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Preferably With Less Of A Fetish For The Fall

I think about John Peel too much for someone who rarely listened to his show, way back when. (I did, however, listen to a lot of Home Truths, his Radio 4 show  about families and, well, life; it was filled with his gentle humor and understatedness, and it was a way of connecting to my mother across the Atlantic, who listened to it, too.) But the Peel myth looms large in my head — a man who became famous, if not beloved, because he stayed true to his own taste and rarely compromised it, instead introducing new music and new ideas to people continuously, including himself.

I often find myself wondering who the John Peel of [Insert Media Here] is, looking to find someone who could be trusted as a tastemaker in the same way in different fields, but the older I get, the more I realize that any true John Peel of today wouldn’t look anything like John Peel. It’s that whole contradictory thing, again; what we’re looking for doesn’t look like what we expected. Instead, they’re out there — a gender neutral term because, let’s be honest, the likelihood of a new John Peel being male is very small indeed — looking like themselves and doing their own thing, waiting to find their audience, or for their audience to find them.

There’s something very reassuring about that thought, to me.

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That Background Ache

I have been massively overworked, lately; I went from saying yes to too many jobs to preparing for a trip — a work trip, of course, I haven’t done a non-work trip in lord knows how long — and at some point, the obvious happened: My body decided it was done.

It started as an ache in my legs after a long walk, which didn’t fade beyond a certain point. A day or so later, I realized that I was still feeling this dull ache, as if I was recovering from a gym session that had never actually happened. I felt consistently, constantly, exhausted. Not sick, per se; just always tired. I’d go to sleep tired. I’d wake up after seven or eight hours, tired. I’d go to work tired. I’d finish work tired. No matter what, tired.

My solution, such as it was, was to just cut back as much as possible. Take care of the things that had to be done, but let everything else fall away, whether it was being social or pushing deadlines out further. To try and create spaces where absolutely nothing was expected of me, and all I could do was marathon Project Runway or whatever. To eat better, too. (Although my love for Twix bars remains.) And, most importantly, to stop myself feeling bad about feeling tired or rundown.

That last part has been the hardest, but arguably the most effective. There’s something to be said for just… stopping. I still ache, I’m still tired. But when that happens, I just stop for a bit and try to prevent myself from nagging me back into action. Turns out, I just need a rest, now and then.

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A Rose By Any Other Etc.

I was sitting in the airport when an announcement came over the speaker system, asking for Jack Cross to go to some gate or another. I heard it and thought, Jack Cross, what sort of a name is that? That’s not a real person, that’s a spy in a really bad thriller, and then I suddenly had this wave of empathy that was entirely unexpected.

Imagine, for a second, that your name was Jack Cross. Can you imagine the pressure you’d feel to live up to the images such a name conjures up? You’d feel as if it was your responsibility to at least have some kind of adventure on a regular basis, and preferably one that involved at least one person bleeding or at least sweating heavily at the end of it.

I’m only slightly exaggerating. “Jack Cross,” or a name like it, has a weird set of preconceptions built into it when you hear it. You hear it, or read it, and your brain starts to fill in blanks in a manner that very likely has nothing to do with whoever actually has that name. It’s not a bad thing, we all do it — but imagine being Jack Cross (or whoever), and knowing that. How would you feel if even you felt disappointed by the person you were, knowing that your name left everyone expecting more than you could deliver?

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Moleskine Dreams

I always wanted to be someone with a moleskin notebook who sat in cafes and wrote deathless prose and brief snippets of beautiful poetry about the people around me. It’s not who I am, of course — I can barely string together sentences that make sense, and poetry is far beyond me — but there’s something about the idea that remains appealing.

For a couple of years at the end of the 20th century (And how weird it is to write that sentence and think, That’s right, I lived through the end of a century as if it was nothing special, Damon Albarn’s own poetry aside), I kept notebooks filled with writing. I wrote what was a diary, I guess, although I’m sure I thought of it as “a journal,” as if that was somehow more artistic and meaningful. In my defense, I had just finished art school and was still teaching there, so pretension was a comfortable second language.

Those notebooks were filled with everything internal in a way that I soon lost the ability to express. I remember very clearly a point in the early 2000s, when I was newly in San Francisco, taking public transport to work and feeling embarrassed about the intimacy and sincerity I displayed in those early notebooks, convinced that the knowing irony and unearned self-confidence I was wearing publicly as a writer at that point was inherently superior. I was finding success as a writer for the first time and in a world where I felt (secretly, quietly, not even daring admit it to myself) like a fraud who didn’t deserve to be read by anyone; the protective shell of irony felt like the only way to move forward. Anything else was not only too dangerous, it was naive and foolish.

Now, of course, I long for the ease of revelation of those notebooks, the fearlessness of just saying everything without shame or anxiety. The me that I was 20 years ago may not have been any more likely to write the poetry or documentary in notebooks and cafes than who I am today, but I feel certain that he’d be far less nervous about trying.

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Line Up In Line Is All I Remember

All photos taken within a year or so of moving to Portland. I became interested in colors and lines, apparently.

(I’m not sure when or why I stopped taking photos like these; I don’t have any after 2010, but I’m unsure if that’s because I stopped taking them, or I stopped keeping them. Either way, it’s a habit I wish I hadn’t gotten out of. I like these investigations of my environments.)

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The Ego Has Landed

So, we didn’t get nominated for the Eisners this year, and I’ve surprised myself by being quite as upset as I’ve been. When I first saw the nominations, I immediately scrolled to the Periodicals/Journalism section in excitement, then — upon not seeing THR — told myself that it was a bummer, but understandable considering the weird process of the Eisners judging system and, really, no big deal. And then I realized more and more that it was a bigger deal than I thought.

There’s some level of rejection anxiety in here, of course, and no small level of frustration that one of the two things I did this year motivated by a sense of, You know what, I am good at what I do was so definitively stymied. (Actually, it was both, in the end; I got turned down for the raise I mentioned awhile back, too.) What the rest of the ingredients were for my mood on Friday, though, I can’t fully explain. Tiredness? The karmic downside for having enjoyed Avengers: Endgame the night before…?

Whatever the reason, I spent Friday increasingly glum and, more annoyingly, increasingly distracted and unable to work as quickly as I needed, leading to me carrying work through to the weekend in order to hit deadlines. It wasn’t the best way to deal with a creeping suspicion that maybe my work is unappreciated and I’m working too much for too little reason, but the fates have a cruel sense of humor that way, I guess. I’m not sure if I didn’t hit my deadlines because I was distraught that no-one appreciates me is in any way a good excuse that works, but let’s not try to find out anytime soon.

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Thank You, Friends, Thank You Again

I have found myself thinking, more than once lately, about the fact that I wish I could give more money to more Patreon campaigns. I already contribute to a bunch via the shared Patreon for the Wait, What? podcast — Jeff and I agreed when we launched that, that a percentage of what we made would be passed on to other campaigns — but there are more people I find myself wanting to support. The problem is, affording that.

In the wee small hours of the morning recently, I found myself imagining setting up another Patreon, just for me, not the podcast. It would be something where I could support personal writing and have more time and space to write the World That’s Coming, I told myself in a sleepy haze, but I was actually imagining a system with which to raise funds that I could then turn around and give to others.

Maybe I should simply set up a crowdfunding campaign explicitly targeted at funding other Patreons. Call it the Help Me To Help Others campaign. Just be blunt about it.

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Everyone Round Here Lives In Silence

At some point, I stopped discovering new music.

Once upon a time, doing that was easy. I was young and in the UK in the 1990s; I just listened to Radio 1 all day, through the Britpop daytime and into the evening Evening Sessions, Mark And Lard, John Peel, whatever. New music came to me that way, or during the weekly weekend trips to record stores where I’d buy singles based on their cover artwork or how strange a band’s name seemed.

A decade later, and it was the era of the mp3 blog, an online network of friends I’d never met sharing the sounds they’d discovered for themselves and gotten excited about. It wasn’t the same as before; it was slower and less passive, but I discovered a number of favorite acts that way. (Curiously, most of them being solo female performers; I don’t know whether that was a bias on my part, or the bloggers.)

Now, I rarely find new things. Perhaps it’s my age, or that delivery systems have changed again. (I’m on Spotify, I promise; I just rarely use their Daily Mixes or whatever.) I find myself reading reviews of things and then searching them out, instead of things finding me with the lucky happenstance of before. Occasionally, it still happens — I’ll hear something by chance and have that What was that, I have to hear more response — and it’s especially thriling when it does, now. But for the most part, I’ve stopped discovering new music.

It’s something I miss, dearly.