No cure for stupid

I realise you don't want to talk about politics

I get it. I do .

The last post had the fewest clicks in years. Lol.

But really. Come on...

Okay, okay, I'll stop.

I'll talk about FTD then, and all my problems associated with it.

But I'll try and keep it light.

Baby-bio for brains

We set the bar too low these days. My experience at the Beeb was that the programme-makers thought the audience were completely stupid. I was told to rewrite certain parts of the fact-sheet that accompanied the programme as it contained words longer than one syllable.

I'm not making this up.

Yet the people making the programme were rather dull themselves. 

Educated, yes. Clever, no.

 I guess it could be perceived as projection. I think they thought they were really intelligent. They were certainly deluded if they did think that.

Now the bar is so low in the Kensington museums that a bright 12 year old would probably feel he or she were being talked down to. 

More relatable, innit?

When your brain is atrophying, you have to try harder than ever to keep those plates spinning - voice, language - stimulating it by using those senses, completing sudokus and crosswords. Keep pumping oxygen and blood through the grey matter and fight against the inevitable to maintain functionality for as long as possible.

I play RPG games as you know, which require multiple skills. 

I still need social-interaction which can - with people I don't know so well - be awkward. 

I understand this is very much how certain people with autism experience the world.

I want to be really smart, but...

I watch discussion programmes and lectures on politics and philosophy which are beyond my pay-grade, but how else are you supposed to learn or achieve anything if you don't set the bar high?

So I've been watching anything with Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry, Vlad Vexler, and archival episodes of Firing Line - a highbrow interview programme which was the vehicle (I cannot spell vehical, vehichal, veichal!) of William F Buckley Jr, a conservative political philosopher who hugely influenced the Reagan administration.

Now before you all say I'm drifting off to the right hear me out.

Being in an echo-chamber is something I try to avoid. I inevitably take the role of devil's advocate when everyone is earnestly nodding heads and wringing hands. There is a prevailing belief these days that our political opponents are not only wrong but inherently bad. 

No doubt some of them are - and I don't even count alt- or far-right wingers whose bigotry I have no time for. I want to understand conservatives and have my beliefs challenged. 

I want to be able to think. And the freest societies allow both sides.

Buckley and Gore Vidal famously debated on The ABC network on the advent of the 1968 US election.

They hated each other and Buckley got close to punching Vidal live on the programme when Vidal goaded him by calling him a Nazi.

Vidal was extremely clever, a master of rhetoric, charismatic, smug, arrogant and a member of the US aristocracy (for they have one).

A drunk Norman Mailer famously head-butted Vidal backstage from a Dick Cavett show in the early 70s. So Vidal had quite the track record.

But while I disagree fundamentally with almost all of Buckley's politics, he challenges, makes some very interesting and persuasive arguments and his interviews on the whole are good-natured and are an exchange or arm-wrestle of ideas.

He had mannerisms and affectations along with a mid-Atlantic drawl (he spent some of his childhood in public school in Windsor) which made him very easy to impersonate.

I cannot - CANNOT - listen to Noam Chomsky. He's so unutterably dull and intransigent. His views to me seem rather stuck in the 1970s. 

Ditto Mailer, who spent his life trying to out-Hemingway Hemingway. He was an anachronism by the late 60s.

So anyway, that's what I'm doing. 

Dad's downstairs watching 'Cash in the Attic'. 

I would like to sit downstairs and read or something, but I can't concentrate with that on. 

It occurred to me that Dad may have ADHD - he needs background noise.

Regrets

Everyday. By the skipful. I dream them. I wake up with them.

If you have none I think you're in total denial of reality or your self.

All the fuck-ups from childhood to present day, although the vast majority are from age 25-40. 

Not standing up for myself, being drunk and stupid, losing all hope and drive in my late 20s, which I realise was depression.

Usually just episodes of patheticness.

Yesterday I went into Wells, I had 3 pints in the afternoon and sat in the pub with my headphones on and read. It got really busy .

In the evening I drank 3 bottles of beer. So, a 6-pint day. 

Last Saturday was a 9-pint day. 4 in the afternoon, 5 in the evening. On my own, in the pub.

Not good is it? I didn't even feel particularly drunk, though I screamed at some balaclava'd youth cycling on the pavement with no lights on his bike.

Arthritis is taking hold of my fingers and shoulders too. 

Yet, whilst just listing these things I don't feel self-pity, rather frustration at past failures to make constructive decisions coupled with a total incapability of planning for the future.

I don't know how you'd plan for the past...

I am, however, very bored.

Have I kept it light?

Oh.

Try this then:

"Do you do dice swaps?"

Asked the 10 year old girl. 

"Sorry?"

"Do you do dice swaps?"

"What?? Certainly not!" I replied, incredulously. While inwardly raging "GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN!!!"

She looked puzzled. Everyone does dice swaps, surely?

Why would I want her glittery dice, all covered in sticky, sugary child-goo?

'Gusting. 'GUSTING!

What was she thinking?

There was an uncomfortable silence as we realised we inhabited 2 separate worlds.

These are MY dice. Those are YOUR dice. And never...the...twain. Do you understand?

GOOD. 

Then we'll speak no more about it. 

No, no, NO!

She hung around awkwardly for a bit, then walked off. 

I think she learned a valuable lesson from that, and she'll thank me one day, mark my words.

And as for the teenagers who neglect to bring a dice and pencil to a role-playing game - A ROLE-PLAYING GAME!!!!! - then wish to borrow MY dice and stationery to duly SOIL with their greasy and detritus-laden fingers?

What is this?

What has the world come to?

Standards have slipped since my day. I blame the permissive society and post war funk.

I could go on.

Oh. Okay...

Threads and Drugs and Rock and Roll

Drugs

It's surprisingly easy to drink all the time. 

It's also surprisingly easy to not drink all the time.

I just can't find a middle ground.

I drank every day for months. I seem to have to do it until my body disgusts me. Belly oozing over belt, belt down a notch and still too tight. Saggy-middle, flabby, atrophying muscle. Ghastly.

I had my last drink on New Year's Eve. I had a Baileys: the guilty pleasure of many!

I've been alcohol free all week. I can already feel the benefits. Stomach no longer bloated, toileting (I won't - you'll be thankful to know - go into details) easier, concentration marred by cold on back-burner, but less hazy brain due to alcohol-freedom. 

Marvellous.

Here are my opinions (and I have many strong ones on multiple subjects as I'm sure you're aware) on some common drugs:

Beer: tastes so wonderful - myriad flavours - easy, complex, bitter, smooth, fruity, malty, hoppy, dry. The drug that tastes nicest of all. What a quantity a pint is! The perfect measure: 0.568261 of a litre.

Cannabis: any drug that makes it okay to watch the same episode of Neighbours twice in one day has to be bad for you. Disgusting sickly smell. The stuff kids smoke today is like heroin compared to the rabbit poo of yore.

Cocaine: have you ever met anybody who took cocaine who didn't turn into an arrogant arsehole? Overpriced (like Champagne) for city and media types to make them feel special about themselves. A drug to bolster one's low-self-esteem. Not to mention the cost in human lives.

Champagne: the most overrated drink of all time. Tastes like ass unless you spend upwards of £50 a bottle. People eat oysters, caviar, smoke cigars and eat other stuff that has the texture of snot and tastes of rock-pools as it's traditionally what the aristocracy gorged themselves on, so it's more about aspiration - 'eating-up' in other words - rather than imbibing it because you actually like it.

'Never go ass to mouth.' - Marilyn Manson

Cigarettes: leant a friend £20 to buy some cigarettes. The change was in coins - less than a fiver - for a packet of 20. For years you see people outside offices standing in the rain to 'enjoy' a fag. I last smoked 21 years ago. I'd given up for years and taken it back up. I still have dreams where I'm smoking. Shit drug - way too expensive and makes you a social exile. 

And if you’re a bloke it shrinks your weenus. 

Threads

I'm still trying to work out what Threads is. It's a bit like a free app version of Twitter/X (if you had to pay for it). Less toxic, fewer features and rather anodyne in its content.

Like Facebook with strangers?

My feed is oddly full of middle-aged women whose entire content is selfies: cleavage selfies, butt selfies, driving selfies and big hair selfies. 

Their posts often read like this: 'Successful Lawyer, humanitarian, nature-lover, athlete, vegan, art connoisseur, mom of 4 super-smart kids.'

If that wasn't enough their post is just full of pictures of them. Is it boasting or is it a deep-seated insecurity that yearns for our approval? 

What have we become in the 21st century?

I understand people are looking to boost their low self esteem but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Keep demanding love and receiving positive affirmations and you quickly develop a need and eventually an addiction for other people's approval...

Ultimately I don’t think Threads knows what it is. You can’t really define yourself by saying this is what you're not.

I’ll await a proper definition. 

How to alienate your electorate

So I look online and see lots of footage of Trump supporters being ridiculed and made fun of. And it is unbelievable. 

Yes they have bypassed any form of half-decent education, they are ineloquent at best, but their vote counts as much as anyones’. Surely the liberals need to appeal to them instead of berating them all the time for being dim?

After all, if I called you 'stupid', or where you come from 'a shithole' would you vote for me? The chances are certainly lessened.

This is one reason the MAGA crowd hate metropolitan liberals - it's their painfully aloof intellectual arrogance. We have a similar thing in the UK between town and country but to a much lesser extent. A mistrust, as though the 2 sides share the same language but an entirely different culture. The countryside being socially conservative, and the townies being socially liberal, but illiberal to the socially conservative. 

Social media gave us anonymity in towers of judgement where we yell expletives and insult and threaten people who disagree with us. There is no serious debate on social media. You pick your binary side (woke and anti-woke) and that's it.

The Rock and Roll bit

Not been listening to music recently, although I did see a marvellous clip of the wonderful Dick Cavett chatting with the great Oscar Peterson, which I then I watched again with Mum and Dad.

These days I do secrete myself away in my man-cave for most of the day as I can't abide what they watch. And I'd be too embarrassed to attempt to watch The Boys for instance, with them. So it's great when we can watch something we will all enjoy (and I won't feel embarrassed about).

Not rock and roll, but just great, great music.