Author: Graeme McMillan

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Don’t You Close The Door On Fate When She Comes To Call

And again, a bunch of graphics for the THR newsletter that ended up going unused this time around. To properly explain why this happens, because I’ve mentioned it a couple times now: the graphics are created a day or so before the newsletter itself, based on stories people think are going to be in there — but in the time between then and the newsletter being sent out, stories can and do drop out for any number of reasons: they’re not ready, they’ve already run on the site because things happened faster than expected, or simply that they’re no longer true.

So, sometimes, graphics get orphaned. It’s why I like to save them all here, so that there’s some kind of record, an afterlife that’s better than nothing.

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Stay Out Of My Way On

I hate April Fools Day. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before.

I must have liked it once, I’m sure; there are vague memories of being a kid and laughing hard at the kind of kid “pranks” that get pulled on April 1st, when there’s no demarcation between joking and outright lying and anything and everything is deemed permissible if you shout APRIL FOOL at the top of your lungs afterward, so I’d like to think that I’ve not always been this much of a curmudgeon.

By my early twenties, though, I was already over it. I remember there being some attempt at a big April Fools stunt when I was at art school, and the utter disdain and disgust I felt at the very notion when it was first suggested to me, a passion for eye-rolling that only comes from being so young. Even then, though, it was something that I found tiring and pointless and, most of all, almost painfully un-fun. Why bother?

My true hatred didn’t arrive until I started writing on the internet for a living, however. In a trend that, thankfully, died off as we all got older and wiser, there was once a point where April 1st was when internet writers were encouraged to just lie in order to try and fool readers with something so “funny” and “outrageous” that it would drive up page views and those all important ad views as readers incredulously clicked through to share their anger and frustration at the news that wasn’t real. And then, get this, we were encouraged to write a second article, revealing that we’d been lying all along and betraying the readers’ trust in us! For fun and profit! It was, uh… “hilarious,” apparently.

And then, once that had died off, there was the horror of having to try to report news on a day when you literally couldn’t believe anything, because lying was the law. More than once on April 1st, I’ve written stories about things that seemed entirely real, only for it to subsequently be revealed as a joke where the entire joke was, “That thing isn’t happening.” All April 1sts should be considered days when all reporting is suspended, just to save time.

Only joking! I love April Fools and you’re all dumb for believing what you just read and this is a funny joke because oh God, I can’t even go through with it. April Fools Day, you fucking suck as a concept and an annual event.

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Hey Hey Mercy

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I tend to have a buffer of posts for this site; I’m not sure exactly how it started but by mid-April last year, I’d built up a three week advance on what was going to be posted and when, and it’s something I’ve more or less maintained ever since, with a couple of bumps where I simply didn’t have time to write.

It’s an imperfect system, for sure, and purposefully so — the buffer is literally just that, and I tend to play with scheduling and rearranging the timing of posts a bunch. Often, I’ll write things that go live that day or the next, and bump what had been loosely scheduled for that spot to some time in the future as a placeholder; it’s not uncommon for those posts to end up getting bumped repeatedly and eventually show up months after I originally wrote them, to the point where I’ve even forgotten what they’re about. But that’s kind of the point of the whole system.

As a system, it’s only come close to breaking down once before, and that was the result of overwork and having no time to do anything new for a week or so; I remember the anxiety I felt watching the number of scheduled posts count down to five, at which point I just decided to spend an entire morning just writing, to fix that.

This time, though, I got to just a couple of pre-scheduled posts before I started being able to replenish the supply, and the reason was simply that I had nothing to say. The combination of being sick, then catching up on work, while the internet exhausted me and real life just kept happening completely burned me out, and every time I sat down to write something for here, I realized that I had nothing.

It was, I guess, unsettling, but more than that, it was something I recognized as a sign that I needed to stop for a while and let my brain soak, relax and refill with the dumb ephemera that would let me come back when I was ready. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to recognize the need to just… stop, sometimes. It’s a small victory for self care, but a victory nonetheless.

And, ironically, because of the buffer of posts, I got to take the necessary break and come back recharged without posts here even pausing. I knew there was a reason I did it.

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I Asked Him Time And Again

I got caught up in Hulu’s High Fidelity adaptation for the right reasons — that soundtrack! — and was happy to discover that it was, genuinely, great; something that felt faithful to the spirit of the original book, but not beholden to slavishly following every nook, cranny and dead end of its pages, instead choosing to change and update things where necessary. (The original book is 25 years old, shockingly; it definitely needed updating.)

The most obvious update is in the central cast, which in the show is made up of two women of color and a gay white man. They’re a charming trio on screen, and I like watching them bounce off each other, and seeing them come out of their initial appearances and grow past what first looks a bit too close to stereotypes, but more than anything, it made me realize how limited the original book was.

In High Fidelity the book, the core trio is… three white straight guys. Because of course it is; Nick Hornby, bless him, wrote what he knew and that’s what — and who — he knew. And, when I read the book all those many years ago (When it first came out? Surely not, I wouldn’t have bought the hardcover; I’m pretty sure I got the paperback, though, with the book already A Thing by that point), that was fine, because that was pretty much what I knew, too.

The comparison is like a window into my own past, and how small it seems when viewed from where and who I am now. Part of it is cultural — there are many, many people I knew then that I’m sure were queer and closeted, or simply unaware; this was the time when the lead singer of Suede called himself “a bisexual who’d never had a homosexual experience,” and it was turned into a joke that followed him for years afterwards — and part of it geographical, with Scotland being severely limited in terms of racial diversity.

Nonetheless, I find myself looking back and thinking, God, how small the world seemed back then, how limited and empty compared with today. And, really, there’s something perfect to me about this being inspired by High Fidelity, a story about looking back and growing from past mistakes. Next thing, I’ll be making a list of top 5 mixtapes.