Social media, soaps and me.

So, previously, my laptop broke, and I had to endure pretty shite customer service to get it fixed. Not the worst ever; that would be a certain well-known music retailer, but still pretty bad. I wrote about it here. The other month I managed to drop my laptop. I am a butterfingered fool. Luckily, I was forking out for some pretty comprehensive cover, and was able to, after an attempt to fix it, get some money to put towards a replacement. While the service was pretty slow, it was, on the whole, much better.

A consequence of this enforced laptop drought was that I had to work a little harder for access to social media – either borrow my wife’s phone (I don’t have a fancy phone myself - you remember how much I love phone shopping) or frequent the local libraries. I love our libraries, as well you know, but for books, not for spending my time pissing about of the Book of Face. So, I took pretty much 6 weeks out.

The e-mail build up was truly horrendous – most of it shite. Amazon recommended some stuff I’d never watch in a million years because of something I watched, and there were many, many e-mails from Facebook frantically telling me of everything I’d been missing and all the wonderful people I could be friends with (let’s not dwell on the fact that some of them were people I had been friends with but had unfriended me previously), and Twitter wanted me to know all the interesting things people were tweeting every day that I was missing.

I logged on and…it was just as if I’d been on the day before. It was like watching Eastenders for years and then missing it for a few months. Coming back to it you find that after 5 minutes you’ve already caught up. Coming back to Facebook and Twitter after 6 weeks was exactly like that.

I am a fan generally of social media – it’s useful, it is a fantastic way to connect with people all over the world that you have more in common with than many of the people you know in reality, and it is a useful way to keep in touch with, well, whatever you want really. But, it’s worth not connecting for extended periods at times so you remind yourself that it isn’t essential and that life trundles on pretty much as it always did, even without you seeing what some dude had for breakfast one day.

Anyway, gotta go. I need to check to see if there are any new cat videos.

It’s like they knew somehow.

A few of the books I’ve read fairly recently have a few unsettling things in common. First off, not too long ago, I read George Orwell’s 1984. Published in 1949, it tells of a rigidly controlled society where to even think outside the accepted lines is to invite horrifying conditioning until your mind thinks the proper way. The population are told what to think, and the structure of society ensures the population think it, even when it flies in the face of all observable facts. Recorded history changes overnight and yet to call attention to this, to question what those with authority tell you is truth is simply not conceivable. It’s hard not to find echoes of Orwell’s totalitarian vision in the way newspapers will publish blatant untruths again and again because it backs their ideology, driven to recent ludicrous highs in the lead up to the election.

(Loosely related tangent: Russell Brand is a cock; we all know this. There is, however, no denying that the cock has become a bit of a figurehead for the disillusioned non-voting masses. So, appearing on Brand’s web show The Trews as Ed Miliband did, in an effort, however half-arsed, to at least try to engage with these people is surely worthy is it not? It seems not. The official Government line is that Brand, and therefore by extension, the large percentage of the population he is speaking for, is a joke. Way to show contempt for the people whose lives you’re supposed to be working to improve. The papers declared it to be the desperate move of a lunatic. Why is it such a terrible idea to try to talk to the apathetic non voters? I agree that they should vote, but apathy doesn’t justify the contempt the press has shown them, lumping them together as some kind of bad smell it’s impolite to even acknowledge. Of course, judging by the recent election results, the silent majority might well consist of mostly UKIP voters, so now here I am, quite out of character for me, kind of hoping they go back to being silent.)

Anyway, back to the point; prescient novels. It seems Orwell’s future is one increasingly within the realm of possibility with every passing year. I’ve mentioned before how one of my favourite films growing up was the 1960 adaptation of The Time Machine, but I hadn’t, until recently, read H. G. Wells’ original novel. Rach picked it up for me from one of our local libraries (I get a delicious thrill every time I remember I’m lucky enough to live in a place where ‘local library’ is plural, and now that where I live has gone blue for the first time in over a decade, I’m concerned that may not be the case for much longer). Published in 1895 and set in Victorian times, it follows a scientist, known in the narrative only as ‘The Time Traveller’ to the year 802,701 to discover what has become of Earth and humanity in the far future. It turns out the divide between the rich and poor in our society continued to grow and grow and grow. It’s incredible that even pre-1900 there was concern in society about the widening gap between the classes, and that over 100 years later, we’re still having trouble with that issue. Did I say incredible? I meant incredibly depressing. But hey, I suppose I’d better get used to things being incredibly depressing for a while.

Having conquered the need to struggle for anything, the upper classes have evolved into the Eloi; mindless children, spending the days frolicking, eating, fucking and, well, not much else. Certainly not thinking. Their language is hugely simplified and their attention span is practically non-existent. The Time Traveller contends that this shows that struggling and fighting for a better world is what has driven us to achieve so much throughout the years, and when we finally got what we had struggled for for so long, our drive, our intelligence, our will to improve and our creativity withered and died, no longer needed. Meanwhile, the working classes have retreated underground and evolved into pasty, light-fearing Morlocks, living in dark holes full of machinery and manufacturing. The relationship between those above ground and those below is no longer economic, for there is no longer the need for an economy. Nor is it master and slave. The Morlocks continue to manufacture clothes and shoes for the Eloi, but it is not to serve them, nor is it because they are still some beaten down underclass. For the Morlocks have become cattle farmers, and the Eloi their unthinking food source. The gap between rich and poor, between upper and working class, has been widening for some time and is already pretty sickening. Inexplicably, we seem happy for it to get worse. The 19th Century concerns expressed in The Time Machine seem more timely now than ever.

And then, I came to High Rise. I’d read some J. G. Ballard before; The Drowned World, The Wind From Nowhere, The Terminal Beach & The Drought were my first experiences of the British writer, which I picked up after raiding my father-in-law’s book shelf. When news broke that Ben Wheatley was adapting it and that it is widely known as Ballard’s best novel, I reached out to my local libraries again and picked up a copy. High Rise was published in 1975 and is set almost entirely within the concrete walls of a recently opened self-contained living apartment. 1000 apartments on 40 storeys, the building includes shopping malls, swimming pools, schools and anything else the occupants might need. The only reason to leave is to work.

It doesn’t take long for things to start going awry; able to shut themselves off from society completely, those living in the high-rise begin to alter their self-contained society into something more primal – physical class distinctions evolve, literally lower, middle and upper class, reflected in the floors they occupy – and, freed from the restrictions placed upon them by a civilised society, a different rule takes precedence, that of hunter/gatherer, of predator and prey.

The really uncomfortable thing about High Rise is the fact that the inhabitants of the building actually welcome this degeneration, like a long-tamed beast finally throwing off its shackles. There is a sensation of the people actually pushing things further and further deliberately, out of a need just to see how far it can actually go; they embrace the darkness eagerly. The thing about High Rise is that it is so disturbingly plausible, that while the apartment building offered the ideal environment for the events described, sometime it feels there is every possibility of pockets of civilisation going this way as a prelude to the whole of our society plunging purposefully and giddily down this path of de-evolution. The intent of our new Government to re-legalise foxhunting and stop Britain being subject to the Human Rights Act, maybe even to withdraw from Europe altogether, make it feel like our entire country is becoming a self-contained high rise of its own, and the feeling of the balance tipping, gently at first, then quicker and quicker towards oblivion that many of us currently have is evoked so strongly in the early chapters of Ballard’s novel it is dizzying, and not a little disconcerting.

Of course, things on the whole aren’t quite as depressing as all that. While it is really quite depressing that in the decades since these novels were written and published, it seems we’ve failed to progress at all, there is hope in that we don’t yet appear to have slipped any closer to the hellish visions dreamed up in them. We might yet find our way to a future civilisation more positive than those described in 1984, The Time Machine and High Rise. More like The Commonwealth described by Peter F. Hamilton. More Star Trek, less Mad Max. Here’s hoping.

A blog post that ends in a completely different place to the place it started, because that’s apparently how my mind works. Or doesn’t.

So I wrote once about how I used to be a gamer – Atari 2600, and a Sega nerd, until I stopped. Then I gave in and bought an Xbox 360. I love it, and have loved catching up with some of the biggest gaming franchises of the last decade. What I was unaware of back then, but know all too well now, is the trap to ensnare the anal mind; achievements. I’m never going to get them all, but I’m never going to be able to stop trying.

On top of that, now there is the new generation. Many of the folks I gamed with are moving on to a place I can’t yet afford to follow. But dammit, how long is not being able to afford an Xbox One going to stop me getting one? Souped up GTA V? The Witcher 3? The new Gears of War? The new Mass Effect? I recently had to be convinced to fork out £90ish for 4 seasons of Game of Thrones on Blu Ray, so I’ll be with the old 360 for a while, I think. Unless you want to buy me a One? No? Fine.

Rach and I often find ourselves asking how people can seem to afford to splash out so much on houses, cars, clothes and gadgets, because we genuinely have no clue. For the area we live in, our combined income is over the average, and yet we cannot find a way to ‘live within our means’ as the saying goes. Wages are spent before they are earned, and anything we manage to save is saved just in time for the car to blow up or something equally well timed. We have holidays (not expensive ones), we have an Internet connection and we have books, music and a TV. A lack of any one of these would label our family deprived, which makes you wonder what families that have to exist without any of this are? I suppose that depends on who you’re asking; Katie Hopkins, who has recently overtaken Clarkson as the UK’s number 1 reason to bring back hanging, might consider them cockroaches, but nobody should try to legitimise that talking bag of stale sweat-scum from Danny Devito’s unwashed scrotum by pretending her opinion is good for anything other than taking a huge shit on.

Anyway, I find myself stuck between a wish to moan about not ever seeming to have enough while other folks have seemingly bottomless pockets and a consciousness that reminds me that there are a great many people who have much less than we’ve got and maybe I should be a bit more grateful, and I call myself unpleasant names. And then I remember the wheels that turn constantly to keep this distressing status quo in place and the lethargy that it engenders in people too focused on the wrong things to make any kind of positive change. I remember the system that masquerades as democracy run in the financial interests of corporate entities with more rights than poor people, entities that will gladly send us running, screaming, fighting, warring, abusing and unseeing into endless catastrophe just to keep profits growing. And then I feel fury at the injustice that is perpetrated everywhere, and helplessness at the obvious impotence of that fury; unable to change things, unable to bring justice, unable to do anything but acknowledge it is pointless even to try. But then I remember something else.

I remember what my life really is – a collection of moments, lived in series; a collection of memories made and memories yet to be made. I am extremely lucky in that the vast majority of those moments are worth remembering and bring joy. An increasing collection of them are perfect moments, and to quote the late Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time; “Against one perfect moment, the centuries beat in vain”.

Finally, after this endlessly repeating dance of petulance, annoyance, guilt, fury, helplessness and gratefulness, I come at last to the end and feel always the same thing: contentment. Let the world continue to turn, let the rich and powerful continue in their greed, let the hateful continue to spit bile. Let them not go unchallenged, and let us remember to spit in their eye should we get the opportunity. But above all, let us be happy for the things that bring us happiness because, and I know this works, you make others happy in turn. If you can do that, even briefly, how can it be anything other than worth it?

Operation Don’t Die: Update.

It’s been a while. As previously noted, much of the progress originally made was, um, un-made. I think I may be getting calorie intake under control again. What’s annoying is that I don’t actually like food all that much. I guess if I did, I could probably make eating less a bit more interesting, but as it is, I just end up not bothering to eat properly. I swear, if I didn’t have kids to try to set a good example for and a wife to guide me in setting that example, I’d probably be ten-tonne-Tessa-from-Texas by now. Another way in which my wife has saved my life.

It has, however, been too long since I stopped my regular exercise routine. New responsibilities at work tend to leave me less time, but I hope I can start going swimming at lunch times again. I went recently for the first time in ages. It’s basically whatever comes first – 30 minutes or 60 lengths (calm yourself, this is not exactly a full-length pool we’re talking about here). Previously I was making 60 lengths in less than 25 minutes and was considering going to 70. This time, I made the 60 with just a few minutes to spare and the last 15 damn near killed me. So, some ground to make up there.

Still, gives me something to do doesn’t it?

The value in repetition.

I’m a repeater. My favourite records are played again and again until they wear out and must be bought again (Definitely Maybe, Parklife, Grace, Is This It?, Different Class, Songs for the Deaf and Appetite for Destruction amongst dozens of others, if you care). Throughout my childhood I re-watched my favourite films to death (The Time Machine (1960), War of the Worlds (1953), Goonies, Gremlins, Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones) and that hasn’t changed much since I’ve got older apart from the addition of a few others – Pulp Fiction, Lord of the Rings, and Fight Club along with many more. The hours I sunk into playing through Sonic the Hedgehog, James Pond, Alex Kidd, Road Rash, Flashback and Street Fighter II and more over and over again in my teens I have no doubt would be terrifying were they ever to be added up, and more recently, I’ve been through the Gears of War campaign more than once and can see myself playing though GTA V again before too long.

There are, I don’t doubt, many people who have quite the opposite point of view; when you’ve seen a film once, you’ve seen it, so what’s the point of seeing it again? But if I love it, why would I not want to see it again? Those records, those films and those games became a support system for me while negotiating the difficulties of adolescence. They were friends, they were retreats – they were my happy place. They still are, in a way.

Books also had their place. I’d like to be able to tell you that I loved books above all those other things; that I used to spend hours, days even, lost in them. Alas, I wasn’t that bright. I did like books – I would read Roald Dahl, comics and adaptations of my favourite films. As with films, music and games, I would re-read my favourites – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, George’s Marvellous Medicine and a junior version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – that would all become dog-eared and well thumbed, and later To Kill a Mockingbird would become my favourite. This recent article about books written for children kicked off this whole train of thought. It makes a good point about the validity of children’s books, as they have to be written with repetition in mind. They have to be robust enough to stand up to kids reading and re-reading them over and over again. While as adults we certainly do re-read our favourites, they are never tested to the extremes kid’s books are – I particularly like the Neil Gaiman quote in the article about how while he can’t justify every word of American Gods, he can of Coraline. Does that mean he thinks Coraline is a better book? I doubt it, but it does sound as though he takes special care over his children’s books compared to his adult books, and it’s probably because of the retellings the children’s books are subjected to.

But I didn’t really get into reading until I got into my teens, when I found Robert Jordan, Professor Tolkien and Terry’s Brooks and Pratchett. I am in fact re-reading Pratchett’s Discworld series at the moment. I wrote this this ages ago about how you generally have differing points of view when coming back to something like a book series or TV show later in life, and a similar thing has happened with Discworld. My favourite hasn’t changed – previously it was Small Gods and so it proves to be the case still – the conceit that gods are only as real as they are believed to be and their power diminishes with their belief, leaving them to essentially die along with their last believer is such a stroke of inspired genius that I doubt Pratchett will ever top it (although he’s come close a few times). Taking the series in more general terms, however, my favoured stories were always the ones that involved the wizards of Unseen University, or Death. While they are certainly the funniest ones still, I’m much happier this time round in the company of Watch Commander Sam Vimes and witch Granny Weatherwax. I could be well off the mark here, but they feel somehow truer, as if their righteous fury at the injustices of the world is closer to Pratchett’s true view of the world and echo the points he’s really trying make under the funny. This piece written by Neil Gaiman about Pratchett and his anger being the ‘engine that powered Good Omens’ might suggest I’m not that far off the mark, after all.

As usual, I don’t really have much of a point, but I suppose what I’m getting at is you should spend time in the company of the things you love.

Why is everybody doing it wrong?

So. Let’s just say, for example that you wear a clown suit all day. You wear this clown suit because you have a deeply held belief that in the beginning of time the all-knowing Bongo squirted the heavens from his holy plastic flower water pistol, and humanity came into being when the all-knowing Bongo threw the sacred custard pie. You absolutely have the right to hold that belief close to your heart and wear that clown suit. I have a right that is equal to that however. I have a right to find your belief ridiculous. And I have a right to say so. I have a right to point out the existence of the all-knowing Bongo flies in the face of all known science, logic and reason. I have the right to publish my opinion on your belief where I want, be it on a blog like this one that almost nobody reads, or in a satirical magazine sold somewhere in Europe.

There is something I don’t have the right to do. I don’t have the right to make personal attacks on you because of your belief in the all-knowing Bongo. I have no right to desecrate the place where you pray by re-enacting the hallowed step ladder routine. I have no right to curtail your rights in any way or see you in any way other than a fellow human because of your religious beliefs. Your religious beliefs, however, are very different. They are nothing but fair game. There is no creator myth that I do not find inherently nonsensical, be it the all-knowing Bongo, or the stories that sit at the heart of Christianity, Islam or Scientology, or any other religion that purports to know how everything we know and are came to be. That doesn’t mean I can’t find you to be a complex and brilliant human in spite not sharing in your belief. In the words of Tyler Durden, you’re not your fucking khakis. Nor are you your religious belief. It’s not a difficult thing to recognise. And yet, our insistence on putting people into ready-made boxes will never cease.

But. And it’s a big but. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that gives you the right to murder, least of all that preposterous religious belief of yours. There are times when it is possible to see the reasons behind murder – to understand, although not excuse, the reasons. And then there are times when it is not. Whatever is it that makes a person think that a death sentence is an appropriate response to drawing a cartoon that takes the piss out of their religion? It’s like those times when a kid responds to an argument they know they’re losing by completely over-reacting; screaming, hitting, knocking shit over. That’s what they are. Children in adult’s bodies who, having never learned the life skills of empathy and debate, have heard something they don’t like and happen to have a lot of guns.

That’s the really poisonous thing about religion. When looking at it in any depth, sooner or later you have to come face to face with the fact that the whole thing comes crashing down if you don’t force yourself to believe something that is simply so illogical, so damn unlikely, with nothing in the way of observable proof, that all you can do is blindly have faith in something that is almost certainly untrue. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult it must be living with that impossible paradox forming the heart of how I define myself. Of course, I don’t imagine it would cause me to walk into a school and start shooting children like those rotting pustules of cat sick. It feels like the Spanish Inquisition might have if they all had automatic weapons.

I recognise that religion isn’t the cause of all wars, merely the excuse, that if it didn’t exist we’d find some other thing to justify all the despicable things we get up to, but I do fucking despise the way it’s used by the mindless faithful to commit these terrible crimes. And then what do we do? We use it as an excuse to persecute members of the same religion who had nothing to with these atrocities. Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day. It might seem a little extreme to suggest that the current way in which people of a certain faith are casually discriminated against by too many people in this country, given a veil of credibility by a lying, fetid press, because of some acts of violent cowardice by other shit munching fuck farts in the name of that same religion could lead to something as horrifying as a holocaust, but the more you learn about the one that took place in Germany during WWII, the more you see that casual discrimination is exactly how it started. It’s the thin end of the wedge, and it pays to remember that.

People are people, whatever else they may be, whatever box they’re put in, whatever label they’re given because of their colour, gender, age, sexuality or faith. Forgetting that puts you on a very slippery slope that ends nowhere good.

People: not all bad.

I’m not unaware that this blog will often contain rants about the stupid and ridiculous things people do for the most stupid and ridiculous reasons, which, frankly, can sometimes get a little depressing. Sometimes it’s worth making a conscious effort to remember that we are responsible for brilliance.

There is a lump of matter in our skulls that can think its way beyond primal survival instincts and contemplate its own mortality and place within the cosmos. It can ask and answer questions about not only its origins, but the origins of the universe within which it finds itself. We can place ourselves in the shoes of those who are less fortunate and help them.

Complex and sophisticated languages, music, architecture, storytelling and many other forms of creation and expression. Not only the ability some have to create, but the ability of others to appreciate it. To respond on a deep emotional level to another person’s creation and either understand what it was they wanted to say, or take an entirely new interpretation of it beyond the creator’s original intention.

People you wouldn’t look at twice on the street are transformed into desirable, sweaty sex gods/goddesses if they’re standing in front of you playing music that fills your head with noise and your bones with vibrations. Moving pictures or written words become real and important because we have an imagination within which they become tangible things.

I know there are a many people in the world who aren’t in any kind of position to appreciate these things the way I can, and I know there are many things that aren’t right in our world – hell I usually moan about most of them right here, but we still have potential. Maybe we’ll realise it before we go under.