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.

Always Check Your Boots

I'm going to begin with one of the stories my dad told me, one of my favourite ones.

Once upon a time he was driving through a godless bit of desert - he didn't tell me which one - when it started getting to the hot bit of the day, so he hauled the jeep over, put up some shade, took off his boots and got some shut-eye. He didn't want to cook the engine or himself.

Anyway. He sleeps for slightly longer than he intended. So when he wakes up, he's all a-flutter, as anyone is when they sleep for too long and they have somewhere to be.

So he does what everyone that lives in that kind of environment does - before he puts the boot back on, he checks it.

Finding himself eyeball-to-pinchers with one of the biggest scorpions he's ever seen.

So he says some choice words, probably something like "oh bother me that is quite a large example of Androctonus Crassicauda, I had best be careful," and grabs the heel of the boot and upends it over the side of the jeep. He hears a bump, feels the boot get lighter, looks inside once more just to make sure, then puts the boot on - minus its visitor.

He's still shaking his head and tutting over the encounter, so he only just notices in time that - as he picks up his other boot - it is even heavier. And it makes an angry sound.

He takes a look.

Your average Arabian Fat-Tailed Scorpion gets to about four inches. The one dad dumped out of his other boot was perhaps just a little bigger than that. The one in this boot? The one in this boot was about the size of a wharf rat, which is as big as necessary to fuck with you, plus a couple of inches.

He looks at this thing. Its tail is pointed at him, the claws and business end down in the heel of the boot.

He holds the boot over the edge of the jeep and shakes it.

The boot makes an angry noise. It doesn't get any lighter. There's no bump.

He shakes it again. The noise is angrier.

So he has to explain to his mother and siblings why he drove all the way home with only one boot, and a scorpion suddenly got a foot on the property ladder.

We only ever see a slice of someone. We don't know them completely - we can't. We only see the side of them they want to show us, or know how to show us, or think they should show us. My dad was the best dad he knew how to be, which - well, honestly, wasn't great at times. I suspect this is because his own father was totally alien to him, an old man even when my father was born, and not a kind or giving one according to anecdotal evidence.

I was lucky, insofar as when he got sick - not sick like a bad back, he had that since before I was born, but sick like cancer - we had a lot of time together to put things back together again, and there's nothing that takes the ego and sting out of a male-male relationship like terminal illness.

For a couple of years we repaired bridges and became friends again. I wasn't his alpha-male competition and he wasn't some loud angry tyrant. We talked about the world, he passed on a lot of good lessons, and we actually enjoyed each other's company.

Then at the end, when the palliative care involved painkillers and medication that truly started to mess with his perception of the world, things got odd again. His memory started lapsing. He'd forget that he asked me to do things, then get angry about it. He'd be three-quarters asleep most of the time. The last time I saw him I am not sure he recognised me.

I knew the alternative was pain that was basically unbearable, because my father was the kind of man that would only take painkillers under intense duress. Morphine stopped being strong enough. It was the ketamine that really started to cloud him.

I had the time to say goodbye, and I had time to say it before it became a rush. Which is good, because when I said it the last time, I honestly don't think he heard me.

He had no funeral. He despised religion. He was cremated in a private non-ceremony and my mum scattered his ashes.

I see a lot of him in myself. Not always things I like. My dad had a hell of a temper, and at times, so do I. The joy of knowing things. Pride in knowing you've done a good job, frustration when you can't or when some presumably unreasonable thing prevents you. Distrust of political and corporate organisations.

The mother of one of my favourite youtubers, Danny Avidan, once described his father in a very specific way: "He could turn lemonade into lemons." There's some of that in me, there was a lot of that in my dad. Like him, I'm not good at whimsy - and, like him I suspect, I suffer from depression.

He didn't like father's day much. For obvious reasons.

I talk a lot about lessons he taught me. Some of them deliberate, some of them by good or bad example. I think the one that I have found the most useful is to always pick your battles - but I think the one with the funniest story behind it is to always check your boots.

I still do. Every time I put them on.