Disguised as a non-demented

Missing life much?

Watching endless YouTube clips on strange and unusual animals, Trump's America, the Epstein list, atheism vs theism, rugby league, Cab Calloway, Lindy Hopping, convergent evolution and some gaming channels.

I then look at the paper. The culture section looks interesting. I wonder what it would be like to go to the theatre. When was the last time I went to an art gallery?

I wish I could just pop out of this fug and rejoin society again.

Then I think, what the hell would I do? And I realise that with my inert executive functions I ultimately have no desire to do much of anything and would be of little use to anyone.

I felt normal

While walking Tomos in The Bishop's Fields I met a woman walking her dog, but she wasn't from round here and her dog was nervous in a new place. I assured her it was safe and it was fine to take the lead off.

So we made conversation and walked round the fields, letting the dogs play and meeting other dogs on the way. 

I went to Niche and acted normal.

No one suspected a thing!

No one suspects a thing.

Then I came home and  for the first time in ages and felt sad. 

Here I am, stuck here, unable to work, no will to do anything, missing the humans and the dogs (my god, I dream about the dogs!) and trying to keep my faculties as sharp as they can be.

For 95% of the time I barely feel any up or down emotions these days. 

That’s the Sertraline. 

If I’m stressed I come out in hives. 

Other than that, I’m so relaxed I’m almost supine.

Looking up

I look at the clouds and their shapes. Today cumulonimbus; yesterday, angels.

The modern system for classifying and naming clouds is largely based on the work of Luke Howard, a London pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, who proposed a system in 1802. 

I guess they were just ‘clouds’ up until this point.

It’s also round about this time that the apostrophe was introduced into English punctuation. 

Must have been the fashion to complicate stuff.

Anyway...

I look at the roof tops, the chimney stacks, the slates, the windows and their surrounds, the colours, the pointing, the brickwork or stonework or render. I look at the plants, the flowers, the trees, the people, the birds, the dogs, the shop windows, the floor; everything

I sniff the air (even through my rubbish sinuses) and try to concentrate on the scents of flowers to the smell of wet tarmac. 

I listen to everything - near and far - and try to decode it, picking out the distant hum of the jet planes and the cars, to the thudding and screeching of building work.

I look at the light and shadows on the land. I look up again at the sky to see if we are due shade or sunlight with any passing clouds.

I look at Tomos, and in my mind ask him to forgive me if I've been distracted. After all, I'm there to enjoy the moment with him, like he does every for every second of his life.

Inside 18th and 14th century brains

A couple of posts ago I mentioned Kubrick’s 1975 film, Barry Lyndon.

The critics at the time bemoaned its coldness  - or in 21st century parlance its lack of 'relatability'.

James Marriott wrote about the movie recently having - of course - researched this period very thoroughly. 

The 18th century was on the verge of the ages of industrialisation and enlightenment. 

It is an age of colossal wage disparity (rarely mentioned in those tedious costume dramas) where the majority of the population were agricultural labourers who starved for much of the time, and where the landed classes had astonishingly complex and unspoken rules of etiquette, where the distance you stood from each other, your bow, and in what order was a minefield. 

Laughter was considered impolite; an affected titter was all that was acceptable.

The elite viewed the those beneath them as sub-human, rather like the ultra-rich do today.

Life was cheap and random acts of cruelty were the order of the day. 

Putting cats on bonfires and hearing them scream was a popular past time, considered the height of hilarity.

Again, there has been a recent upsurge in the torture of cats, which is another strange correlation with the 18th century.

The coldness of the people in the film is a result of Kubrick’s exhaustive research. It was a period between the feudal and the industrial, and evidently very alien.

I’ve always loved a series called Inside the Medieval Mind which was originally on the Open University. 

One thing that stuck in my mind the Mapa Mundi - one of the oldest maps of the then known world. It it square, and has at its centre Jerusalem - the Holy Land being the centre of the world. On the perphery of the map are the dog-headed men.

Whether they existed was not the question - it was a given. 

The question of the day was do they have the soul of a dog or the soul of a man? 

If they have the souls of men, then they could be converted to Christianity and missionaries would be sent out to do so.

If they have the soul of a dog they can’t.

Their world was totally supernatural.

I sometimes imagine having the ability to go back in time. Even if we could speak as they did, how would we have navigated the unspoken societal rules?

I’d have been burned at the stake within hours of touch-down. 

That's enough Blues-Rock for one lifetime

At Wells Beer Festival on Friday. God it was loud, heavy meal pumping out from the speakers. 

I asked Jan as soon as I got there “Is this din going on all night?” 

Smiling, he said, “Yes.”

So I had my headphones on, and then the band started. ‘Fire’ by Jimi Hendrix, some Led-Zeppelin, some Cream, etc etc.

I loved this type of music from an early age, but I’ve really had enough of it.

60 years of this type of music being played by what seems like the majority of pub bands. 

I’m sick of second rate Zeppelin or Cream impersonators.

I hear other genres of music are available.

Great TV can also be trash

When I was in the 6th form at school, out of the 4 channels, Channel 4 could be relied on to provide interesting alternatives to the other 3.

One of the programmes they aired was The Gong Show, a late 70s US  - and it could only be the US that produced this particular programme - talent show which is still one of the craziest I’ve ever seen.

It features some of the most bizarre acts, with a live band (as they all did back in the day), a panel who physically beat a gong if the acts sucks, regulars such as The Unknown Comic and Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. 

The whole show was just a giant anarchic party. 

Such a tonic. 

When I watch it I have a fixed grin from start to finish. 

Howard's Way

Simon Park who composed and played this theme for the appalling 80s serial also did the Eastenders theme.

A great talent for viral irritation.

Here are the lyrics which must have been in Simon's head as he composed the shite.

Howard's way.

It's always Howard's way.

He always gets his way.

Bloody Howard's way....etc

When was our zenith?

When did we peak?

I'm talking about human excellence. In the sciences, arts; creativity. What it is to be human. What we can achieve if the best minds and talents are nurtured, encouraged.

Very few people know who the engineer of the Burj Khalifa was. 

More people know what Kim Kardashion has for breakfast.

Great people of our age are pouting morons.

Exude Izzy! Exude!

I just watched a documentary on Stanley Kubrick, genius director. 

He picked the greatest hard-science fiction author of his age - Arthur C Clarke - to co-write the story with. Arthur C Clarke had an extensive background in science and predicted back in the early 60s the use of satellite technology for communications, so that a doctor in London could perform an operation on a patient in Calcutta.

What we now call a futurologist.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) features iPads , artificial intelligence, and asks fundamental questions about our place in the universe.

Unlike the great cultural milestone that was Sex in the City 2. 

Kubrick created a new standard of special effects, technologies and ways of shooting scenes by aiming for perfection, and encouraging and enabling excellent people to go and figure things out so they could contribute to his vision.

He used Zeiss lenses made for NASA which were F0.7, to shoot Barry Lyndon and lit the whole film by candlelight and no electric lights, having exhaustively studied English 18th century paintings. 

His films became fewer as he got older as the perfection he sought in preparing for his movies was increasingly exhaustive. For example, he employed his nephew to photograph every house in Commercial Road in Shoreditch, which entailed a separate shot up a ladder so there was zero perspective convergence. (This is all before digital cameras, let alone Google Streetview).

It took a year, and they made a huge Bayeux Tapestry of them all. 

Stanley said 'It sure beats going there, huh?'

In the end they made the front they needed on a film set. 

What's all this about then? 

I suggest we probably peaked 60ish years ago. 

We live in an age of homogeneity: botox and fillers and deadening hairdos with which people try to reach an aesthetic singularity, finished off with make-up techniques perfected by drag queens. 

Young men with absurd dental implants, bulging  biceps and shoulders, with the skin colour of pure creosote. Then covered in tattoos that look like any doodled notepad next to a telephone.

People no longer wish to be individual. This idea that for northern European women the upper lip should be as plump as the lower lip, despite having the wrong bone structure and skin colour to accommodate it.

Music that is so utterly banal and boring as to reduce me to sleep in seconds. Where people like Cowell talk about "The Product" rather than the song.

Scum.

That anyone creative is at the bottom of the pile. That English, art, drama and music are now the least popular subjects in state schools, leaving only kids from wealthy backgrounds with the opportunity to pursue careers in them.

The country that gave the word the most mongrel and elastic language ever, and the person who shows us who we are, now eschewing it all to turn us from a 1st rate Britain into a 3rd rate China.

The commodification of everything has put a stick in the spokes of what it is to be human. As Frank Zappa said, American culture can be summed up as “What’s the bottom line?”

So kids are driven to careers which will soon be swallowed up by the leviathan of AI, or A1 as US Education Secretary Linda McMahon calls it.

Yes, she of the WWE.

An art scene that is purely market-driven to decorate the foyers of large banks and the preposterous homes of those who toil in them, in order to show off their great taste they neither have nor are even interested in acquiring. 

"I mean, they must be good. I paid a fortune for them!"

Our differences which were fascinating and wonderful are eroding. Those old colloquialisms found all over the British Isles, subtly different accents from town to town, have become disappeared or are disappearing fast thanks to radio, TV and now the internet.

For example you rarely hear rural Buckingham or Kent accents any more. They've been replaced by estuary English.

Those almost incomprehensible accents I heard at school have softened to become a broad Mummerset.

I listened to a fantastic podcast the other day which explains how social media has essentially fucked us up. 

That it was all going so well and the future was rosy, until in 2006 Facebook introduced the Like button and Twitter the opportunity to retweet...

PICK YOUR BINARY SIDE AND START HURLING INSULTS!

It’s really worth listening to.

We live in a world where a narcissistic conman and reality TV star and who has aspirations to be an unenlightened despot more appropriate to Turkmenistan than a liberal democracy, is the leader of what used to be known as The Free World; enabled by immoral lickspittles whose CVs comprise solely of how far they can get their tongues up Jabba the Trump's anus.

In summary,, I'll leave you with this. 

And...breathe

So we arrive with nothing. We leave with nothing. 

It's the in between that's the difficult bit.

Well, I found it quite difficult anyway. 

My Dad who is quite wise said it's about picking where you want to be on a line with money at one end, and pleasure on the other. What are your priorities?

I think the old bugger's right.

"Hey Stud! Let's boogie!"

Went out with friends on Friday at 4pm. Came home around 10.30. I had a good time but I'm on the cusp of 56 and I don't want to have let myself down. I can be quite a show-off with a few beers inside of me, and quite dumb as well.

I think I had a good time. 

My key-demographic is now the horny pensioner. Thankfully nothing has happened in this department, and luckily with my diagnosis and living in the parental home, it should be a sufficient repellant.

Apart from that, I am running Dungeons and Dragons on Thursdays and the thrill-factor seems to be back on eleventy, which is where we want it.

We had 2 guest players this time and they enjoyed it too.

So that's good. We are back on track! Also playing Mondays, Wednesdays and the very occasional Friday.

Been playing BG3 - over a 1,000 hours just on the PC.

Reading the paper. Do you go to the columnists you either love or hate? I do. Nothing inbetween.

What's that about?

Here's something beautiful. Check out the harpsichord!

Trump - a footnote, from a YouTube commentator:

An Insurrectionist threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act??? A Draft dodger demanding he be honored with a military parade??? A Felon demanding law & order??? The irony is not lost.