Saturday Morning Villainry

If you were born when I was born, and watched as many cartoons as I did, then you are probably well acquainted with villainry of a specific sort.

Cast your eyes over this little bevvy of bastards (original artwork here: http://batkong40.deviantart.com/art/80-s-Animated-Villians-557990209 )

We all know who THESE folks are, surely.

The maniacal Megatron, leader of the Decepticons. Mumm-Ra the Ever Living, sworn enemy of the Thundercats. Skeletor, perpetual thorn in Eternia's side. Cobra Commander, GI Joe's constant nemesis. Shredder, leader of the Foot Clan, whom the Turtles battle at every turn.

All indisputable bad guys of the most epic quality. All, as Don John from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing would put it, "Plain Dealing Villains". You know what they are about the moment you clap eyes on them.

They were so ridiculous, weren't they?

I mean as we all grow up and become adults we know that no villain looks like this. Nobody deliberately bedecks themselves with the trappings of mwahaha evil and does what these people do. I mean some of their truly most incredible plans include erecting a pyramid of blackness around the earth to block out the sun, unleashing a mostly uncontrollable iron titan to raze Eternia to the ground, and Megatron's biggest and weirdest plans are just erratic in the extreme. Hypnotising twenty-somethings in nightclubs for unknown reasons, convincing the world that the Autobots are evil by very dubious means (THIS ACTUALLY WORKED), and drilling to the core of the planet are all means by which the gladiator from Kaon thought he could secure victory.

They aren't the only crooks, obviously. I mean just name a cartoon. Captain Planet fought a whole host of bad guys who randomly polluted things as if that would benefit them in any way. I mean some of them weren't even making any money. They were just deliberately fucking up the rainforest for no apparent reason. Doc Terror and Hacker from Centurions were similar - they just acted douchey as if that would get them more likes on Instagram.

But then we all grew up. We started looking for nuanced antagonists. Sometimes, we found them. If we look at Alien we find a dual antagonist - the instinct-driven inhuman xenomorph, incapable of good or bad, simply doing that which it does, and the faceless corporation so determined to exploit aforementioned xenomorph that it is willing to give up the lives of its employees to secure the dangerous creature for profitable ends.

We started seeing bad guys in the regular world, with motives that were understandable that we could almost sympathise with (and in a few places, actually could sympathise with totally). We found Roy Batty and his quest for more life; we found the competing forces of nature and industry; we found antagonists of every stripe, some more like us than we liked, some more like those four-colour bad guys that we had grown up with. A whole spectrum of supervillains.

We start seeing them in real life, too. We see the faces of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ed Gein, Charles Manson. We realise that evil still lives, still exists in the world beyond the cartoons that we watched with our cereal on a Saturday morning. We realise that the antics of Megatron - a huge, mighty, despicable tyrant - are still more bearable and tolerable than those of, say, Luis Garavito. (If you don't know who he is - look him up - his nickname is La Bestia.)

...and then we have the current leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States.

Now every time I see the Cheeto holding up a piece of paper, another executive order, another bill, I get nervous. Because the first few made you think - well sure, it can't keep up this pace the entire time he's in power, can it? He can't keep signing these bills, which are clearly pretty shit for most of the population. Like every single thing this guy does seems to be something that Cobra Commander would do if he was in charge. Every single thing.

A selection of those bills that have been signed include trashing the Affordable Care Act (yes, he literally got rid of affordable healthcare, it means what it sounds like), promising to build the big fucking wall that won't stop drugs or people entering the US, making women's lives harder the entire world over, send federal authorities into every city that don't do what he says, fuck with the lives of immigrants from the Middle East (but not those countries he has business or military deals with), and force through pipelines that are mostly (if not universally) considered a bad idea.

Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of Westminster is engaging in similar shennanigans, promising a trashing of trade deals and making vague threats of engineering better ones (usually with people like the Cheeto), cutting funds to objectively good things (The NHS and renewable energy), promising to spend billions on nuclear weapons that don't work, and indicating a willingness to deploy troops we can't afford to properly equip into countries we won't accept innocent refugees from.

...see, that's not evil like real world evil. That's not subtle. That's not the kind of thing a taut drama is written about, like Frost/Nixon or like the extra-judiciary murders conducted by Mossad in Munich.

This is Saturday Morning Evil.

How do we fight this? We aren't Optimus Prime, we aren't Lion-O or He-Man or G.I. Joe or the Turtles. If we show up and just kick people's asses, we are the ones who go to jail - or worse, get shouted down by well-meaning people on our side (just look at the response to the neo-Nazi chappy getting punched or how people felt about Shia LeBoeuf not turning the other cheek to another alt-right Nazi prick).

It's had to believe that people actually voted for this.

...well most people didn't, it does bear mention. Just less than 20% of the population of the United States voted for the Cheeto. Just over 17% of the population of the UK voted for the Tory party, who then changed out their leader for the Wicked Witch of Westminster without public consultation or similar.

I don't think that one in five counts as a mandate.

So what do we do about it? As Theoden says in The Two Towers: "What can men do against such reckless hate?"

...well I have to be honest, I am not strictly sure. But we have to make sure this shit doesn't happen again. I've often spoken out about resisting these bastards. Now it seems those words have come home to roost. Enough people have started to realise that this right-wing fuck-em-all approach is just going to get innocent people hurt and killed. If they haven't realised this, then they haven't been paying attention.

I've been experiencing fatigue in this department. There is only so often you can preach what you think is common sense, that you can tie the facts together to come up with a course of action or a method of resistance, and have little to show for it. Almost all the people who read my blog either agree with my particular line of thinking or just don't care very much - and I have no idea how to get my ideas TO the people that matter, TO the people who can be convinced by argument. Because I have faith that there are people that vote Tory, there are people that vote Republican, who are at their heart good people that are making a bad choice.

Everyone makes a bad decision, sometimes - none of us can look back at our lives and claim a golden streak - but some of those decisions only result in personal misery. Some of them compound with a great many other bad decisions.

And those decisions sometimes lead to these two cartoon villains being in charge of previously proud nations.

This sounds like a generalisation. It probably comes across as one. I know, love, value and respect people who don't vote like me, and don't think like me. We can still get on if we don't see eye to eye on this topic. And I don't think that everyone that wears a Labour badge is a saint, or that every Democrat is in it to help the world. It just so happens that the current antagonists of this season of Human Life are, well...jesus. They're like poster children for the worst of the worst.

But what can I do?

I can keep talking. I can keep up the facts and the thinking. Because giving up doesn't help anyone. And if there's any one thing that being ill for this long has taught me, it is that victory isn't always something that happens in a single action. Sometimes, victory takes weeks, months and years. Sometimes it isn't about knowing what to do in this moment...Sometimes it is about doing the right thing for as long as it takes, and staying standing until you can't - or until you win.

That's the lesson to take from Saturday morning. The fight always continues, but the good guys can't afford to give up. So they just don't. They fight, until the fight is over.

So let's do that.

Like A Disney Movie

So the other day I was talking to someone about relationships, and people staying in relationships that are bad for them, and the mentality of it. I've even done a blog on the topic right here, and a blog on a semi-related topic right here.

As we were talking it occured to me that, throughout my childhood and my teenage years, very few of the relationships I was presented with in the media I consumed were what I, in later life, would consider to be a healthy one.

That is, perhaps, because such things aren't exciting. They aren't what we all thirst to read about or see or hear about - but then, perhaps our idea of a fairytale romance is informed by the fairytales we were subjected to.

We all love a good Disney movie, right?

Well here's the shit - we grew up with princesses and princes and love's true kiss, none of which prepares you for, you know, relationships. They are profligate with shitty messages about love and trust. A quote that I borrowed from Stephen Colbert a few years ago:

“So, Disney, I demand that you drop this two mommies plot & go back to delivering wholesome messages. Like teaching our children that they can be a princess if they let a man make out with them while drugged, or that there's nothing wrong with bestiality if a candle says it’s OK.”

Change yourself and you will have value because a man will want you, says The Little Mermaid and Cinderella. Relationships are something that happen to you rather than something you do, says Sleeping Beauty. They want you, and that's enough, says Snow White. Any level of deception is acceptable once they see the REAL you, says Aladdin. Stay in your lane and accept what you have, says Wreck-It Ralph. You can change them to make them into something you want, says Beauty and the Beast.

Disney isn't the only culprit, of course. The very notion of True Love, of the kind of love that you know full well happens to you and that you can't resist and that you should pursue at all costs et cetera - that notion is implanted into us real young, and is...well...dangerous.

Imagine you are taught from a very early age that needing to urinate is what a healthy relationship is, and nothing deviates from this reinforced teaching. (It's ridiculous, I know - but it's meant to be.)

I will state at this point that I am probably very biased. I'm socially a little malformed, and have had social anxiety for a long-ass time. So perhaps my word shouldn't be taken as academically sound - but then this blog is all opinion anyway, just sometimes backed with statistics.

So if we are raised in a world in which love is a thing that scares you rather than comforts you, and something that you can't ever give up on no matter how bad it is for you, and something that you MUST pursue in every aspect of your life, and that a life without love isn't worth living...well...

...okay, does anyone actually believe this is true? Like, really?

Is anyone going to truly claim that the best relationships they have in their lives aren't about comfort and trust and knowing each other and being able to exist in each other's company for basically years without going crazy? That they are based on mindless devotion and anxiety?

My mother once told me that before you can go out with someone, before someone can be your girlfriend, they have to be your friend. I scoffed at this. Film and television teach us that you fall in love with someone you meet out of the blue and charm and woo and then they love you and this is symbolised with a kiss which is obviously the desired result.

It took me a long time to realise what she meant. That to have a sexual and romantic relationship with someone that I can't be friends with is...well it's idiotic. If I can't hang out with someone and just be okay with them, how am I meant to be their other half? If we can't goof around with each other and laugh at dumb stuff, then...how complete and happy will our relationship really be?

It's easy to believe that relationships that are objectively harmful are the right way to do things, because all through our lives they always have been. We dismiss feeling like we are being mistreated because "shrug, well, that's the way love goes". We have all heard the story of "we're from the era when you fixed things rather than threw them out". That is held up as a virtue while we ignore the fact that domestic abuse was absolutely rife, and the notion of leaving that relationship was stigmatised to the point that you'd take the beating rather than the sidelong looks.

It does not have to be like this. It never had to be. We can change - and we can change the media that teaches people.

Steven Universe is something I come back to time and again. It has very healthy examples of relationships working, and examples of people resolving problems in a safe, smart way. It's just the tip of what needs to be an iceberg, though.

Creators - put healthy relationships in your books. Let them be friends first. Let people not be obsessed. Let people recognise that Romeo & Juliet is actually harmful, that infatuation is a form of obsession which is also harmful. Let people recognise that loving someone is an ongoing friendship, not a cycle of abuse.

Because my fairytale romance isn't a fairytale. It's a friendship. Just more.

Money Talks

I'd like to conduct a mental exercise with your assistance.

Picture for me, if you will, a successful person holding an object of value. Imagine them in their home, and how that all looks.

Are we ready for the thought experiment?

Hands up if the person you imagined was wealthy, or had some obvious sign of being so - a suit or similar. Similarly, hands up if the object of value was an expensive one - and finally, hands up if the home would definitely rank on the pricey side.

I bet that's a few hands up. (Put em down again. You did it. Well done.)

Now you know my agenda, go ahead and look back at the request. I didn't mention money, not at all - though several of the words I used imply it.

We're paying attention to words at this point. The actual semantics of the situation. Now we can be careful about how we phrase things.

Who can remember a time when money didn't pretty much dictate our lives?

Not a lot of people who read this blog, that's for sure. There's a significant proportion of people alive in this day and age that live by subsistence farming and agriculture. Money probably doesn't come up for them very often - so I daresay it doesn't have the linguistic hooks dug into common parlance.

Here, though - here, today - most of the things we do have a coin involved somewhere. Work is so impressed on us, so central to our culture, that it is the default answer when someone asks us "What do you do?" - something I try and shake up whenever asked. "You mean for money or for fun?"

If we want to achieve almost anything, it is monetised - and if the act itself isn't, then the accessories and support services associated are. You can run for free, but these running shoes are £50 a pop. Lift weights? A branch will do - but unless you want splinters, join a gym, get the gloves, grab some dumbells.

To achieve things in this society - and to simply survive - we require money. It's difficult to do so otherwise. Some people do so, but they themselves will tell you how hard it is. Note that I do not mean living on benefits, as that is simply acquiring money from a different source (and is just as valid, if you are legally entitled to the money, you take it, it's yours). I mean literally not handling money at all. Often it results in criminality. This country has only just taken to heart the French idea to deliver unsold food - not even spoiled, just one day out of date - to places wherein the homeless and disadvantaged can access it.

Aspiration is often hitched to fiscal increase, too. If you want a better thing, it will cost you more - so you'd best get more money, hmm? And if the achievement doesn't require money or anything similar, then it is worth pointing out, because it is a difference, a change.

So when we talk about someone being successful, we assume that to mean wealthy - unless specified otherwise. Because what other universal handwave term for being well-off is there? Of course, in a world dictated by the flow of currency upward and upward, having more of it is a literal success.

Something being valuable is automatically assumed to mean expensive, too - because that is the de facto measurement of value. The thing is, the most valuable things to me are not the most expensive things I own, because there's levels of value. My most expensive possession is my laptop. Sure, I value it very highly - but not more than the silver chains my dad gave me, or the notebooks I have stuffed with old ideas, or the ticket stubs I still possess from the big five gigs of my life (Pearl Jam @ Hard Rock Calling 2010, Nine Inch Nails @ O2 2009, Counting Crows @ Brighton Arena 2009, Alter Bridge @ Portsmouth Guildhall 2008, Foo Fighters @ Wembley 2008), or the first CD I bought in America - also my favourite album of all time. Value is not monetary cost; however the cost is so important to us on a day-to-day basis that it becomes the standard assumed meaning.

The thing is, having money does not equate to having happiness or feeling satisfaction or security. It can contribute a whole hell of a lot, mind. If your income is very close to your expenditure, increasing that gap can only make life easier - there's less stress, less concern. We don't worry so much about having to take a week off, or missing the next pay raise, or the cost of bread increasing with little to no warning.

Of course it is also a truism that as income rises, so does expenditure. As we have more, so we take more. That's the nature of the beast - because again, in a society wherein the measure of success is money, that means that all goods that we may want have a cost, and the more desirable goods always cost more. Who doesn't want a slightly bigger fridge, a slightly nicer car, a slightly better laptop, a slightly larger house?

It all costs. We just accept that. To cover the costs we have to work, and we just accept that too. We earn so much less than the people who pretty much instituted this way of life, and we accept that also. It wasn't a shadowy conspiracy of a group of figures in a dark room. The people with the money just wanted to make more, and so they did. Because that's how it works. When you have it - you make more of it.

When you think about it like that...is it not surprising that whenever anyone suggests doing something that casually disregards the constant hunt for further funds, that it is treated with incredulity?

Traditionally, the Labour party in this country has been a left-wing worker's party. It was dragged more toward the centre-right in the late 90s by one Tony Blair. They did well, because after Margaret Thatcher's hatchet-job on the average blue-collar worker to line the pockets of the financiers, right-wing attitudes in this country had started to come to the fore - but the Tories still had the reputation of being nasty. So we can still be right-wing money-grubbers and also not be held up as evil? Sign me up!

The thing is, they took over the entire party. Tory-lites. Women and men whose view of the world was pretty much the same as their blue-tied brethren on the opposite benches, just with a nod to the poor and the sick. And don't get me wrong - having been on the receiving end of benefits and sickness support in both the Blair era and the subsequent ConDem/Tory era, that nod actually helped us out a lot.

Recently, the party voted for a new leader. That leader was Jeremy Corbyn, an old-fashioned left winger whose attitude is that we should really be helping people and doing the right thing regardless of income or profit.

For this, he was treated to a non-stop campaign of hate. People mocking him, calling him a communist (incorrect) and a socialist (they wouldn't know one if it hit them in the face), saying he was unelectable (despite being elected as party leader). There were threats of mass resignations, mass resignations, personal attacks, smear campaigns across the wide breadth of the media. The temptation of digging in and fighting back must have been great, but his line has always been the line of grace under fire. However much political capital he could have made from getting into verbal fisticuffs with all and sundry, he just got on with it.

All this came to a head in the most recent leadership re-election. A vote of no confidence was called. Those who wanted him gone were - as you'd expect - Blairite neo-Tory coatriders. Those who had profited from still being the right wing in an apparently left-wing party. Those comfortable in quiet opposition, which isn't really opposition when it comes down to it.

When it became clear that it would be down to the party members to vote, another hatchet job was put in place - and this time, it was basically electoral fraud. People who joined up for the party in droves in order to show their support for the party leader were told that they wouldn't get a vote, for...no apparent reason, other than the fact that Owen Smith and his people had ascertained that those new members were signing up to support Jeremy Corbyn. It doesn't take a genius or a statitician to work out that this was a calculated attempt to undermine support for the man who had already been made leader once.

Out of 551,000 members of the party, only 285,000 got to vote - just over half. Can you imagine the outcry if 49% of a country weren't allowed to vote in a General Election because it was thought that they were going to vote a specific way? Can you imagine? (If you live in Florida you don't have to imagine. Thanks, Jeb.)

Even so - out of the 285,000 that got their vote, over 168,000 of them voted for the unelectable man. 59% of them. Then there were the supporters and affiliated voters, whose support for him ran at an even higher percentage.

It's only now that we can understand where the term unelectable comes from.

In a world where a successful person is one who earns a lot of money, and a valuable object is one that costs a lot of money, the one who understands both of these things to be inherently true is seen as more acceptable, more grounded than the one who does not. If we accept blindly that money should rule our lives, then the man who wants us to believe this to be true is our friend, and the man who wants us to question this belief is our foe.

In a world wherein our way of thinking is highly informed by money and worth being commensurate, the man telling us that there's more to life than just money has to be painted as a madman, a man without a grasp on reality. A hopeless man. A man that can never lead, can never expect to be followed. A man that is unelectable.

Now look around you.

Are you a failure because you aren't earning more? Because you aren't living in a mansion? Are you a failure because you aren't bedecked in jewels and driving a sports car? Are you a failure because you buy things at a discount rather than crates of expensive nasty-tasting champagne?

Or are you a success because you made it this far, rather than by how much is in your bank account? Are you successful for reasons other than a six-figure salary? Do the things you own have value that isn't connected to how much they cost you? Is your home your home, regardless of how much smaller it is than the homes of those that collect our taxes and make our decisions?

If the answer to any of those is yes, then you are already smarter than the prevailing attitude. The natural divergence of semantics based on who dictates what is good or bad hasn't changed you into a heartless machine, driven by greed. Because at the heart of it, nobody really believes it. Not really. It's just the way the world seems to be going, and is the way the world has been going since enterprising merchants started agreeing that this much maize was worth this much silver.

If we are to be higher beings than this, if we are to be better than simply biological machines to be used to make money for ourselves and others, then we need to look at the use of these terms. We need to apply them differently, to make specific examples. We need to find value in that which is inexpensive, success in that which is unmarketable, happiness in that which is free, and worth in that which is penniless.

That is how we elect a man who is unelectable.

Fear And Its Fallout

Technically speaking, phobias are anxiety disorders, and I suffer from two quite common examples.

The first (and worst) is arachnophobia. If a spider is over a certain size I can't deal with it rationally. I do my best, but I'm left with my heart in my mouth and sweating like a carrot stick in a raw food clinic. If the thing is big enough then I can't sleep until after it is dealt with, and even then, it will take hours before I can normalise again.

A recent and infamous example was a year or so ago, when a creature henceforth known as the Cataclysm Spider descended from the chimney and brutally attacked four of us while we were watching Pulp Fiction. Everyone in the room saw it before I did, and reacted with understandable alarm; but when I caught sight of it, my body put me in the kitchen before my brain could actually inform me of what was going on. Housemates braver than I had to execute the beast, and probably levelled up a couple times in doing so. We watched the rest of Pulp Fiction to calm down after.

My arachnophobia is entirely informed by my mother. I never had an experience that made me afraid of spiders - I've been afraid of them all my life, probably due to her reactions to them when I was young. Which is a shame, because I find them absolutely fascinating and (horribly) beautiful creatures.

The second is coulrophobia - which is a phobia of clowns, and I react to them in a similar (if less neurotic) fashion to spiders: exterminate. Spiders don't get to live if they come into the house. Neither do clowns. I can't deal with them. Hate them. It's less severe - if I had to pick five minutes in a room with a tarantula or six hours with a clown I'd pick the clown - but fuck don't ever make me choose. I hate clowns. Hate them.

The hatred of clowns is one that onset later in life - probably thanks to endless horror movies, Stephen King's It (the book), and depression that makes any false happiness sinister and not to be trusted. It's a phobia I can control a lot easier, as a result. It's less firmly embedded in my psyche. Relatively superficial in comparison.

Where am I going with this? Well...

Everyone knows a homophobe. Everyone knows a transphobe. Everyone knows an islamophobe. Either they are just a bit ignorant and chat shit without thinking, or they are properly, like truly, in hate with their chosen demographic.

Morgan Freeman didn't actually say this:

...but I'm sure everyone has seen a picture of him with these words attached to it, circulated around facebook or similar.

Fear is a keyed response. It is something that can be tempered, trained and reduced, but it exists beyond the conscious mind. It is very hard to control true fear. It's te bit of us that kept us safe from predators and hazards back before we had the capacity to actually think about why they were a threat.

Our instincts, however, are not our best selves.

Irrational thoughts and attitudes inform poor decisions. Going off one's gut, without giving a moment's pause to the correctness of our action, or whether or not the deep intrinsic insecurities and anxieties that make us human have influenced our decision - well, that's how really dumb mistakes are made.

We are afraid of things we don't understand. That is human. That is part of the basic insecurity that is indelibly part of our mental heritage. That which we understand is safe. People stay in situations that are objectively toxic because - well, it's the devil we know.

Let's be real though. Even the devil we know is still the devil.

When I moved off the island for the first time, I moved to Bradford to study Law in college. I went from a place that was, let's face it, a little insular...to a place chock full of interesting new cultures, languages, races and faces. For the first week I was totally knocked off my perch. I had no idea.

You know what though? I adapted, because I refused to let my fear of that which was unknown to me inform the rest of my life. I stopped being intimidated by people talking languages I didn't understand and religious practices I didn't share, but the first few times I encountered them, that fear was real - because it was unknown to me.

I often hold that it isn't how we feel that defines us; it is what we do with that feeling, how we react to it, and how we deal with it.

Thus I contend that a homophobe is someone that feels an initial urge of anxiety when encountering homosexuality. That's sometimes hard to control. That in itself is fear. What you do with that fear... well, that is the difference between being a person and being an asshole.

This is the difference. If you run into a guy and he introduces you to his husband - you can't stop your initial response. What you CAN do is realise that your response is an anxiety trigger and you aren't obliged to act on it, and that the proper way to deal with the situation is to remember that this couple that scares you are still human beings that haven't actually done anything wrong.

When I see a clown my initial response is fight-or-flight, with an 80% fight bias. I get angry. What do I do? I don't punch the poor bastard in the facepaint, because underneath the facepaint, the poor bastard is a person just like me. Whatever my initial instictive response to that facepaint, it doesn't justify me being an asshole.

In my opinion, we use the words homophobe, transphobe, islamophobe - we use them to indicate something more than just the phobia. That person has felt an instinct and acted on it with hatred or ignorance or a mixture of both. The fear isn't a choice, but their response of abuse and vitriol is.

I think we need to stop using -phobia to describe someone who is a bigot. A phobia is a fear, an anxiety disorder. Choosing to be an asshole is choosing to be an asshole. Phobics suffer - assholes decide to make other people suffer. The language has to change. They're not victims. They are agressors.

As time goes on and the populace as a whole becomes less and less insular and more and more educated, those who practice hate will dig in. They have to, because the general human drift is to defeat hatred - mostly by the hard work of the few. Attitudes do change, over time, as new generations are raised in environments that make the old attitudes of the past unacceptable.


To the assholes in question, I say this:

I understand your fear. I understand why things scare you. I understand that these things are different to that which you know and are comfortable with. I know full well how hard it is to leave that comfort zone.

Try it though. Just for once. Stop giving into that toxic hostility you are so used to. Just for a little while. You'd be amazed how easy life can be, if you just stop being such a prick.

It's so easy to hate. I should know - I hate a lot of things. It's very very easy; but then the easy way isn't always the best way. Everything can be better for everyone, if haters cease hating. Or at least fucking hate something that NEEDS hating - like if you're gonna look down on people who claim benefits, then at least have an equivalent disdain for the six British companies that didn't pay any tax in 2014. They made £30 billion for fuck's sake.

Just think for a while. Just think. Feel - Think - Act. In that order.

You never know. You might even like it.

Not Born To Pay Bills

It is sometimes a hard thing to deal with depression as a vaguely nihilistic person.

You see a lot of motivational posts all over social media. A lot of these posts talk about purpose, meaning, so on, so forth.

It's great that people can find things like that helpful or soothing or actually motivational, you know? It's nice that the things can actually prove to be useful to folks, because everyone copes differently and everyone needs a different way forwards.

For me, all the motivational stuff makes me feel a little nauseous.

Like...I am sure some of them (if not most, if not all) are made by people who don't necessarily need the motivation they provide. They always strike me as hollow platitudes. Like there is something inherently mindlessly optimistic about it all, like someone that's never lost a limb telling me how it will feel, or someone who isn't drowning smiling calmly and telling me that it'll be okay, just picture the oxygen entering my lungs.

More than that, though - more than that is the notion that there's something beyond, and if only I believe in it, then it'll give me the strength to do the next thing. Which I can't do. Because if the recovery is built on the belief in something that can't be proven, then there's nothing to keep it all from falling down when you have that moment of doubt. All that can hold it together is your belief, your unshakeable belief...

...and you are better off devoting that to yourself.

"You were not born to just pay bills and die," one of them says. That's true. In truth? You weren't born for anything at all. You were born because of point A leading to point B, and the cell separation at point C, and the birth at point D. You're not here FOR anything. You're here BECAUSE you were conceived.

My function is to keep going. I wasn't put here with a purpose. Happiness is the one thing that should be pursued without question - though not at the cost of other people's. What else is there? All life demands is sufferance. We owe it to ourselves to make that as easy on us as possible.

Something my dad used to say, when he was very, very sick. "All I want is a peaceful life." I think that is what all people want, in a way. More than to be wildly succesful, more than to be vastly wealthy or permanently entertaining; we want to be able to breathe, to take time and to have that time to ourselves.

We spend a significant proportion of our lives doing things to try and achieve that peace. The average citizen of the UK works 1,677 hours a year. We go through school, we try and normalise, we go through everything that is expected of us just so we can get to a point where we have warmth and shelter and a lack of hunger. Then we have to keep it up - we run on the spot to keep that place. We put ourselves through daily experiences that lead to heart conditions and buildups of stress just so we have somewhere to go and sit and not be stressful anymore.

That's the life we have, the cards we are dealt. All we can do is try and change it to something better, and find our peace and our happiness as best we are able.

That's something to believe in.

You Can Do It

It's halfway between Christmas and New Year, and I am already all holiday'd out.

I'm glad that the people that had a good time, did. I'm sad that those who didn't, didn't. I wish everyone could have had a good time. Likewise I wish those who didn't want to do this whole thing (but ended up kind of having to do it anyway) could have sidestepped it.

What is coming up is New Year's Eve, and there will be many things going on, in people's heads and on social media.

Amongst all the chat about this and that, there will probably be a significant amount of thoughts relating to new year, new person. A lot of this may be accompanied by motivational posters; and it's those particular posters that on occasion catch my eye.

See...I am a depressive. Have been for a long time. A bit of a cynic too. So whenever I see those messages of positivity, my instinct is to sneer. I don't know if they actually work for anyone - if they make people feel better, give them the drive or determination that they need - but for me, it never seems to ring true.

That said - if it WORKS for you? You do you. Unless something someone does is harmful (to them or anyone else) then I probably shouldn't have any say in it. I just don't understand the mindset that MAKES it work. It's beyond me.

Likewise, New Year's resolutions. I've made some in the past. It just....doesn't really work for me now. If I have one each year, it's to make it through to next year; and some days, that is harder than others. My health makes actually going out and having adventures fairly difficult - and besides, for me, the draw of them has faded a little. Perhaps that is cynicism, too. Perhaps I just value things differently, now.

Sure, there's things I want to do in 2016. There's things I am hopeful for. I want to be able to get more tattoos. I want to attend some gigs. I want to get some serious writing done. I want to be in a better financial place by the end of the year - and at least 80% of that is just on me, so I am hopeful.

Work looks positive. We've got a lot of good work coming up, which is gonna keep us busy as heeell. Predicting a few late finishes, which is fine. Even looking down the barrel of a shedload of work - my team is a good one, we'll be okay.

Got all sorts of fun events coming up, too. Nine Worlds convention in the late summer, which I am SERIOUSLY looking forward to. A trip up to London to catch a showing of The Room at the Prince Charles theater, which I am still sourcing plastic spoons and an American football for. Visits to friends, hopefully - both near AND far. (Assuming you wanna see me that is!)

So...why not 2016? Why not. I'm not gonna say it is going to be the super-best year ever - but I will settle for it being a good year.

Hopefully not just for me, either. I'm hoping America has a good year, by avoiding the Trump Bullet. I'm hoping folks the world over have a more acceptant time, an easier time, a time less plagued by the ignorance and greed of others.

Hell...maybe I AM looking forward to it.

The Question Is Why

A lot of bad shit has happened to the world in the past week.

A lot of innocent people have been killed, their only crime - being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those places have been reasonably diverse. One occupies the majority of the media attention, of course, because...hell, in the Lebanon, people get blown up and shot all the time. It's monstrous and cruel and so very regular that nobody bats an eyelid. Like acceptance by mass numeral.

It is as tragic as it always is to see innocent people die. It's never right, for whatever reason. It's an awful injustice and it just shouldn't ever happen...but it does.

What really bothers me...what truly works my nerves...is not knowing why.

Why would these people choose to do what they do? Everyone has a theory. Some of those theories are perhaps based more on personal bias than actual fact. What chain of causality led to those people pulling the triggers, flicking the switches? What decision-making process took them from step 1 to the awful final step?

What caused those decisions to be made the way they were? Not "because X said so" or "because they were angry", but what led to that? What caused all of this to happen? If these acts of atrocity are the symptoms of a sickness, what is the sickness itself?

I only phrase it like that, because it's all too easy to treat the symptom, not the sickness. A comparable situation - in theory, if not in actual tragedy - is the spread of Malaria. To constantly try and patch the holes, to rush around curing each outbreak and instance - that is burning a lot of energy hacking at branches, when the roots of the problem remain out of reach. To stop the mosquitoes that spread the Malaria, to find a way to prevent them from spreading it, to get people out of areas where it spreads from...that's a cure.

I wish I knew why. I dearly wish I knew why. That way I could make sense of it and see a solution.

I can't. That is what keeps me up at night.

I suspect that there's many theoretical root-causes. Societal reasons on the macro-scale, which can be tackled with big, difficult decisions, the kind that make people say "yeah but that wouldn't work really would it" not because they won't work but because making people believe it will work is harder than just letting it all keep happening.

I just don't know.

I wish I did.