I’m Also Going to Use Proper Titles Going Forward

And here I am once again wondering to myself, and those of you reading, why I do this little thing that I do. I’ve always come at this topic from the position of trying to define intent, what I should do. I think I understand now that this was a silly way of going about it, that instead of obsessing about plans, the best laid of which often go awry, I should just let the thing live. All these vain declarations of design, of what outmoded model I follow or wish to, all this arrogant self explanation of what tone or message I imagine others could take from what I leave, it’s tiresome. You’ll note the irony in this statement I’m sure, but from here on out I intend to stop this.

I don’t know why I write exactly, I just feel compelled to keep doing it. Even though sometimes it’s as if I’ve been whisked back to my school days, particularly those long weekends spent staring at a blank sheet of paper – or playing vidya, trying to pretend the paper doesn’t exist – with an assignment hanging over my head. I keep writing, week after week, and I savour the moment when I press the “publish” button because it’s often the high point of that day. Through words I can explore my thoughts on anything and everything, and more than that I have the eyes of a small group of people so I know I’m not entirely screaming into the void. I like being heard, however faintly.

I don’t know if most of you are regulars, because none of you actually responded to the poll I made a couple weeks before I went away. I’ll be honest I was disappointed at first, but with the other things on my mind I was quickly distracted. Then of course I was away, and now I’m not that upset or disappointed anymore – well I am a tiny bit, over ten hours in MS Paint on that header image desu – I understand that I’m not owed anything from any of you. The only issue is that I still don’t know what it is that I was hoping to find out from that very poll, which is whether all this new traffic is from return visitors or not. Things have died down a little, I’ve had a few days here and there with few or no visitors, but I’m still getting a lot more than I was before the bump that inspired the poll.

Days with no one are very rare, rather than normal as they were. I should mention that one person did respond, so I can say with a certainty that I have at least one return visitor. I appreciate that, guy, but on reflection maybe it’d have been better for me to truly have had no response at all to that poll. Because it would strengthen my resolve when it comes to what I realise I need to do. Circling back somewhat to how I started this post, I need to stop worrying about what kind of writing I should be doing, what ideas and themes I think people should read into what I write, who I should be writing for, and instead just get on with the bloody thing. Like I’m not doing right now…

The results of the poll, that is the lack of results, seem to suggest that most readers are one time visitors. That for some reason I will never understand, and that could change at any time, these posts I write are showing up more in search engines than they were for the first year and a half of me having this blog. So while these posts that I write now receive more attention than what I was uploading even half a year ago, there’s no reason to assume they’re making any impact on any of the people who do. In fact, if I am being consistently stumbled across by people and am staying at the same average page views roughly then it must mean most of these new people don’t find what I write compelling enough to stick around or I would see consistent growth.

The poll result (or non result) has still taught me something, even if not one of the two things I expected to learn. I understand now that even if I have a reliable following, which I might/ but I very well might not, it’s a ghost following. It will never be anything more than numbers on a page, which represent people and show that I am heard, but tell me nothing about what impact my words have. Do I make people think, or feel? Do I inspire? Do I make people feel less alone? Do I provide comfort for people down on their luck, for the fact that they have found someone even more unlucky? Some mix of those and plenty more I would guess.

I’ve mentioned it already in a few posts, but I’m reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa at the moment (or Bernardo Soares perhaps) and I think I might see something of what people see in this blog. The book is much more poetic, and an entirely different beast, but similar in a few key ways. It’s a posthumous collection of notes and scraps of paper which were found in a huge chest nearly lost forever and put together in a way that Pessoa himself never would have wanted. I’m reading just one of several orderings, the one I chose seemingly the most comprehensive as it includes almost everything, and this is only of the translations in English. In the original Portuguese there could be thousands of potential arrangements of these short snippets of inked reflections.

He talks about so much, and I’ll save my specific thoughts on the book’s contents because I think I’ll probably write a whole entry here about the book, but it does remind me a little bit of this blog. I’m really loving the book, I was reading it for almost two hours straight last night. I’m trying to savour it though, I’m mostly reading it for around half an hour a day at most. I’ve been reading other stuff alongside it, I recently finished Dubliners by James Joyce. I really want to read a lot more in 2020 than I did the last few years. Every year since about 2014 actually, the last decade was a lost decade for me. That’s how I see it, not just in regard to reading but in every sense actually. I ruined my education, and I retreated away from the world only to waste that time in petty self pity.

When I came back from my trip to Rome recently, for the first time since dropping out of school during my A-levels, I considered higher education. My conversation with a man who I only know as “Bournemouth” which I talked about in my last post, prompted it I suppose. Though it was more than that, my uncle has been pestering me about when I’ll give uni another chance from the day I renounced that path, it was as much spending time with people who were just like me that are studying. Sure I have a friend who is in uni in England, but I spend very little time with him. The last time I spent as much time with him as I spent with the people I visited while in Rome was back when we were both 15.

I realised that I don’t want to be stuck in this box by the station until I’m old, honestly I’m terrified I’ll still be doing the same job I do now when I’m 30. There’s a guy I work with, he’s in his early 30s (about the same age as my dad when I was born) and he has two children. If I want a stable, lower middle class job, then it’s going to be very difficult without a degree. The traditional career, that of the boomer, is dead. The idea of working your way to a position through experience alone. At least, the barrier for entry has been raised significantly, you need a degree, and so I briefly considered trying to go back to take a year course to qualify and then go to university. I’d probably study English, certainly a humanities subject because it’s the only thing I could stomach, and then after looking into it for a couple weeks I decided I would rather not.

See, the barrier for entry may have been raised in one sense, if you want to be another office worker/ cubicle cuck then you’ll need a degree, but on the other hand the barrier for entry has been lowered in some respect. We as a society have achieved a level of consumerism never before thought possible, and unless Corona-Chan or some other catastrophe arrives to kick off the long awaited boogaloo then the trend will only increase. We are living through the slow bourgeois-fication of the human species, honestly look at the most well developed countries on the planet. Whether it be Norway or Japan, you could categorise them as middle class nations. Where I live, in England, we’re not far off. Even the homeless have smartphones, the other day a gypsy woman showed me a photo of her daughter with hers after I gave her some spare change.

I paid for my plane ticket to Rome (a return ticket, though as I mentioned there were complications) with the money earned in two seven hour shifts at work. I would like a more stable job with reliable hours and slightly more money so I can perhaps one day afford to own a home. Although on other days I wish I was dead, but assuming I “make it” and find someone I love and find a reason to continue with it all and all the usual normalfag faggotry. If I could earn what I earn right now (if averaged, because I do shift work of course) working as a teacher, or a librarian; or I could earn the salary of one of those more reputable professions doing what I do right now; I’d probably go with less money for the more respectable salaried job. More importantly, I think most people would be even more likely to do so. Especially people from a similar background to me.

I’ve never really cared about being wealthy, I have no real ambition in that regard, but I’ve always craved respect. Not that I’ve done anything to earn it. As we near the point where even the poorest among us live better than the kings of old, the idea of the job gradually becomes nothing more than fashion. It’s all posturing, it’s the expansion of the blue collar (trade) vs white collar dichotomy. You might very well be able to earn more as a tradesman of some kind than at a low tier “white collar” profession like middle management, but yet you will always be looked down on by that same white collar worker. You will always be a red faced prole, gammon. Now I see it though, I can’t find it in myself to take part at all. It’s so sickening to see the charade play out.

It’s a crazy world, clownish. This blog is the only real solace I have from it, that and good books. I’d say I should write as if I have no audience, because it would lead to the most pure kind of expression of whatever it is I wish to express, but I’d be trying to maintain a fiction. There are people here reading, and I intend to keep giving you more to read. I am however, going to try my absolute best not to be influenced in any way by what I think said audience may want from me. I recently uploaded something quite unlike anything else I’ve ever posted on here before, a work of prose poetry inspired by the creature Tiktaalik who has been making waves recently on 4channel.org.

I’m pretty sure the first thread was made on /his/, that’s where I saw it first anyway, but either way I really just took the inspiration to talk about determinism in a way that I thought would be more interesting than if I just made a more standard entry on the subject. I mentioned ages ago now, over a year I think, that I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that free will is anything other than a mirage and that I would need to write about it in some depth, but I never could find a way to intelligently share my view. Anything I wrote seemed juvenile, easily dismissible, and useless given there are so many very clear and well reasoned writings out there for you to read on the subject already from people far more educated and knowledgeable than I.

Whatever this new gradually forming worldview of mine ends up looking like, it’ll almost be certainly be determinist/ fatalist, because that’s how I see the world. It’s gradually become a crucial way of seeing the world for me, at this point a day doesn’t go by where I don’t find myself reminded at least once of the fact that we have no real control over anything. I’ve been meaning to write more generally about the idea of constraint as well, the very idea of it, and of course this subject also always leads one to the most oppressive kind of constraint of all. That being the idea, the fact, that we have no kind of freedom of choice in any sense when you really think about it.

There are no choices, whenever you follow through with a process that in your mind you would consider a choice, know that this “choice” was the only outcome that there could have been. You were always going to do what you actually did do, which is why you did it. It’s not something to be upset about though, for a long time I was quite negatively affected by this new understanding, for as I said it’s the truest realisation of constraint imaginable. Now though, I’ve kind of made peace with the idea. I said I didn’t want to push people towards a particular interpretation of my writing, so I won’t labour the point, but that post was kind of about that.

I really find the philosophy of Heraclitus helped with this process, which I wrote about a fair bit in this post. I do intend to get back into that by the way, I have been distracted lately and also reading other things, but I will finish that book and the post responding to it. I’ve also been working a lot lately, I did six days of work one week. It’s an easy job for the most part, and I’m getting paid, so I don’t mean to sound as if I’m complaining, but I’ve had very little time to write. I’m surprised I’ve managed to get a new post out every week since getting home from Rome. Well actually it’s not too surprising, this one I’m writing right now is completely mad and stream of consciousness. It’s easy to just vomit my thoughts out like this. The prose “poem” I was talking about a moment ago was half finished before I left and still ended up being pretty short, less than 1000 words. Last week’s post was substantial though, I hope you liked it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, I feel like everything is slowly deteriorating around me and I’m very concerned. I don’t even have time for “tfw no gf” anymore… those were the days. I know that I don’t want to study, I would hate the environment, I’d be stuck doing a course for four years at least and I’d probably have to continue living with my dad for that time because I wouldn’t be able to work full time and study. I don’t know what to do, but I know I need to do something or I’ll be in that exact position I fear so much. I can coast through life, barely alive of course but present, and modernity will do it’s best to keep me comfortable while doing it, but in my heart I will grow more and more to hate every waking moment.

I know it’s odd that I was just writing about how free will and choice are an illusion and now I seem to be obsessing over “choices”, but knowing an illusion for what it is doesn’t make it feel any less real. Another example of constraint would be the languages we use, as far as I’m aware all languages are predicated on the idea that we are agents with the power of choice. So it’s impossible to talk or write about doing anything without reinforcing the illusion, every time you say or even simply think about doing something you further strengthen the false idea of choice. If you throw a ball at the ground and it bounces back, you wouldn’t say it chose to do so, but imagine if you were raised in a language that did. You would start to think it did, and of course the presumption probably comes before the language and I understand that our innate belief in free will might be genetic and not cultural.

I’m very tired, I’m going to stop writing now and go to sleep.

At least I’m getting the hell out of this gay city soon

I knew that I would feel this way, and yet I went there anyway. I did it I did it, and now I am stuck in a room all grey. I can’t even find it within myself to write something coherent, I won’t sit here all day. That’s not true yes I will, but I won’t spend it typing, dwelling in ink. Code more like, because I don’t truly write. I type. None of that means anything, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just TYPING things out trying to say something and I’ll stop when I’ve covered all the things that are making me hurt. I know I shouldn’t, hurt I mean, but I does be. Can you ever guess why?

Right now, I have a hangover but a mild one only. I always make sure to drink enough water now, after bad experiences resulted from not doing so years ago. I’m perfect, I was asked why last night but not by one I wish would think of me so. Actually I don’t wish that, no one wants to be with perfect they want to be with “just like me”, going easy, won’t throw up in my boyfriend’s car. Fucking kill me. It was in response to this wish to avoid day after dehydration that this accusation of perfectness was hurled at me, quite unexpectedly. The pent up wonder at my careful carelessness I believe. In some sense I am glad that through mild drunkenness it was revealed that my efforts do go noticed; though by her tone I can see perhaps not in the way I have held in my head it must be.

This exchange was at a flat, four of us the same as last time abandoned by the rest, at an hour I would usually long have been asleep. Or at least lying in the dark tossing and turning, or staring up at the ceiling, kept company only by uncomfortable memories. The flat in question, occupied by the girl or woman I would (not) like to have called me perfect, her partner who was very friendly and probably deserves her, and at least one trouserless Hungarian who only wanted to use the washing machine. The house of one of the abandoners was close by, some jokes were made about that. She told me she sometimes sees him in the early hours and swerves behind a car, she motioned, in order to avoid him.

This walk, about ten minutes from the station to the residence, was the highlight of the evening for me. I had a plastic bag of sickly sweet almond liqueur which she gave to me to carry, and I liked that. It felt like some kind of recognition of my masculinity, because it was done unthinkingly particularly. Unconsidered, and therefore real. I walked with her on my right, and though stilted there was conversation. She told me that she likes to watch shows, she said I like to watch shows to relax. Unprompted. And there was a sadness. I don’t want to project, but the implication seemed to be that she does yearn for something else. I wanted to say something but I couldn’t, I turned to look at her and she looked up at me and so I would have something rather than nothing I asked to clarify the name of the show she said she had just finished recently that she told me about.

It’s a sci fi show, she pronounced it sky fi which was charming. “Oh, you like that sort of thing?” I asked, the emphasis not judgemental but meant to suggest I was learning something about her. It was a moment like that which I had been yearning for myself, if I’m being honest. I just wish I could stay in that moment, her warm brown eyes staring at mine and bashful smile. I just feel so much better when she’s there, close by. The walk was a wasted opportunity I think to myself, there were stretches where we didn’t talk and I wanted to desperately wanted to say something but I didn’t know what to. The illusion I’ve held for the last few months was shattered there on that dark stretch of not quite suburbia yet also, when I did say something and was misheard.

I asked something about the cigarette she was smoking, I don’t smoke myself but I do quite like the smell, I don’t recall exactly what but it was a question which is the important thing. She responded as if I made a statement, “oh, really?”, and broke my heart. Maybe I should stop with the melodrama, it was more of a disappointment, but it did hurt when it happened. I had this idea that with her that didn’t happen, it was what I thought was one of the reasons I fell for her. Everyone mishears me, especially people who have English as a second language which is actually quite a few of the people I find myself surrounded by ironically. If not ironically then coincidentally, whatever.

She always made the effort, or didn’t need to, but then at this point quite clearly and a few other points that were less cut and dried I found out this was not the case. My only hope is that maybe I was speaking even more softly than I do most of the time that evening, which I do feel might actually have been the case but I don’t know why. I tried to speak up, but I just can’t do it. Throughout, everyone had to lean in whenever I was asked a question or trying to say something. At the first pub, over the dinner table, at the second pub, on the train, etc. There’s someone else grabbing hold of my vocal chords, and every time I attempt to increase my volume his grip tightens. The bastard, he’ll doom me. I would uproot him if I could and revenge myself upon him for the years worth of damage he has caused.

I don’t feel anywhere near as awful as I did last time I made a post like this, well not like this mess but alike in subject matter, I will see her tomorrow for ten minutes and it will be lovely as always. It’s so pathetic, it’s so unbelievably pathetic, I wish I had other words to use but I just hear pathetic over and over in my head ringing out. I can’t help how I feel, when in her company however briefly I just feel better. Even though I paradoxically also find that it hurts to be there because of moments like those walking last night (this morning) where I find myself in a classic case of the porcupine’s dilemma. So desperate to reach out, not physically but to bridge an emotional gap yet refraining because I know that if I do I’ll be walking into a wall of spears.

I learned some foreign swear words, but I forgot them all. I remember how to say thank you in her language though, not that it will come in much use to have such knowledge. Then again, what use is any of the trivia I’ve collected over the years? It’s Valentine’s Day shortly after I get back, that subject came up at one point during the evening. I’m not getting the day off, because I won’t need it. I was asked if I have any plans “a secret admirer perhaps?”. Really funny stuff. Actually, I’m too harsh it was kind of funny in the moment and I did laugh. I laughed a lot, not the kind of full hearted near to tears pain in my side wheezing laughter I have with my close friends but closer to that than I’ve ever been with these people before. Usually at these work meetups I smile, I chuckle politely, but I genuinely found myself amused on a fair few occasions last night.

I had a good time, for the most part. It’s complicated, I was switching back and forth a lot in my feelings about the events while they were occurring. At first I was nervous, shaking actually, trying to get comfortable but failing. The one who I can’t stop thinking about seemed pretty disappointed that one of the two guys who cancelled last minute wasn’t going to be there, I really hate to say it because envy is so ugly to me and something I’ve always done a good job of not falling for, but I did feel a tinge of jealousy. I know that the two words are not synonymous, but I’m not sure which one described my feeling in that moment. Envy is the desire for something you don’t have, and jealousy is the fear that you will lose something, nowadays the implication tending to be that this will happen because someone else will take it.

I don’t know what it was, do I just feel envious? Do I just wish that she would feel similarly if I were to have not turned up? Would she I wonder as well, I really don’t know. If so, then it would be closer to jealousy, and if not then I suppose it is envy. I really do wonder just what she thinks of me, it’s so hard to tell. Sometimes I feel like I make her uncomfortable or she doesn’t want me to be there, a micro expression here or a comment there gives me this feeling, and it hurts. Then she laughs when I speak or say something, both when I try to be funny (and in my opinion fail, but apparently not hers) and often when I’m just talking normally. She does seem the type to laugh a lot, but I do think it’s a little more frequent with me than when I’ve seen her talking one on one with any of the others from work. This is very possibly a fabrication of my ego though, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that in fact the opposite is true and I make her laugh less.

She doesn’t flinch or seem uncomfortable in any way when I touch her. When we were there in the pub, she had some kind of stain on her elbow from the table and I grabbed it to look, and she didn’t mind at all. That was quite unlike me by the way, I had not had much to drink yet at this point and I’m usually so incredibly frightened about crossing people’s personal boundaries, to a degree that is rather comical, and yet without even having time to think as soon as I noticed her examining the mark I found myself reaching out. It wasn’t a sexual or creepy thing of course, there’s nothing particularly erotic about holding a clothed elbow in your hand for less than ten seconds, if I were to grab her waist she’d probably freak out. Of course I would never do anything of the sort, again I’m actually really quite surprised I even just grabbed her arm like that. It’s a bit concerning, if I were to see some other guy who isn’t her boyfriend do that I’d find it suspect.

Am I going to become a lecher, a groper, a fiend who women from all across the world will fear. They joked about these sorts of men, they wanted to go to a nightclub and we almost did. It would have been a gay nightclub, because the guys at normal places are apparently too touchy feely. I’m glad we didn’t go, instead I would have been the one who faced the grotesque creeping hands of slimy men. A friend of mine once warned me, and me specifically, that if I ever find myself in such an environment I will be groped. I’m not sure if he was complimenting me on my looks, he does occasionally make remarks of that sort I think because he believes it will boost my confidence, or if he was talking about how I look quite young and by doing so remarking on the predatory vibes that the “gay scene” is known for.

I would have felt so out of place there, on the one hand I enjoyed myself more than expected at the local club I went to in December and maybe would have danced again given enough alcohol, but it would be too degenerate for me I feel, apparently drag queens are even known to make an appearance at the place that was suggested. It’s a weird thing, to operate as a sane mind in modern Britain. But what can you do? To even suggest that all the various different sorts who collect under the LGBT banner are anything other than wonderful is social suicide. When the lovely girl who maybe hates me was teaching us swear words in her language she told us the word for faggot, in a rather awkward way, she said “this is like the word for “gay” but in a not good way” or something like that. Fine with me, based actually. But then one of the other girls said something along the lines of “we don’t say that here” or “we don’t have that one”… So uncomfortable, but it was a very brief moment.

I noticed as well that I caught her staring at me far less often than on other occasions like this. I often turn around to face her very suddenly when I’m finished talking to someone else or if I’ve just been doing nothing staring at the ground, and like to find her looking in my direction sometimes smiling other times looking away like a child who has been caught doing something they shouldn’t. Maybe I’ve done that one too many times, and she has decided to make a concerted effort to focus elsewhere when I am present, or perhaps I have a self serving memory and the frequency of such a thing is actually less than I recall. I want it to be true, but I shouldn’t. Even though I have no intention of making a move I still feel so awful just for even desiring a taken woman.

I feel awful he was honestly a really nice guy, he drove me all the way home at half past three in the morning, over half an hour’s drive and even though I said he could drop me off early he insisted on taking me right to the front entrance. He had a friendly demeanour and look, his physiognomy and behaviour tells me that he is a decent individual. And they’ve been in a relationship for a long time, they’ve been living here in England for five years at least. There was another awkward moment when she was asked about marriage and she acted like it was a crazy question, noteworthy because she’s functionally married already. Maybe the relationship isn’t perfect, maybe she doesn’t see herself growing old with him.

You see? This is why the situation is awful, I hate that there is a part of me that wants to see a relationship fail. Yet I have to want that, an unwanted want it may be but that doesn’t make me feel much better. I spend so much time thinking about how she would feel if she found out how I do, if she were to see all this thought I’ve put into every minor interaction that she herself must have long forgotten. I wonder if she suspects something already, which is why she feels more distant since I’ve seen her recently. She’s been quicker to leave when we switch over at work the two times since she’s come back from her trip home, though still very friendly admittedly.

She did invite me into her home though, I feel like if she was concerned about me getting ideas or as a potential stalker, which I am obviously fucking not, she wouldn’t do. Yes she invited three of us, but still the suggestion came totally out of the blue. Before I left to meet everyone that evening I wouldn’t have thought for a second that the night would have gone the way it did. If only I lived alone, we could have come round to my flat. Perhaps next time the chance arrives I will be, I can only hope. She also seemed to want me to come along specifically, when she first suggested we go to her place I was a little hesitant as it is so far from where I live, but she asked me specifically to come and said I’d get home safe. I’m just rambling.

I tried to cover all the moments most memorable, the chronology not so important, I don’t know if there’s any others I’ve forgotten. A certain individual who may have unknowingly played a crucial role in this blog’s creation was brought up at one point. Referred to as “my friend” weirdly enough, the implication of which I’m still in doubt about. A suggestion that my feelings and even the scrap of goodbye I hid for her are known of? Or more of a complaint that those two had some kind of hostility to one another, and nothing about me was meant. Preferable, and probably more likely, I just like to torture myself with worry over every tiny thing because at least it’s better than the dead grey walls and the dead grey sky and the sludge of life. Terror always trumps tedium, I think.

Oh of course, how could I forget! Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, the not-a-novel I mentioned in the post previous. I received a copy as a gift, when we all gave gifts to one another. Well, those of us who were present. Two three four at the pub, five at the restaurant, four after that until six, briefly, before five again and finally one. It might sound like a shocking coincidence, but in actual fact the guy who bought me the gift had asked me in advance for a list of things I would like because he was struggling to find a good present (he also passed around a list of things he wanted for himself, for his “secret santa” to find) and that book was one of the ten suggestions. Nevertheless, it is rather interesting which choice he made. Maybe he is more of an understanding individual than I first thought.

I had to lie a little to explain how he could have known which book to get, I said it was already a favourite of mine and that I used to have a copy but lost it. When we were guessing who bought whose gifts I said I had told the guy who bought me the book that it was my favourite, which was why he knew to get me a copy and why it must be him. I will take the book with me to Rome next month, for the plane, if I get it back before then. I left it behind at her house. There was a big bag with all of the gifts in, so they were all left behind there. I wonder what she’ll think of it, I saw her flicking through it and reading a page at one point. Which is fine, more than fine I hope she reads through it a little before bringing it in to work. I really would be interested to hear what she thinks about it.

And while I would like to bring it with me, part of me also thinks perhaps it’s best saved as something to comfort myself with when I return. After all I will probably be sad that the trip and my time with the person I’m visiting is over, it’s inevitable. We subject ourselves to the pain of something coming to an end because we are taking a gamble that the thing itself will be worth the upset to come. Being immediately thrust back into the things I’m running away from won’t be much fun either. So maybe I’ll ask if she wants to borrow it, assuming she doesn’t just bring everything with her immediately and actually seems interested in the book. Or maybe I won’t.

A change of pace

I haven’t been on the ball at all lately, I’ve really fallen behind and I’m not quite sure why. Nothing has really happened, in fact I’m actually quite motivated at the moment, but I’m just not doing anything about it. I started my last post, thinking it was something novel and interesting, but while working on it I lost faith in the whole idea. Now this is only a part of it, because I also just became less engaged because the idea was not as good as I originally thought, but I’d say that not having a single visitor for around two weeks might have affected my losing interest. I don’t like that it bothers me so much, and that it’s becoming something I seem to whine about so often, but it certainly is interesting that when my posts are well received (or actually more importantly, just often received) I find it easier to write and I write better. Not that I’m saying I ever write well, I don’t think I do, but what I write is better I mean.

So that post was one of the longest to finish of all of the ones I’ve uploaded, and partly this was because I took a break for about three or four days and didn’t even look at the blog at all. Instead, I’ve been trying to read more, for those few days I read for a good few hours each. The book I was reading was Herodotus’ The Histories, which I bought a copy of (Translated by Robin Waterfield) a long while ago, but dropped it about half of the way in and I didn’t pick it back up until last week. Funnily enough, the second half is quite different and much more focused than the first. So I’ve found it a lot easier to stick with it. The winding first half which follows the first three Persian kings as they build their empire, veering off into various fantastical stories from the many places they conquered, is interesting sure but it also drags in places. I’ve just found, surprisingly, that the story of the invasions of Greece by Darius and later Xerxes was much more engaging.

Anyway, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on /lit/, which is not my usual board at all. I’ve spent more time there this last week than the sum total of time spent during all my other visits. I did originally just go to check the sticky, because I know they have that start with the greeks chart and reading what I was and the fact that I’ve been reminded of when I read The Republic (and probably barely understood it) a few times over the last couple of months I thought maybe now is the time. I ended up just sticking around though, and enjoying it quite a lot. It might sound strange, but I quite liked that there were conversations that I felt unqualified to join in with. Feeling out of my depth almost, it inspires me to read and learn so that I will be able to keep up with the discussion some time in the future. So, over this week I said to myself I would do exactly that.

I’ve mostly stuck to it so far, I’ve definitely spent at least some time reading (even if only half an hour some days) every day since that period of a few days where I finished The Histories. I’ve had to make do with this book I got as a present years ago and never gave a read, The Crying Of Lot 49, it’s awful if I’m being honest but pretty short and it’s something to read until my copy of Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War arrives. That’s the next book I’ve ordered, and I’m not listing all these off just to flex on whoever is reading this so I hope it doesn’t seem that way. Honestly it might sound rather impressive hearing all these ancient greek names, but the books I’m reading are famously written in simple language. Herodotus’ writing is a common choice for people trying to learn to read ancient greek because it’s so clear and easy to grasp, and I’m just reading a translation into English. I do have a MEGA link to all the works attributed to Plato though, which actually is pretty fucking intimidating, and if I get through all of that and actually understand it well then I think I’d have a reason to be somewhat impressed with myself.

So because of all of this, and because I’ve kind of been finding it harder and harder to consistently write a good post every single week, I’ve decided to upload more irregularly. I’ll still try to consistently be writing, so at any one time there’ll be a post I’m working on, but I just don’t want to have this deadline hanging over my head. Instead of feeling I need to rush to finish a post that I’ve been having more trouble with, I’ll just keep working on it longer. It seems to me, that I’ve established myself now on here, I don’t really see anything changing where I’ll suddenly experience any kind of significant audience growth. I might gain a new regular reader every couple months, but I also lose one as well. What I’ve realised, after this most recent long gap without any visitors, is that those few of you who have stuck around this far don’t even want to read a new post of mine every single week, but you probably will check back in eventually. There should be something new, most of the time. In fact it’s already been a week since the mess I uploaded last week, and I doubt I’ll be able to finish this today as I’m working until 22:30 tonight and going in soon.

Another good thing that should result from this is there’ll be no more of these shitty update/ filler posts, like this one. It’s hard to really tell what you few regular long term readers like, but I know that the only “likes” I get from one off visitors are on the posts where I talk about ideas rather than whining about my own life. I mean, I talk about my life and things that happen to me in those posts also sometimes, but it’s a case of me using observations, memories, or dreams as a jumping off point to talk about something more… cerebral I suppose (is that a pretentious thing to say) rather than writing a post about those things themselves. I also prefer those, as even though it is sometimes satisfying to just use this blog as a diary none of the posts I’m really proud of are those kind. There’s this kind of non-story of my life which one might pick up if they were to read through everything I’ve uploaded here, and there’s these one off vignettes which while they also build on one another could be understood without any context.

Well that’s not entirely true, I do write my posts with some kind of prior assumptions about the world settled already. The problem is, I hate talking about something that has been done to death, for the same reason I very rarely watch a film more than once. It’s easy to forget that what a lot of the ideas that I talk about here are built on top of isn’t actually accepted by most normalfags. I’ve spent so many years of my adolescence on 4chan and so on that I forget how different my perspective was before, and how differently I see the world. I’m not the only one who does this, nowadays (and ironically I’m about to state something that is exactly what I hate, an opinion we’ve all heard hundreds of times that is always presented as a new or fresh perspective) it is true that a lot of people, at least online, are stuck in echo chambers. So because of only talking to likeminded people all the time, all the assumptions and nuances of their underlying worldview don’t even come up when they start expressing ideas of their own.

Not that that means anything, even if the whole world is doing things the wrong way it doesn’t mean you should too. I’m not sure that it is “the wrong thing to do” though, in this case. I mean maybe it’s another factor preventing me from gaining more readers, and that’s a shame, but what can I do about it? I’m not making any money or getting anything out of this, other than the very enjoyment of writing and expressing my ideas. If you just want to hear people express ideas you already hold there’s thousands of blogs, and youtube channels and online magazines that will cater to that demand. This ties back into the main point of this post, why I’m going to drop the weekly schedule thing. I’m doing this for fun, I don’t see the point in holding myself to this arbitrary standard that only adds stress to my life when the whole point of the blog is to wind down and/ or vent about things in order to lessen some of the stress I have. So, I’ll be uploading less often but not a great deal less. Other than that, not much else should change.

A humble but durable legacy

The previous two evenings I’ve come home from work with the intention of relaxing by getting to work on a new entry and then after writing for a couple hours I’d read a little and head to bed. Yet both evenings I came home and ended up just scrolling through the catalogue right up until it was time to get some sleep and finding maybe one or two interesting threads the entire time, staying up later than I planned yet achieving less. There’s this image I have in my head of myself sitting by the glowing heater otherwise in a dark room, with a warm cup of chamomile and my laptop in front of me. Crafting a new entry that cleverly weaves several ideas together in a way that is both intelligent and poetic. Yes, I know it’s rather silly. It keeps me going while I’m there though, dealing with the various characters that come through the shop. It’s fair to say I have a romanticised idea of what it is I’m doing here, in a weird way I’m kind of aware of it and see it as being not entirely “truthful” yet at the same time I can’t shake it off entirely either. It’s in my nature, I’ve always done this. It’s more than mere “cope” as well, because I did it back when life was good. When I was a small child, when the world was still mysterious.

It’s hard to give examples of this because it’s more than just how I describe things, although that is of course a huge aspect of it. Even if I were to force myself to use the most mundane language when talking, in my mind there would still be a certain beauty to all the more mediocre things in life. Well, until I actually get around to being personally involved in them that is. Take this other example, my job. I’ve described it as a shop, and that’s close but not entirely accurate. There’s two different locations and the office, I’ve mentioned this before. What I haven’t mentioned is that the smaller shop, the one I’m still sent to most of the time is really more of a box/ kiosk. Here’s a drawing of the layout, to give a better idea. It’s a simple sketch, of course it looks nothing like the actual place without the colour and things all over the walls and in the front, but it gives a good idea of the size and shape.

So, as much of a big deal as I made in that one post about why I was always being placed at the smaller shop I actually much prefer this place. I have a stool to sit on and a small heater, and I can listen to whatever I want to. Lately I’ve been listening to The History Of Rome podcast for a good couple hours at the start of my shift there before it gets busier later in the afternoon and then I’ll just put some music on. I think I mentioned I was restarting that in another post here, well I’ve just got past the point I got to last time which was the end of Marcus Aurelius’ reign and the transition of power to Commodus. I can have free hot drinks from the machine, coffee (which I only drink in the morning) or hot chocolate or a herbal tea. I’ve spent days in there when there were thunderstorms and heavy rain, or pretty dense snowing (not that it ever snows that heavily here), and in the middle of the summer when the sun was beating down, all while reasonably comfortable. I even had a conversation with one of the customers the other day about this. He said he saw me sitting there with a bored expression and that I should be glad boredom is the worst thing I have to worry about while working. He was right, I’m really glad I found this job honestly. The worst it gets, at least at this smaller place, is a period where not much happens and I’m just daydreaming. Amusingly enough also recently I saw a poster on a wall while walking to work advertising some kind of scheme or something and it said “Want to get paid to daydream?”. My immediate thought, given I had had that conversation the same day, was that I already do.

So I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the job, in fact after I’ve had a good few days not working (which happens often because the schedule changes weekly and I only do four days on average, so often I’ll get three or four days off in a row) I look forward to going in and not being stuck at home anymore. At the same time, when I’ve been working for five or more days in a row because I have days at the end of one week and the beginning of the next it does start to become a slog. My point anyway is that for wageslavery, it’s pretty fucking /comfy/. When I write about it it makes it seem even better, and that’s really my point. Because of course when I’m there while I am aware of how fortunate I am I still feel like a wageslave of course. As soon as I leave though, every time despite being there for over a year now, I can’t picture the place without the romantic lens distorting things.

In the podcast I’ve been listening to there’s an episode called A Day In The Life, where Mark Duncan (the narrator/ writer/ guy behind the whole thing) goes through an average day for a citizen of the eternal city itself during the Pax Romana. The height of the empire, the period you probably think of when talking about the glory and prosperity of Rome. Well the picture he paints in some ways resembles my own life. I sit there in what is essentially the modern equivalent of a market stall and receive coins for what I sell. It really hit me when I was counting up the coins at the end of the day, see when we finish we take the coins out of the till and separate them into various plastic pouches to bring back to the main office. I just realised that two thousand years ago, not just in Rome but in cities all over the world there would be plenty of people just like me counting up the coins for the day and putting them into pouches. Pouches of leather rather than clear plastic, of course. Whether I like it or not as well, the city I live in also has a very “international” character. It’s like those posts people will make, with the meme arrows. Ywn be X person at Y point in history living an easy but /comfy/ simple life. Except, I actually kind of am doing that. I’m still a fucking loser, but in this one regard life is pretty good. I suppose, and see this is me doing that thing again, I’m continuing a legacy that goes back millennia. A simple unskilled city worker, it may be an ignoble profession but it’s outlived many more prestigious ways of making a living.

I know this is a shorter post than usual, I just can’t really think where else to take this subject. I think I got across what I really wanted to already, and hey it’s still about as long as a usual post on most of the other similar style blogs I’ve seen around. Not that that means I intend to usually have shorter posts like this, I enjoy the longer ones. Again sticking to the whole idea of this post, I have this nice image in my head of someone spending an evening with my newest entry, getting /comfy/. I know I don’t have many people regularly coming back, but I like the idea that I’m giving someone something to look forward to. Not that any of my posts are quite long enough to take an entire evening, at most maybe the longer ones might take half an hour if you’re really taking your time. It could be a nice part of it though, and if you stop to think yourself and respond in your head (because no one ever actually responds with a comment unfortunately) to what I’m talking about it could last longer. Anyway I’m rambling, which I know is what I do here but it’s not really leading anywhere interesting. I suppose I could quickly talk about one thing, just because I got reminded when typing that out. I’ve been thinking more about the title of the blog, I’ve considered shortening it. Or, I’ve considered that perhaps one day I could. See I am admittedly rather neurotic and I don’t see that changing, and I do ramble a lot which I also don’t see changing, but I do believe that one day it will no longer be fair to refer to myself as “a mess”.

There have been some setbacks, the shrooms I was growing have been contaminated with mould for one (the photo I used for the main image is of what became of them) which is a real shame because I thought they could have given me some interesting insights and also inspiration for this new hobby of mine. I suppose I could try again, but if I do I’ll wait until the spring because the cold weather also caused a lot of problems. It was tricky keeping it both warm and well lit, and I think that also led to the failure. I’m also considering the peyote cactus, which is even easier and less tricky legally to get here. It will take much longer to grow and prepare though. I haven’t been reading as much as I wanted to be, I’m reading the book Travels In Nihilon at the moment. It’s a novel telling the tale of a group of travellers sent into the fictional country of Nihilon in order to write a travel guide and how they get caught up in an insurrection. The country is a kind of hypercapitalist/ libertarian fantasy, but of course unbelievably corrupt and spiritually desolate. It is bordering a heavily militarised and equally shitty socialist state called Cronacia, with whom it is locked in a seemingly unending war. When I finish, perhaps I’ll make a post regarding my thoughts on the book. I’m enjoying it though, it’s a nice easy read to get back into the swing of things with and fits well with the kind of things that have been interesting me lately. Oh, and I’ve been listening to Still by NIN a lot lately. I avoided it when going through the whole band/ project’s discography because I thought it was just another one of their many remix albums with more recycled material. The second half is all new, and pretty good too, though. Plus the redone songs are also quite a different experience this way. I’ve got some good ideas for a couple interesting posts too, so that’s something for us all to look forward to as well.

and a happy New Year

I spent New Year’s Eve alone, for the most part anyway. I did watch a film with my dad earlier in the afternoon/ evening, but he went to sleep several hours before midnight. So when the time came, I was in my room on my own. I had my “friends” on r9k to keep me company, and this isn’t the first time I’ve been alone to witness the year’s end, but it was nevertheless quite sad. Most years I’ve spent the evening with these family friends I think I may have very briefly mentioned in a post from a couple months back. After I went to dinner with them and then my co-workers the night after that. It was a pretty bad entry, but the original plan I had for it would have been quite good I think had I been able to pull it off. Oh well, not everything goes according to plan. Anyway while this is the third time for me (last year I just went to sleep before the clock struck 12 so maybe that doesn’t count), I think it was the most upsetting. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, it’s just another night people will say and they are half right. It wasn’t that bad, I’ve had far more upsetting moments just this year. Of course the most obvious being the whole situation around which my early posts revolved. I didn’t have an emotional break down, but as I was sitting there leaning against the forest green wall in my room listening to John Frusciante’s The Will To Death and waiting for the year to be over I did get a real sense of despair. Weirdly it hit me as I was reflecting on a feeling of hopefulness I’d had all day.

Going back a bit I mentioned how people will say “oh it’s just another day”, etc. Talk about how it doesn’t matter, there’s no significance. I remember speaking to my friend about the idea of having a New Year’s resolution last year (or two years ago I suppose, you know what I mean), and he dismissively just laughed at the idea. Because it is indeed just a day literally speaking, no divine being floated down to tell us otherwise, the decision to start anew here is arbitrary. Nevertheless this is where we start, and this starting point has a long history going back to republican Rome. So while maybe in January 153 BC when an uprising in the provinces led to new consuls being selected earlier than the usual date of March 1st, the day did indeed have no significance, now two thousand years and several calendars later I think it’s earned some.

People are lazy, me especially so, and people like order and ritual, again me especially so. If they need to make a change in their lives, however small, they often look for a significant point to both start on and also to track with. The day they can point to years down the line as the turning point. So, the first day of a new month, or just a new week even. Maybe a special date, their birthday perhaps, or the day following some significant event in their lives. Maybe something bad happened as a result of their bad habits, and the following day they decide to put it behind them once and for all. Or they choose an easily memorable date, and give themselves the time until then to indulge for the last time. So with all this understood, is it any surprise that the start of a new year is so commonly chosen as the time for such a change. So common is it in fact, that the idea of the “New Year’s resolution” is something we all are aware of, especially in the west but in some way all over the world. Something that has it’s own Wikipedia page, for what it’s worth. These people who dismiss the importance of this date are in a way being so cold and rational that they’ve taken an irrational position.

This is the first year that I’ve really seen things this way though, other than as a child I mean, I guess it’d be more accurate to say this is the first year after losing my teenage cynicism. It’s been a gradual process, every year I see my worldview as being different to the year before, but I mean in regard to this particular thing. So because of this I was thinking throughout the day about perhaps taking the opportunity to change some things in my own life. I should read more, maybe then I won’t be flailing around in the dark so much when I talk about complex issues and ideas. Reading used to be something very important to me, but I fell off as so many have. I should actually commit to doing exercise, even if I just do simple bodyweight exercises at home I should have an actual routine and goals rather then the irregular and unplanned sessions every few weeks I’ve been doing the last few years that have not really made me any stronger or well disciplined.

I should continue this blog, and try to have less shitty entries and more that are worth reading. I’ll try to get more regular readers, but other than outright shilling which I don’t feel comfortable with I’m not sure how best to do that. Not that I’m making any money from this, or ever intend to. It’s quite a shame really how unusual I seem to be in this regard, just wanting this as a small hobby. It seems once again I’ve fallen for a romanticised view of what blogging is. See as I never was a part of the “blogosphere”, until I started this I suppose (of course I’ve read blogs before, a certain post that I got a link to or found through a google search, etc.), I had this clearly completely false idea of what it was. Even that term, blogosphere, it’s just a relic of something that didn’t even really exist a decade ago but certainly doesn’t now. This image we have of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people with personal blogs where they share thoughts and ideas, just as a hobby maybe they work on a couple times a week, is not representative of reality. Sure there are probably plenty of those, but the overwhelming majority of “blogs” are just completely soulless attempts at making some extra cash. At least that’s been my experience since starting here, because the last half year or so I have been occasionally checking other blogs. Sometimes through the referrer thing, but also whenever I get a like or someone “following” me I will check their stuff.

In all but a few cases, they’re not even what I’d ever have called a “blog” a year ago. Of course, they are. They fit with the dictionary definition, but they don’t fit the cultural definition. I think it should be fairly clear what I mean by that term, given the context, but if you read my post about school shootings (it’s one of the first I ever wrote) you’ll get a better rundown of this idea of mine. I know that’s a bit cheeky of me, but I really don’t like saying the same thing over and over and I quite like the idea of there being a continuity or evolution in this blog, with my posts building on one another. Anyway as I was saying, this idea I had of the blog as art is a fantasy. I swear I’m not even sure if half of these are written by real people, they could just be using a bot to manufacture a new post every day and then putting an expertly crafted title on top to scrape as many people as possible off of search engines. There are also way more fucking daily recipe blogs than necessary too in my opinion. I don’t want to appear to be shitting on people, the people who make these aren’t really doing anything wrong, if there’s a gap in the market someone’s gonna fill it. What I’m saying is I suppose I have this sense of loss or longing for something that never existed, and you could also say that I’m trying to achieve it myself with this blog. I’m hoping for this blog to almost be an archetypal example of what I always thought blogs were.

I went on a complete tangent though, not that that’s a problem I was hoping for it, but I should try and finish what I started talking about at the beginning eventually. So, I was talking about what I could do to improve or make the blog more appealing to people. Not just anyone of course, I want the people who would appreciate what I’m doing now but might overlook it currently because it’s a little rough around the edges. Some pruning or polishing is fine, but I don’t want to lose the identity that I believe has developed. For example I don’t want to change what I was talking about just now about how the posts build on one another. I like the idea of “being there from the start” being rewarded, and also I think it gives a good reason to go back. There are a few things I could change that might make my stuff more digestible or easy to read, I could change the way I’ll type how I talk in some cases (how I talk when I’m comfortable that is) and then more like I would for an essay at other times. I can see how the inconsistent tone would make it annoying to read, even if people aren’t fully conscious of it specifically it will just “feel off” in a way. At the same time though I don’t want to lose the identity that I’ve developed for the blog, maybe the weird changing tone and style is appropriate because I myself (who this blog is supposed to reflect) often have quite sudden changes in mood and regularly experience feelings of awkwardness or things being not quite right. I don’t want to sound like an annoying pseud, this is just a crappy blog with only a couple of regular viewers at this point (back up from only one at least), I shouldn’t kid myself with this grandiose talk. Oh and of course I could have shorter paragraphs, I know these giant blocks of text are offputting and I am in fact already working on it a little in this post. It’s a weird idiosyncrasy of mine.

So this kind of stuff is what was going through my head, resolutions and new plans, things I should stop doing and things I should start. Then this scene in the film I was watching earlier in the evening came on, it was The Return Of The King and the scene in Mordor where Sam sees a star shining through the clouds. Light and beauty, hope, shining through in even the most desolate and evil places of the world. Tolkien’s world and stories are very dear to me, and perhaps I could write about that more in future, but I will say I think the LoTR films don’t deserve the shit they get from “purists”. Of course they’re not perfect, but I think one should view them as a love letter to the original book. There’s no major motion picture with a budget like that and a big studio backing it with anywhere close to the same passion and care put in to the project I can think of. I also think that the philosophy and depth of the original story isn’t lost like some people say, and even if it’s not expressed as beautifully or as well the films led to millions going on to read the books anyway who wouldn’t have otherwise. Getting to see the beauty of middle earth and experience the most touching moments of the story every year is something I’m glad for. I do plan to re-read the Lord of The Rings and some more Tolkien in future, but I wouldn’t want to every year.

So, that scene, I’ve always appreciated it but this year it really stuck out to me. Of course, I suppose because as I’ve explained I was feeling rather hopeful that day. Maybe hope is the wrong word, too strong, but I was feeling positive about the future. I often get carried away on a specific feeling, probably because there’s so little of anything good or bad in my life. I will seize upon any kind of change or potential change unthinkingly, and get wrapped up in a romantic daydream. So when in the cold light of day I realise this, it is always very unpleasant. Not only is there this disappointment or longing for something that never was (seeing a pattern) but I’m also ashamed to have fallen for it yet again. So after the film finishes I’m thinking about that scene, and I realise that while that star may be shining far above the clouds, down here I am still in the land of shadow.