A Shinning Moon

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To carry on the misery, the deeply held pain myself and many others are feeling about this election gone bad, like milk but not the good stuff you can turn into something tasty if you know how, the bad stuff good for nothing, the stench so bad it goes straight in the bin, lumps floating on its surface like the boils of decay on putrid skin, the skin that covers up corruption and wanton self-serving betrayal. But I won’t, how about something more positive to mask the disappointment of hope smashed on the rocks of despair. What do we do when we want to forget pain, we stuff it deep within the folds of our soul, or we drink, we drink in search of the perpetual warmth of alcoholism or at the very least a nice whisky to take the edge off it.

If my phone hadn’t run out of battery and I hadn’t lost my charger now would be a great time to add a photo. In fact if you are reading this and there is a photo attached it means I went back to it and added one subsequently. To add photographic evidence of my successful attempt at creating the elixir of forgetfulness, the murky liquid gold, the self made man to the Etonian heir, the home-brew to the hipster microbrewery. You guessed it? Well understandable if not, but today I took my first step on a (continued) journey of suppression and made myself thirty-five pints of beer. This may be the start of something life changing, especially if my mate gets his way and we start producing enough to sell, but for now its just a combination of curiosity and pleasure. It is unclear whether it’ll be a success and I’m not necessarily excited as I’ve managed to convince myself that somehow I’ll mess it up, I just can’t quite believe its going to work somehow. All the same I’m pretty pleased with myself.

In about six days it should be suitably fermented to bottle and in a further two weeks after that it should be perfect to drink. Therefore in roughly twenty days from now I’ll be able to start on the road to suppressing my emotions and living in a world of denial and ruby ale drunkenness. In between then though we have three weeks together of me either twiddling my thumbs or feeling sorry myself. I could just get over it of course and get on with life but then where’s the wallowing, where’s the self-pity, what would be the point of making all that lovely beer.

Gobble, Gobble, Gobble

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And just like that the turkeys voted for Christmas. Or how about the Turkish proverb “The forest was shrinking, but the the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that as his handle was made of wood he was one of them”. The Conservatives won with a majority of forty seats, it was a landslide and Labour were arguably crushed. Previously safe working class Labour seats which had voted Labour for seventy, eighty, ninety years voted Tory. For some reason the residents of Grimsby think that the ruling elite somehow represent and will look after them. It’s a shit show.

I’m also angry. I’ll try not to be bitter or a bad loser but there is no surprise when seemingly the entire media has spent the last four years attacking Corbyn. Crowing, barely able to contain their excitement throughout the election show. Despite spending the last forty years fighting racism they have somehow successfully painted him as an anti-semite racist. He stood up for the Palestinians and was anti-Israeli. That is not anti-semitism. He fought the billionaires with the intention of them actually paying tax and slowing the cash grab that has been going on these last ten years. Unsurprisingly they have been terrified he may actually get in. His social policies described repeatedly as extreme left wing marxism when in fact all they would have done is put us on par with Germany and France. This was him standing on the first real working peoples manifesto for the last forty years and the working class rejected him. It feels like he was the last great hope for change, that’s what hurts so much. It will now get worse.

It turned out people couldn’t look past Brexit. The Tories managed successfully to make it the Brexit election while the rest tried to have some actual policies other than ‘get Brexit done’. 88% of their ads were found to be misleading, Labour – 0%. The Leave and Remain traditional Tory voters continued to vote Tory but the Leave Labour voters switched their allegiances and voted Tory. That was it really. And of course those who switched feel disenfranchised, they’ve been left behind, they have nothing but leaving the EU won’t magically fix what in reality is the result of forty years of neoliberal policies and neglect within Britain by British governments. It’s always the same, we think that by just buying that new car, getting that new job, winning that referendum, we will somehow wake up the following day and everything will be great, our lives will no longer suck but that’s just not how it works. All that’s going to happen is we wake up the next day to find someone ramming stuffing up our arse and placing strips of bacon across our back. We did vote for it after all.

Election 2019

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Today is the big day then as we decide upon the fate of the world. Hyperbole aside with today being voting day in what has become a highly polarised country there is a sense of enormity in the air. Of course walking down the street in my little town it is just another day but it may be worth it just for twenty four hours to shut out the voices whispering the fearful possibility that nobody actually cares and it’s all in the little microcosm bubble of my facebook feed.

The problem is I’m still undecided who I’m going to vote for bizarrely enough. To vote with my heart and support Labour or with my head and vote for the centrist Scottish National Party who are most likely the only ones capable of defeating the current Conservative incumbent in my constituency. However while Scottish nationalism may be a friendly cuddly version of nationalism, it is still nationalism and that is something I try to steer clear of. Labour say all the things I want to hear at least but in my countryside area they don’t stand much of a chance. The Liberal Democrats who are also centrists, but slightly more to right than the SNP, are the more traditional rivals to the Conservatives but fell to the wayside after their disastrous coalition with the Conservatives at the beginning of the decade. A coalition that was disastrous for the Lib Dems and a raving success for the other side tells you all you need to know about supporters of each. Their votes either went Conservative or more commonly to the SNP however it will be interesting to see how the share is now. Certainly that SNP vote has dropped in the Borders, where I’m still registered, as few want independence and so I suspect tactical voting which recommends SNP may actually be inaccurate in the end. In that case can we expect the traditional Lib Dems to make a revival here? I just don’t know as they’ve failed so miserably in the campaign nationally and seem to appeal to nobody.

It pains me to say it but I doubt there is much other that a Tory victory here, nationally though I think predictions are folly. Despite the news channels pretence of balance they seem to be pushing an agenda, but then both sides say that. In any case why not vote for who I really want, my vote will probably be a waste anyway. Either way this election goes, the best part of it is that it has politicised a whole new generation of voters. They complained the young don’t care about anything, the media pushed the same debasing narrative while ignoring the queue’s and printing pictures of pets at empty poll booths. The world is changing, communication is changing and maybe one day narratives and those fighting instinctive change will also change too. What a ride it promises to be.

Abre Los Ojos

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My existence at present is a difficult one. Well actually in many ways it is both easy and enjoyable but it lacks things which I am used to from past moments. I am currently working as a renovator, painter, handyman and all round dogsbody for a mate and the work is straightforward, as is my ability to be flexible in regards my working hours much to his constant frustrations. I have been at it now for the best part of two months and I won’t deny there is something very comfortable and enjoyable about this version of existence. The other day when returning from Cockermouth I even felt a senses of warmth and happiness as I got back to my place. This is not necessarily a new experience but is unique in that I can’t really think of a time I have ever lived alone properly in a flat for any extended period of time and then to have that feeling on top of it was very interesting to observe. I have agreed to stay for another three months until the end of February, but who know it may even end up being the end of March.

The issue then is my lack to appreciation for what this opportunity gives me. I may have just changed my mind while writing that one sentence. Ideally I would be continuing to read and learn things but I am forever too tired in the evenings. I can’t say I’m not being creative because I have so far managed to maintain this blog but certainly the fact that I have still not finished the first book I started when I arrived is frustrating. The reason I perhaps changed my mind though is that I just realised this life offers so many other things I’m overlooking. I’m gaining a great deal of knowledge on the more practical side of work and life. I could always do things but I’ve discovered painfully that I never really understood the theory behind why or what I was doing. Now I know a hell of a lot more than before. I also get the opportunity to have a stepping stone into living a normal existence instead of just being thrown into it straight from traveling. It is funny though, I’m thirty four years old and I can travel the world and deal with anything that comes up while doing so, but I need to take little baby steps when doing what millions of people do on a daily basis.

What a lucky boy I am. There is clearly so much to gain from this current situation. We miss so much around us when we become fixed and obsessed with something that we desire, we often miss what is right in from of our eyes.

The Dark Side

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It is amazing the fear we have about writing or expressing things that may be disagreeable. I have been trying now to write up an idea I had today which if I stood by it as a belief could be construed as patronising, elitist and morally skewing in the direction of disagreeable. Ultimately it is half baked and I suspect I don’t necessarily agree with it, however I found myself unable to write it up on here. What I must work out then is why, because if it is simply down to a fear of being scorned and rejected by my peers well that says either more about the failings of my peers, the change in direction of my moral compass or about how I deal with the reality of rejection. While I don’t necessarily think my moral compass is changing I do believe it is evolving, it still retains the foundations I have learnt, but I hope I can say it is growing up and becoming more refined. Like a pendulum though we can go too far as we discover the limits to certain ideas or ways of existing. Perhaps that’s what this is. The other rationale for why I am unwilling to write up a half baked idea that may be disagreeable is that I just don’t agree with it and am unwilling to write up something which I disagree with. However seeing as it is half baked, perhaps one way to bake it is to help my own understanding by writing it up.

Full disclaimer I do not necessarily believe this. But I admit, I did think it. I am human. I just seem to be breaking some unspoken rule about expressing things which we know should not be expressed.

The populace are like children. Some have the ability of a toddler to think constructively, some like a twelve year old who can think for themselves but doesn’t fully understand although is learning to push the boundaries to see what they can get away with and some like teenagers who can think for themselves and are fighting for their place in society but are stuck in that grey realm between childhood and adulthood while being neither, behaving like both and invariable never being treated how they want to and should be. Some people have access to great education while some no education. Neither makes you think but having no education does not help in your ability to form a fully thought out well constructed argument about who you should vote for. The reality is some people don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about yet they have the same voting rights as say a university politics professor. That is democracy and that is one of the beauties of it, if it were not like that then we would have some elitist technocracy which would probably never fully understand the people that it is telling how to live. It also means democracy is not perfect. Democracy is flawed, fundamentally I don’t know, but it is flawed. This does of course mean that I believe my opinion and vote is more important than the idiot reading the tabloid newspaper, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable because I’m not sure I do believe that, although maybe I do and just don’t want to admit it.

I have totally gone off on one. That was supposed to just be able the populace being a varying age of childhood. Perhaps that is just part of it and this then would most likely be a good moment to realise trying to cook half baked ideas on here is not the best idea. I suspect I will come back to this, as well as whether I believe myself to be more worthy than other people.

I am so confused and I feel so dirty. Am I in fact the ignorant one? Or am I finally just trying to see and understand aspects I may not always have been quite so keen to believe exist within me.

An Assassinated Character

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One of the scourges of decent political debate in modern times is the cult of the personality. It goes without saying that this has always been a part of politics, players of the game have been getting embroiled in character assassinations probably since the days of feudalism. It seems however, or at least I’ve heard it said by many people and possibly partially been influenced by this myself, that this form of political delegitimising has been on the rise in recent years. This came to mind today when listening to a podcast of a talk with Brian Eno and Yiannis Varoufakis. While I’ve never heard of Brian Eno before, who incidentally has the best full name I’ve heard this week – Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno – Yiannis Varoufakis is for me certainly much more well known. He took on the EU while in his position as Greek Finance Minister, is a fervent critic of the EU although he believes in remaining in so as to tackle it from the inside and is easily and perhaps crudely described as a left wing rockstar economist. I don’t know everything he has to say but there are arguments he makes that appeal to me. My issue then is that people don’t like him not always for his politics but his character.

It is too easy to go into simply disliking someone. There have been many times I have heard people talking about an idea but found myself rejecting them because either I found them annoying or for some unconscious conditioned reaction to how they dress or their accent. It is ignorant and will make a good piece in itself at a later date, but that is for then. Varoufakis when in his position as minister took all his money out of Greece and put it in foreign bank accounts. I don’t think it was him, but the government, and I think it was after he quit his position, introduced laws to stop Greek people doing this. Some preempted this to varying levels of success but I remember chatting with a Greek at the time who disliked Varoufakis because he believed he had told people not to remove their money to safeguard what was left of the Greek economy but removed his own as he knew it was pretty much doomed anyway. Research would be required to confirm the validity of this.

The question though is whether you are capable of putting aside the supposed unpleasant act and therefore issue with his character and still listen to his ideas for what they are, or dismiss his ideas because either you can’t trust him or simply believe him to be sneakily self-preserving and hypocritical. This relates in a huge way to the current election. Boris Johnson is a lying racist scoundrel who cannot be trusted and Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semitic marxist who wants to drag us back to the Stone Age. The point is not whether either are true or not but that people seem willing to still vote for them for their policies while others refuse to vote for them because of their perceived characters. That is of course oversimplifying an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation but fundamentally this is how the parties and media seem to be trying to play it.

It is really challenging to actually listen to someones words and put everything else aside despite your unconscious biases, especially to believe in what they say after they have proved themselves untrustworthy. An extreme would be Hitler and vegetarians but that isn’t worth going into. Both arguments can be rationalised with varying degrees of success, so must we look to the emotional side of the debate? Or it perhaps comes down to your belief in realpolitik. Whatever it is it seems an enormous challenge to actually see the words for what they really are. Certainly though if we all found a way to learn how to we may just manage to drag politics from the gutter it seems to have found itself in, and who knows in the process ourselves too.

Amor Fati

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Having just watched a six minute School of Life video on youtube about Nietzsche and his concept of Amor Fati I find myself slightly confused. Much of what I hear of Nietzsche confuses me, much of what I read of him I agree with but usually forget, and some of which I disagree with but suspect may actually be correct, just a little harsh for my sensitivities to accept. He seemed to be complicated and misunderstood, and I’m sure I remember him saying something along the lines of inferior minds will misunderstand him and terrible things will be done in his name. Certainly my mind is inferior to his or may I say different. I doubt I’ll be such a groundbreaking philosopher as he was, the man was arguably the best, or most significant. And how to define inferior, for at least I can talk to women. Yeah fuck you Nietzsche with your superior mind and your constant rejections. It’s the small victories which keep our egos believing. I remember working as an extra on Game of Thrones and seeing the actor who played the handsome hero John Snow wearing platform shoes and having to stand on a box to make him appear slightly taller, my tall man ego won that skirmish. Unfortunately I may have been the only one playing.

Amor Fati means a love of ones fate and it has distasteful fatalist overtones, which I don’t necessarily feel comfortable believing or accepting. We may debatably live in a mildly predetermined world but the future only exists as much as the present allows. The premise of Amor Fati is that you love what has already passed or that you at least accept it. A refusal to regret what has gone before and not look back, this he believes to be a virtue. Perhaps this is him refusing to accept the hardships of his life, the rejections, the mental illnesses, and on a hypothetical note had his life been wonderful and jolly these ideas may never have come to him. In that case, for creating the environment to have these ideas, all that went before him had to happen. What is not to love about that. Believing in determinism or fatalism is not a requisite of acceptance. While we are all guilty of looking back longingly or regretfully, how we deal with adversity is what is of most importance. There is always something to learn from every moment if we so choose, the good or the bad, and how lucky we are to have adversity in our lives to give us that opportunity for development. If that is to love ones fate then amor fati me.

Born Again

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When people get into their thirties, like I am well into now, they discover new things and sometimes become mad and obsessed with them. In their twenties it doesn’t happen so much but thirties for sure I’ve seen people go crazy. The born again christians of whatever new hobby or life direction they take to fulfil that empty hole in their life. My lack of the focus and attention span required may just protect me from this. I’m currently reading a book on beekeeping and they’re incredible animals, from the nanny bees keeping the larvae at the perfect temperature, and I mean to one degree celsius, to the queen laying two thousand eggs a day to the language they use communicating about good sources of pollen like little stoners. They’re incredible and I want my own apiary, healthy nutritious raw honey, tasty alcoholic mead and the connection and bond with an actual hive of tens of thousand of bees. Will I become obsessed, well maybe we’ll see. It may just fall at the wayside like my plan to learn how to write code – I downloaded an app about a month ago – and making beer – I bought a brewing set about two months ago.

The problem with desiring doing too much is that we put so much effort into the excitement of the planning and dreaming that the actual doing becomes boring. The effort and hard work required to complete these fantasies doesn’t compare to how we have been imagining it in our excitable dreams. In the end we do nothing. Part of this then involves discipline and this seems to be the thing that has been lacking for me. Of course it suited me in my twenties having no discipline, who needs it when you’re just traveling around and having fun. This continued into my thirties but at thirty-four I think I may have to become a born again disciplinarian, or at least born again about the idea of it. If I ever have kids, poor little fuckers. This writing experiment is just that, an experiment but it is also an attempt at learning discipline and creating the habit required to not even notice the effort required to be disciplined. I have the physical discipline to write daily it appears, or at least do at the moment while my life is in one place and stable, but not always the discipline to write well or with effort. That will come, as much because it’ll be boring for myself to just dribble out inane nonsense. But what I am curious to see is whether this discipline can spread out and infect other parts of my life. The discipline to do yoga every morning, to do a little exercise, to eat well – these three things are starting to become necessary more each day as I start to feel the aches and pains of age. Maybe I’ll even make my beer and god forbid sit down long enough without procrastinating to find time to write an app.

Time is the master. While it may be infinite our moment within it certain isn’t. What has happened now in the past is done, it is over. It may have been great and full of experience but if we do not look forward we just become those grumpy old lonely travellers lost in their missed opportunities and repetitive stories. Today I drive to Cockermouth, the day after I probably come back, and the day after that, well thats anyones guess but I suspect it may be a good one.

A Three Point Piece

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I suspect I’m going to attempt to talk about too many things in this piece, three to be precise, but I’ll try anyway. I should probably stop wasting words telling you this though. To start with I feel it necessary to be critical of yesterdays piece. My issue is that there seems to be a certain immaturity to how I write about politics, and most likely when I talk about it too. This is evidenced I feel by an excessive amount of rhetoric and the danger with this is that not only is it, in my eyes at least, a sign of immaturity but is also a sign of a bad argument, a lack of understand an argument suitably in depth and also perhaps a sign of being a bit of an idiot. I hope I’m not an idiot but I know theres a good chance I would accuse others of such things were they to write in such a manner. Ultimately I’m not happy with it. I could have written it better, made better points and made them in a more evolved way. The problem with not publishing these yet is that I am unable to get your (constructive) feedback, but if anyone ever reads back on these I would love to know what you have to think.

The second thing and third actually were inspired by my avoiding writing this and procrastinating on facebook. Greece is burning again and having lived there for three years, give or take, on and off, I feel a connection to it and a sadness at the continuing trauma that is the Greek tragedy. I may have lived in Exarchia, the anarchist run neighbourhood in the centre of Athens, but it truth I never really integrated and always lived fairly anonymously within it. The new right-wing government has seemingly followed through on it’s threats and has spent the last six months closing down squats. Tonight is the eleventh anniversary of the murder of a 15 year old boy by a police officer, who was coincidentally let out of prison a couple of months back, so expect the streets to be a war zone once more. I love Greece but it’s run by dangerous morons, who are elected by scared morons. Nations seem to repeat events and behaviours throughout their history, Greeks have spent the last hundred years killing and suppressing each other. I said Greek tragedy, but perhaps it’s more of a black comedy. Just not for any of those involved.

And finally, a meme I quite like and thought worth mentioning. Quote ‘The deer isn’t crossing the road, the road is crossing the forest’. It is all about perspective and until we change our perspectives on how we view each other, the world around us and the natural world we are a part of we are going to continue missing the point. Missing the point of our own existence and dragging down the remnants of the harmony that we not only stopped seeing but refuse to see and seemingly have lost the ability to even comprehend anymore or ever again.

That is all.

Change

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This time next week I’ll most likely be standing in a polling booth. We have our general election next Thursday and it is not too unacceptable to be liberal with the superlatives when describing how massive it is and how it has the potential to shape the future in so many different ways. It is probably also an opportune moment to mention I’ll be putting my theoretical belief in anarchism aside, theoretical because I don’t do enough in life to allow it to become practical, and participate in what is probably a momentary denial of the pointlessness of this whole charade.

This election is massive because we are are standing at a t-junction. Neo-liberalism has done it’s proponents well these last forty years as big business and the wealthy have cemented their authority and wealth but theres not much left to ring out of everyone else who has been left behind. We are faced with the choice between turning right at the junction and electing the Conservatives who wish remove us from the European Union, an organisation I’m not necessarily fond of as it represents the tyranny of centrism, but moves us closer to being a tax haven bent over a table with an American dick up our arse. Turning left and following Labour as together we take a step back to a time before a neoliberal agenda sold everything but which probably should be left in the annuls of a grey and failing 1970s. It does however represent an inclusive compassionate agenda which does actually seem to give a shit about the people of the country and not just as tools to retain power and maybe I am being unfair with the 1970s comment as I agree with many of the policies but perhaps it’s time to look forward, readdress our relationship to capital and left wing notions of full employment and actually revolutionise how we live our lives and exist of a daily basis. We need something radical now more than ever. Something is very wrong, we can all see and feel it and it’s one of the reasons people are going and doing extremes like voting for populists and Brexit. People are rightly pissed off and it’s just unfortunate they don’t realise all they’re doing is voting for the wolf that has already bitten off their legs while convincing them it must have been that racist anti-racist sheep who couldn’t possibly be trusted with his own wool and refuses to give up the self-determining shears as he eyes up your starved withering free arm. The choice of continuing the nightmare that has happened or the fear of one that may happen.

That is why this is such a massive election. Much can and will change because centrism doesn’t work, it just makes everything pretty and people have had enough. However, is that enough and are people really ready and willing for the change in themselves that will be required for anything worthwhile to genuinely actualise. It is unfortunate that people have seemingly lost their sense of direction at this most crucial of moments. It is also debatable whether they ever had it in the first place.