Wednesday 28 December 2016

Cancel My Subscription to the Resurrection... maybe?

Carrie Fisher is dead.

For the last twenty-six hours, or thereabouts, I have been repeating this to myself every so often just in case I forget (I won't) and to make it more real.

Other folks have written eloquently about Carrie - nobody moreso than herself - so I'm not going to even try and have a crack.

I've spent a lot of today mucking around on the internet and taking some joy in the never-ending - if occasionally horrifying - creativity of fans. Lots of memes. I mean, LOTS OF THEM.

Spoiler Warning: There are references to features of Rogue One behind the jump.

Sunday 25 December 2016

Black Dogs and Universe Glue

I wrote this post's title a while ago, as I started to try and write a post for the first time in godonlyknowsevenhowlong.

Then, I stopped. I left it lurking while I did other things - anything else, I suppose - and now i know why.

This title was waiting for today. It is entirely relevant.

It is Christmas Day for another ten minutes - might be 26/12/2016 by the time I finish - and I want to scream and shout. I want to go at this room like I'm Kylo Ren with his lightsaber.

Last night, I went with my parental units to their church, a perfectly ordinary Roman Catholic parish church in North London. Carols followed by Midnight Mass.

Church once a year, I can deal with, especially as this is not the parish of my childhood and has no particularly unpleasant associations beyond the general, overall issues I have with Holy Father Church.

There's a great line in Dogma by Serendipity about Catholics: You don't celebrate your faith, you mourn it. That seemed about right yesterday, during the carols-as-dirges and mass that dragged in a succession of stand up-sit down-keneel-stand up again-recite some words like rote.

I'll be the first to admit that the problem is almost certainly me, not the singers and the organist, who at least made an effort. The priest seemed engaged and pleasant (I've definitely encountered worse)... but it all left me feeling sad, and then hollow.

Today, with my parents, who are generally lovely if... eccentric... and my sister L and my dearest, loveliest niece.......... even then the proceedings had a shadow hanging over them, not assisted by the Golden Child's insistence on being a two and a half year old and consequently lobbing tantrums at regular intervals. Her poor, overstimulated, excited little brain that wouldn't her nap, that wouldn't be at peace even when Gene Kelly was on TV.

Turns out, Gene Kelly doesn't hold much sway over small children.

And that was the Black Dog, snuffling at my heels. Like usual. Like almost always. Like he thinks he belongs, like he's entitled. the Morecambe & Wise 1976 Christmas Special was a hilarious band aid for a while, but a Band Aid nonetheless.

This is my life. Even when I'm happy, I don't get to be all-the-way-happy, because that fucking dog is at my heel. So far, I've been able to push it away for short periods of times, even lock in a dungeon for awhile, but this is my reality, I guess.

I once thought to myself that if I could, I'd absorb everyone's pain. No sense in us all feeling this way, after all.

*

It's been a year that I'm fairly sure will have its own special module on History courses in decades and centuries to come. I don't want to be right, but moments in actual history have acquired new resonance lately: Archie Duke, who shot his ostrich; blackshirts and rise of popular fascism in the 1930s; the horrific treatment of black Americans that led to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s... I could go on, but it's too fucking awful.

not just on the worldwide or national scale, but the amount of utter awful that has befallen the people I love and friends and those folks who share even a little of their worlds with me... My pain has been inward-facing, of my own making. Theirs? Less so.

There is so much pain in the world. Ever t'was thus, I hear some of you say. Perhaps, but it's 2016 so why are we content with accepting this form of status quo? Why is this considered OK just because 'it's always been'?

Smallpox was traditional, once. High infant mortality rates were traditional, once. Gaslamps and bows-and-arrows were traditional, once... we made them obsolete (T&Cs may apply) so why don't we make other traditional hates and pains outdated too?

We live in a selfish time, and it's by design. If we're all busy looking out for ourselves, looking to acquire what we can for ourselves, then we're not helping each other and we're not making the world a better place by holding those in power to account.

Which is why it's by design. Carthago delenda est is now common policy, it seems. Trade unions have not helped themselves over the years (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Scargill) but the discrediting of them has worked enormously well for businesses and not at all for workers.

Most of us are workers, by the way. The lie that we can be part of the elite if we just do as they say and vote as they tell us to is one of the marketing greats of the last half century.

I wasn't even going to talk about that, but you can't talk about common pain without it, I guess. And i haven't even touched on Aleppo or the many varied concerns of the people around the world who go largely ignored by us because they don't look or sound or seem like us. Even though they are also human beings with a baseline of human dignity and respect. Even here, I'm using 'Aleppo' as lazy shorthand for 'brutal human suffering' rather than considering the real humans affected, because I'm part of the problem too.

*


Are we all so fatigued that we don't care, in our selfishness, about things now? A truck got driven into a market in Berlin. Where were the 'Ich Bin Berlin' Facebook filters (Ich bin ein Berliner has been done, of course). Did we rend our digital garments then? No.

Bowie died at the start of the year. Since then, it feels like the Grim Reaper must've had a stretch target to meet. Variations on the theme of 'Turns out Bowie was the glue holding the Universe together' have littered the internet over the year.

I've started to really dread the noise of the BBC News Alert on my phone.

I'm a pop culture person, these things matter to me. I don't expect them to matter to anyone else and I don't ask you to care, but don't expect me not to simply because I didn't know someone. I don't suggest my sadness comes even close to that of the peope who loved and knew *Insert Name Here, Let's  Be Bitterly Honest'... but allow me - and other fans - to experience our own feelings in our own way.

As I was beginning to contemplate going to bed this evening, with the black dog nipping at my heels after a day which has been both lovely and taxing, and after seeing pictures of other people experiencing much more straightforward joy (as far as I can tell)... my phone pinged.

George Michael, a fixture in the pop culture around me for my whole life, died. Another one. Another one.

A friend of mine, who is awesome, thoughtful and compassionate, wrote that the 'Fuck you 2016' stuff was getting too much. That we should not turn real people into memes and joke about the year that sucked. She's right of course. I deal with this sort of thing with dark humour (see, yanno, above) but there's also a strain of prurient gossipy nonsense that comes along with it. We almost wallow in it, wishing to be the first to break the news to our group (no, we all get the same alerts...) and wishing to be seen to be the biggest fan by being the saddest. Who can rend their garments quickest? Who can be the first with a bad taste joke about the deceased?

That last point is moot: nobody can do better (worse) than Twitter after Michael Jackson died.

We have our right to our feelings and our grief, but there's responsibility there as well.

*

I remember leaving 2015 behind thinking that 2016 would 'be my year' and while in some very important ways I've made some important progress... I'm still here, Black Dog fur running through my fingers, still not living my vocation...

But I'm writing this blog post, and that's a sort of achievement. There have been moments of great joy this year, for me, for the people I love... but they seem to be so utterly outweighed by awful things.

What could possily counteract the bile and Newspeak of the various elections and referenda this year that have kicked Western Civilisation into the long grass?

This is not a competition and it's definitely not a joke. I would say "gotta laugh else you'd cry' but if 2016 has proved anything: it's that you can do both at the same time.

CW 25/12/2016

Wednesday 21 December 2016

The Storyteller - From the Vault 2008

Another piece from the Old Blog of Long Ago... although 2008 is not all that long ago, surely?

 As ever, I've made a few tweaks here and there but nothing particularly substantial except an Ernie Wise-ism in the opening line that I couldn't resist.

Thursday 8 December 2016

The Great What If - From the Vault 2006


This is an odd little alternate history scribble found during my latest chunk of dragging through Ye Olde Blog for anything worth keeping. It's a bit daft and a lot of wishful thinking but amusing, I think.

It's also an interesting little precursor to the fictional magazine pieces I wrote for Walking in the Shadowlands - practice, perhaps?

The universe is odd: I am posting this now almost a decade since it was posted, and on Jim's 73rd birthday and Lennon's anniversary - this was not by design. Not mine, anyway.




Wednesday 7 December 2016

The Valentino Test - From the Vault 2007

This is from mid-2007. I had discovered the deathless wonder that was Rudolph Valentino earlier that year when Blockbuster Online (cue 'remember them' gag) sent The Sheik on DVD.

I had know of Valentino forever of course, but had not understood the fuss until seeing him on film. I was entranced, enchanted and bowled over. He was a beautiful distraction during unquestionably horrendo times.

This is all still true, nearly 10 years later. I'm nothing if not consistent.