Month: August 2024

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Too Early, Too Much

I have, it feels like, lost the ability to get a good night’s sleep.

This is a problem, of course, but it’s one I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to fix. I am doing the right things, in terms of going to bed at a reasonable time and trying to decompress my head by reading a little before turning out the light and settling in for the night. It’s not as if I even have trouble falling asleep, because even that I feel as if I’d be able to address in some form or another. Instead, I fall asleep almost immediately, and I don’t wake up until the next morning. It’s just that… I don’t feel particularly well-rested.

Again, the problem isn’t that I’m not getting enough sleep, although I could almost certainly go for more. I’m getting maybe… seven hours or so a night? Maybe closer to eight on some nights. That doesn’t feel like I’m running at a deficit, especially compared with my historical averages. (When I was a kid and entirely invincible, as kids are, I could manage on four or five and still feel fine the next day. Ah, those were the days…) It’s simply that I do not, for whatever reason, feel as if I’ve actually slept when I wake up in the morning.

The reasonable answer about what’s happening is probably connected with the amount of stress I’m feeling lately — the job is filled with things to utterly dominate my mind and refuse to let go, unfortunately, and that’s been the case since the beginning of June; that’s an entire quarter of a year, almost! — but, despite what G.I. Joe once told us, knowing isn’t half the battle. It doesn’t really do anything for the sense of exhaustion I’ve taken to permanently wearing around my shoulders, like the fur of a shittily-designed fantasy warrior.

Instead, I find myself yawning by the time it’s 5pm, and my eyes feel heavy around 8. I’m in trouble by the time fall will arrive, if this hasn’t sorted itself out; I’ll hide from the inevitable chill in the air and the darkness outside in the evenings, and fall asleep by accident in front of the television, lulled into unconsciousness by the drone of the latest episode of a reality show and unable to properly relax for the same sound quietly nagging in my ears.

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Coming Attractions

It’s funny, looking back and realizing that the term “Doomscrolling” was only invented back in 2020. That’s not to say that 2020 wasn’t a particularly bleak year — the one-two punch of COVID and the election that year were pretty horrific, especially when you factor in all the political upheaval and upset surrounding both — but, when I think about the idea that things started to noticeably go wrong in the world, 2020 feels considerably too late to me.

Instead, I look back to 2016 for that, perhaps obviously. The US election of that year can be pinpointed as a particular level of Bad News; I have very specific, very clear memories of becoming all-too-obsessed with the news especially in the last month or two of that election, as it became increasingly clear that Trump had a very real chance of winning instead of being the joke candidate that people (including me) had initially written him off as being, and that certainly feels like some early form of Doomscrolling.

But it started even earlier than that; that summer saw the Brexit vote in the UK, and there was something there, in seeing the UK (really, England, but the results impacted the entire United Kingdom, so thanks for that) make the stupidest possible choice based on the worst, most xenophobic reasoning, and having a very real sense of, this feels like the start of something very bad.

That feeling of there’s something happening here echoes in my brain right now, with another US election in the offing and complete upheaval in the United Kingdom. Sure, I know that the Tories have been voted out of office (finally!) just a month or so ago, but now we’re faced with a rise of neo-Nazi protests and attacks, and again I find myself worried about what’s going to happen to the US over the next few months. “Doomscrolling” as a term feels too quaint for this feeling, I have to admit; “doom-foreshadowing” or something similar might be more appropriate.

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I Should Be Out There Running

Man, it’s been awhile since I shared updates to the 2024 playlist. A reminder, because it has been awhile: these are songs that for the most part are new discoveries (but in some cases, are things I haven’t thought about in awhile, but recently resurfaced for whatever reason; see PJ Harvey’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” which I first heard something like 30 years ago) that I’ve become obsessed with in the last few months. I share updates every 50 entries, and you can listen to the playlist if you have Spotify right here.

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Take A Little Ride, Let Me Be Your Guide

There’s a particular genre of movies that I struggle to name, but have become increasingly enamored with over the past few weeks — that weird brand of 1970s (and late ’60s, in one case) rock opera that is at once overblown and theatrically outrageous and also utterly possessed of its own importance and making with the societal pronouncements like they’re going out of fashion.

I’ve written before, more than once, about my love of Head, the Monkees’ highpoint from the late ’60s, and I’m pretty sure I’ve shared my affection for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls around these here parts, as well. (If I haven’t: I’d argue that it’s not only Russ Meyer’s best movie — heresy, I know — but also one of the best movies about the culture gap between straights and freaks in the middle of the 20th century, bar none.) But there are more than those movies: in the past week or so, I’ve watched Xanadu, The Phantom of the Paradise (a true classic), and The Apple, all three of which are variations on the same idea, in some way.

The Apple and Xanadu feel like two different endpoints for this genre, which essentially died a death when both of these movies bombed at the box office. Xanadu is this genre as upbeat, hopeful, optimistic thing with almost no real threat or darkness throughout the entire movie, unless you count the fact that Gene Kelly effortlessly out-charms the rest of the cast without breaking a sweat to be a sign that the future is doomed; The Apple, meanwhile, is a sprawling, messy parody of pop culture devotion and corruption that has to be seen to be believed — think The Rocky Horror Picture Show if it decided to really go for it, and something far more cynical (and, arguably, more realistic, despite a finish that can’t be described).

Rewatching all of these movies, I find myself even more distraught that very little today has the same… lack of giving a fuck, perhaps? Or energy, to be more polite about it. I want to see someone convince Taylor Swift to just go for it and create a ridiculous, unapologetic pop opera about how fucked up everything around her is. I want to see Beyonce do her own version of Swarm but it’s actually a musical with big fuck-off production numbers. I want to see things get less boring, just a little bit.

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One Man and His

Out of nowhere the other day, I remembered the 1980s TV show Street Hawk. For those who were lucky enough not to grow up in such a time when we were so starved for fun and attention that Street Hawk felt like an somehow worthwhile viewing option, I’ll quickly describe the high concept behind the show: a dude had a high tech motorbike, and was a vigilante whose activities somehow always involved the use of his high tech motorbike. Please note: it was a 1980s TV show, so when I say “high tech,” what I really mean is, occasionally it had a computer display of the road ahead with impossibly crude graphics. Nonetheless: that was the show.

As uninspired as Street Hawk undoubtedly sounds — and it really was, don’t worry — it’s worth pointing out that it was part of a strange trend for 1980s action shows where the entire formula amounted to nothing more than “entirely average man is vigilante, but don’t worry because he has a special vehicle of some sort.” The obvious hit of this genre was, of course, Knight Rider — David Hasselhoff and his talking car, a concept so popular and important to so many men’s childhoods that it has been rebooted no less than two times in the past few decades, shockingly — but it wasn’t just Knight Rider and Street Hawk; there was also Airwolf and Blue Thunder, which shared a vehicle if not a sense of self-seriousness. (Airwolf was the more fun of the two helicopter shows, I remember, but I’m not sure how true that really is, and how much I just remember that being the case because I preferred the theme song as a kid.) I’m sure there were other such shows that didn’t make it to Scotland, too; I was probably spared something about one man and his computer-powered submarine, or his technologically advanced scooter, thankfully.

Looking back now, it seems so strange that “one man and his vehicle” was popular enough as an idea to support multiple shows overlapping on the screen and my subconsciousness at the same time. There’s probably something to be said about the ways in which it demonstrated our growing love of gadgets or a dehumanized on-screen hero, not to mention the implied glamour of how much such items must have cost. I didn’t think about any of this at the time these shows were on, of course. Instead, I was 10 years old or so, convinced that I’d never be able to drive a care or ride a motorbike myself, but nonetheless thinking to myself how cool it would be to have a vehicle that could go so fast, and drive itself while I got more focused on saving the small town from some existential threat of the week.

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The Double, Triple, Hidden Life of Me

In rediscovering the fictions of my youth, I’ve been remembering the world as I imagined it as an impressionable teenager, filled with romance and an imagination fueled by European arthouse movies where melancholy was almost certainly the order of any given day. I couldn’t swear to what prompted by interest in the movies of Krzysztof Kieślowski and his ilk — I feel as if, at some point in my mid-teens, I told myself that my thing was going to be that I was a movie fan and so I bought the magazines and the books I thought that was supposed to entail, and suddenly I was let loose in a world of influences and stories I had no business in.

(What prompted this belief that I was into The Art of Cinema? I genuinely have no recollection, but I do remember subscribing to Empire and Sight and Sound at an inexplicably young age, even if the latter was something I only read a handful of times before I lost interest in how humorless and sterile it all seemed at the time; Empire, which sought to bring a music paper sensibility to movie writing, was far more my speed and I kept that up for years after.)

However I ended up in that mindset, there was a point in my mid-teens where I was increasingly watching European movies about the existential weight of the world in which effortlessly beautiful actresses pouted and frowned when faced with the meaningless cruelty of the world, surrounded by old men who also frowned but found new life when faced with their decades-younger, naive-but-somehow-wise muses. (I still love things like The Double Life of Veronique or Three Colours Red, but it’s easy to see in them the roots of what would become the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliche of American cinema years later, alas.)

Rewatching such movies now, they’re still filled with breathtaking, aching moments of real beauty, of human frailty and kindness and all kinds of feelings that words struggle to conjure. But I also see in them the beginnings of my overly romantic, melancholy nature and a tendency to tell myself a story in which sadness and pain can be noble or meaningful when the reality is something far more banal and empty. If I hadn’t fallen for such pretty sorrow in these movies as a teenager, how much of my life would’ve been different years, decades, later?

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As If No Time Has Passed

So, funny story: it was COVID after all.

I had convinced myself that it wasn’t, because (a) the home tests said negative, (b) I didn’t feel that sick (or so I kept thinking to myself, as much trying to reassure my own brain as anything else), and (c) COVID would just be really bad, and I didn’t want really bad, in the grand scheme of things. And yet, after going to the doctor at the weekend, the test result came back and… there it was.

To be fair, “there it was” ignores the fact that I actually read the email notification three times, because I had managed to convince myself so well that I was convinced that I’d misread something and there was actually no way I was testing positive. “Oh, maybe it’s just saying that positive was an option,” I thought, as if that was actually something that would be listed under the all-caps heading “RESULT” just for fun. (“Did you know you could test positive for COVID? It’s true!” would be the helpful, jaunty, explanation.)

When it comes down to it, I think I knew the whole time. I hadn’t been sleeping well for a few nights by that point, and when I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my brain was freewheeling like during my last COVID-experience; during the day, my concentration was gone, and I felt perpetually dizzy, outside of all the other (many) physical symptoms, and almost everything felt like a chore that made me generally grumpy to have to deal with. I’d felt like all of this before, even if I’d rather have told myself that it was just con crud and everything would sort itself out the next day, if only I got some sleep.

Of course, by the time I eventually got the diagnosis, it was apparently too late for medication to help. (There’s apparently a deadline starting from the date of first feeling symptoms.) Instead, all I could do — all I’m still doing, as you read this — is relaxing as much as possible and hoping for the speediest recovery possible. Sometimes, it’s 2020 again after all.