Greyspace

I'm going to open by stating that, more importantly than whatever drivel I talk about this week - Breonna Taylor's killers still need to be brought to justice, and this brand new spate of lynchings that the police are calling suicides is symptomatic of exactly the reasons why the protests were as universal and as large as they were. No justice, no peace. Black lives matter.

Okay, so... do any of my chronic illness / medicated / mental health people experience the thing where days and times kind of blur together into one seamless mass?

I've been having that a lot lately, and I've taken to calling it Greyspace.

No, not these greys.

Basically... with Covid-19 making it a huge risk for me to leave the house - and I am significantly at risk, I already only have about 50% lung capacity - and a bunch of businesses and things closed anyway... days have been much the same. The only thing that changes is the news. So it's easy to forget which day it is, to lose track of what time of day it is. Which can be unpleasant.

What this has meant is that I have been running entirely dry in terms of inspiration. I haven't been much able to read, nothing has been catching my attention, writing has felt like it's required herculean effort. It's been a bit shit honestly.

So I was honestly at a loss as to what to write about today. Voices clearer and better than mine are tackling current issues; I can't speak with any clarity or closeness about the CHOP, or about Juneteenth and how it should absolutely be a national holiday (which it should), or about how the Trump rally in Tulsa was a monumental failure, or about how my government is just consistently failing at even the most basic tasks, without just repeating things that other people have already said.

Luckily my friends and accomplices on Facebook stepped in. And in an impromptu Readers Request - more like a Friends List Suggest - I'm going to natter about the things they said I should natter about.

Without further ado.

The evolution of what it means to be a good father?

Appropriate given that it is Father's Day in the UK. Been almost eight years since my dad passed away too. I think that the core of being a good father remains pretty much the same as it always has been - be a supportive source of strength, that teaches the important lessons that need to be taught. I just think that the things surrounding that have changed. The nature of those lessons, for example.

We're breaking down a lot of the old impediments that were in our way to being whole people. "Never Did Me Any Harm" behaviours have come under the spotlight and found to be, actually, doing harm. We can talk about our feelings and our emotional states and be vulnerable - and we don't explode or melt. We are becoming better people, slowly. For the most part. And that has to be hard, because... well, my father was from the Lebanon, putting him firmly into the traditionalist kind of camp in this country. We are taught how to be parents by our parents, either by what to mimic or what to change. So there's a lot of deconstruction to do in the space between being raised and raising our own.

I don't envy the challenge, but I think it's good for the world that fathers can increasingly be less stern authoritarians and more human beings.

The importance of t shirt designs

Very important. I have a LOT of t shirts - honestly I am basically just a teenager from the nineties, 98% of my wardrobe is tees - and my favourite ones all have corporate logos from the Alien universe or the flight info from the Nostromo or whatever.

As a pride month fundraiser for Gendered Intelligence, TomSka is offering up a rather neat shirt that is inspired by his I Like Trains kid from the ASDFMovie series. That's a cool design. I should get one myself.

Boobies (sorry, had to)

Ah, a callback. However, I shall not pander.

Current favorite tunes to listen to

Well - I am listening to RTJ4 on repeat pretty much, great album; favourites include Walking In The Snow and Goonies Vs E.T. I'm also enjoying No More Kings and CrazyEightyEight. A bunch of tunes by Goldfish. I guess if I'd have to share anything specifically right now - aside from protest tunes - it would be this, by Bakermat.

I dunno about the anti-taco propaganda... but...

What will the current UK government do next that kills healthy brain cells for everyone who hears about it?

No Deal Brexit. That's the agenda now, seeing as the government is bored with actually saving us from preventable COVID deaths, and will remain so until the big old wave from their opening up on last Monday hits us. BuT aT lEaSt We CaN bUy TiM tAmS

Favourite childhood film and how you think it may have impacted upon you in adult life?

It's hard to pick out just one but - let's go with the Goonies. Which is always going to be the first thing I think of when people say Sean Astin. Keep your Lord Of The Rings...

The thing I took away from that is the importance of experience. The importance of having the anecdote. To go do the thing as best you can and to have a story to tell afterwards. The importance of stories themselves.

Oh, and pirates. Pirates are cool.

What you've done to diversify your world in the last 3 weeks. Any new favorite creations by black artists, or something that you wish to learn more about.

I have to be honest. My media consumption has been pretty minimal recently. This would be the ideal time to catch up on a bunch of stuff, educate myself, but I've been singularly lacking in the drive to do so. Which is on me, really.

Along the same lines, discuss Juneteenth, and the whitewashing of history. Esp from the perspective of someone outside the country

THIS I have done more of. I knew of Juneteenth before now but this is the first year I seriously read into it - of course it isn't taught as part of the curriculum here in school, we don't learn about our own history outside of a white-man context, let alone anyone else's. I'd like to see it turned into a national holiday.

Whitewashing of history is massive. The amount of people who love Churchill in this country - not DESPITE him having starved 3-4 million people to death, but with literally no knowledge of that happening - is testament to that. The statues and street names of slave owners, who are all held up as philanthropists and merchants, and when you ask - of what? People scratch their heads.

Even in this country we learn the state approved Thanksgiving myth, even though we don't celebrate Thanksgiving. Figure that one out.

A friend of mine recently aired the thought of, how many conservative politicians in this country come from families that were made wealthy by slave trading. I can say with a degree of confidence that, in a way, it was probably most of them.

Puddings

Yorkshire. Please. (In all seriousness I'm not a big dessert man. I mean I am a big man. I am just not massively into dessert.)

Earliest memories.

I think I've talked about my earliest memory before but - ONE of my earliest memories involves being in the garden at my aunt's house, drinking from a can of ginger beer an pretending I was really cool. And my idea of what was cool at the time involved having a ponytail, being really muscly and having a gravelly voice. Like a genuine unironic 80s action movie star. So like. Essentially I was pretending that I was Tim Cappello.

I know. I know.

Small ways that you find happiness in your life despite the trashfire that is 2020

Seeing other people succeed.

That's the big thing. Seeing people I know do okay, have their victories, make things they like and that people appreciate. Seeing people make their plans, talk happily about the online experiences they've had.

Seeing change happen, even if it is small, and being fought against by the powers that be; because in the face of a grinding constant push downwards, seeing the occasional boost up, even against adversity, even watered down by every possible measure, is a small victory.

The light of hope is small, and flickering, but it exists. And it doesn't always.

Maybe we'll be okay.

Thanks for putting up with me this week. It's been a splooshy one, in my brain. So. Perhaps something more cogent and relevant to current affairs next week.

Sorry.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Good Old Days

The Goonies was a formative movie of my childhood.

I mean, why wouldn't it be? Adventure! Mystery! Kids having fun! A fat kid that still gets to join in despite everyone treating him like shit! (Okay it hasn't necessarily aged well.) It's my Sean Astin movie - Lord Of The Rings just borrowed him.

What it leaves, though - the thing it left with me, that it has always left with me, ever since I first saw it - was this sense of nostalgia that it immediately provoked in me. A yearning for specific elements of a childhood that also included a bunch of really shitty elements - to just be running through the woods, chatting nonsense with people I know and trust, or going off and doing whatever for a whole day and having nothing to care about in the intervening hours.

What movies like The Goonies and its peers really do is sell us a childhood we really wish we had, by framing itself in terms and tropes that we actually experienced.

That's not a criticism. It's the nature of fantasy/adventure films of a certain age aimed at kids. Because they were shot when we were kids, they were made back then, so everything is redolent of the era. Using bikes to get everywhere and needing to come up with creative ways to stay in touch because, hey, we didn't have mobile phones.

It calls back to the time when that was the concern. When the biggest worry of any kind was managing to get the crew together to do some stupid stuff, like ride around on bikes for hours arguing about if Tommy from Power Rangers was rubbish or brilliant.

It was before we went through the awkward phases of partial knowledge of world events, where we sought for simple answers as to why things were hard for certain people but not for others. Before we started realising how things really work.

Wanting to be back in that space, wanting to be in a position wherein the primary concerns are small ones, is hardly a sin. It says more about the world as it stands right now than it does about us as people and what we want out of life. That there are so many things today - anxiety-inducing things which are made difficult for no reason other than to change them would be just slightly more difficult and would disadvantage those more important than us - which we accept as just being normal, and never seem to question.

"That's just the way it is," is the answer you get given. Which is dangerously close to "That's just the way it has always been," which echoes the warning from the (fictional) five monkeys experiment. I'm sure you know of that one: five monkeys in a cage with a ladder leading up to food, and whenever one monkey goes up the ladder all the rest got soaked in cold water, so they start beating up any monkey that goes for the ladder. Then when they substitute out one of the monkeys for a new one, the new one immediately goes for the ladder, and gets beaten up for it, and without even knowing the original reason why, is encouraged to not go up the ladder by societal pressure.

(As an aside, the actual experiment is kind of more interesting. Monkeys, when manipulating an object that had previously appealed to them, were punished with several blasts of pressurised air - enough to alarm but not harm. After a while they stopped manipulating the object when by themselves, but upon mixing with other monkeys who did manipulate the object, they themselves did it too. Thus, the actual experiment proves the complete opposite of what the ladder bullshit tries to tell us: that we can be encouraged by others in positive ways rather than just negative.)

I don't think it is a contentious statement to say that there is a lot of nostalgia media around right now. Old video games becoming fashionable again, the iconography of an entire decade becoming people's standard aesthetic, neon and grid lines and synthwave and fake VHS lines. Stranger Things and stuff like it. Awesome musical acts like Robots With Rayguns literally evoking the era with their imagery, their samples and their songwriting. Tim Capello - the sexy sax man from Lost Boys, Tina Turner's tour saxophonist, the man that taught me I was bisexual - has an album out, and is recording synthwave music with other bands. This guy.

The people who grew up with The Goonies are now the people consuming most of the media - and the people making a lot of it, too. There's still a lot of influence from the older folks, because hey, there's money in the industry and they want it. The nostalgia train is loaded with cash. We just hanker for that time - that time back when things were simpler, and not necessarily for good reasons. Like, things still sucked back then for a lot of people - living standards by several metrics were objectively worse.

On a personal scale - that is where things were better. Less existential dread. Less worry. Less fear of the future. Life wasn't better because the world was better, life was better because we were kids and we didn't know any better.

We must take care to pay attention to that - and it is perhaps something we might mention to those who talk about the past as a mythical better place. Like everything back in the seventies, sixties, fifties, forties, thirties, was better than things are today.

Our childhood wasn't better because it was the past. It was better because we were children.

Be kind to yourself. Life is hard enough.