The World That's Coming

One of the kindnesses of the holidays is the space you get to think. My weeks aren’t normally known for this amount of time and space — and now I sound like Doctor Who, accidentally — but between the time off for Christmas and a reduced (slightly) workload this week because certain outlets are taking it easier for the week between Christmas and New Year, I’m finding myself with time to breathe again.

Admittedly, I made it worse for myself this year, committing to an Advent Calendar’s worth of content for the Wait, What? Patreon patrons, which seemed like a good idea at the time but ended up being far more work than I’d initially thought it’d be, to the point I felt like I’d somehow taken on an extra job by mistake ahead of Christmas. But I’ll get to that soon enough. This, instead of a regular entry, is something else: housecleaning.

I had two unfinished posts in draft in the blog here that I’m just going to throw up in their unfinished state, because why not? The first was unfinished because I literally couldn’t find the words, written after the Paris attacks back in November and the second because I couldn’t find the time, written two weeks ago. Here they are.

**

The Paris attacks were the kind of thing that are, literally, intended to dominate thoughts and derail everything else, and that certainly happened to me Friday through Saturday — I had deadlines that had were due after the news started breaking, and I found it almost impossible to write. I could hardly focus on what I was supposed to be writing about, never mind try to be entertaining, educational or any other aim I’m supposed to aspire to; I was too busy checking Twitter to find out what was going on, reading updates on The Guardian and feeling increasingly sick to my stomach about everything that was unfolding.

Unsurprisingly, I spent much of the weekend thinking about Paris and my own, limited, experiences there. I’ve only ever visited twice, and both trips were everything I could have wanted from them, and maybe a little more. Paris is a city that feels right to me, something that just kind of fitted where my head was both times I went. There was beauty and stillness and noise and an urban feel that I craved, both times.

Even before the events of Friday, I felt this odd urge to return for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. My reasoning, when I try to explain it, sounds ridiculous, but it’s this: I remember, astonishingly clearly, this moment from being in Paris when I was 21 and having breakfast in a cafe that was filled with the sounds of the radio. The music sounded so amazingly alien to me — this would’ve been 1995, so the heights of Britpop, which was in many ways the way I defined myself back then — and it was a sign that, as much as I loved Paris, I was an outsider. These days, of course, it feels like a good percentage of the music I listen to at home is French — Camille, especially, of course, but also a lot of yé-yé and other bands and singers — and part of me feels as if I want to revisit the city now that the sounds have become part of my inner landscape.

Like I said, it sounds ridiculous, and yet…!

**

**

Such events throw us off, and make us feel more afraid for ourselves and others than we had been hours before. That’s what they’re there for. I’ve been reading a lot of coverage about the reaction, both from politicians and — well, regular folk, for want of a better way of putting t.

**

Yes, that’s how the November one ends, with “t” instead of “it.” It feels appropriate, don’t you think? It was a strange time for me; the Paris attacks hurt in a way that felt new and unusual for reasons I still can’t explain, and I was afraid and angry and all these emotions that wanted to get out but didn’t have a direction. So, instead, I abandoned that post and never came back to it.

The next one, though, was simply left because I had other things that demanded my time.

**

It’s taken awhile — it’s already December 14! — but I have finally gotten into something resembling the Christmas Spirit. I’m a little worried that it’s taken this long, because I used to be someone who’d happily be thinking about mistletoe and holly before December had even arrived. I remember being a teenager — maybe 13? I want to say it was in 1989, for some reason — and writing a diary in November, eagerly announcing that it was just 32 days to Christmas.

At the time, that seemed extreme (Hell, looking back, it feels embarrassing), but it should be pointed out that, in the UK, the holidays don’t start until December 1 at the earliest. There’s no Thanksgiving, after all, and that means no Santa to arrive at the end of a parade in late November and give you permission to get in the mood. Instead, my parents would patiently always remind me, you have to wait until at least the same month before getting excited about Christmas.

I have this half-memory, one of those things that’s as much a feeling as anything more coherent — and something that just doesn’t make sense when I sit down and actually try to unpick it in my head — that, one year, my parents didn’t get a tree and decorate the house until a couple of days before Christmas Eve. What I remember more than anything about this is the sense of frustration that somehow we had wasted so much of Christmas by being behind the times. How could that have happened? I thought, incredulous at the very notion that somehow so much of December could creepy by without being celebrated in an appropriate manner.

Which, in many ways, makes my behavior this year particularly… shameful? Ironic? Somewhere between the two?

I have good reasons for it, I promise. Things have been stupidly busy with real life issues like work, basement moving and planning and renovationing, and the like.

**

So, in the words of Dame David Bowie, where are we now? I like to think things are better. Christmas has come and gone, all too quickly — I really am sad I didn’t get to enjoy it more, but there were basements to empty and friends visiting and parties to attend and and and just too much to do during all that time — and the New Year beckons with its inevitable specter of disappointment when all the hopeful realize that, oh yes, January 1st doesn’t mean you actually transform into a whole new, hyper-competent superbeing, but remain the same person you always were.

For me, I’ve been reading a bunch — currently, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, the new Elvis Costello memoir that’s uneven but not unenjoyable — and trying to get my head on straighter as we head into the coldest, darkest part of the year. As I get older, I become more susceptible to the dark, I worry; the thrill of wandering around in dim early evenings is gone and I’m just grumpy about the fact that it doesn’t get light until after 8 in the morning right now. Once the holidays are over, there aren’t fairy lights and tinsel to distract me from what’s going on out there anymore, so I’ll have to be strong and try to get through it nonetheless.

**

Which reminds me of this, of course.

Ah, my youth.

**

Before I get to the New Year — and another couple days off! — there’s a dental appointment on Wednesday, because my planning is the worst. But after that, the sky is the limit, if by sky being the limit you mean “I’m going to try and get back to doing these weekly like I wanted to in the first place. Which means, of course, that real life will kick in about three weeks in. But for those three weeks…!

Happy Holidays, whoever reads this.

I’m blocked, somehow; it’s Monday morning and I have a lot of shit to do, and my brain isn’t responding to any of the usual tricks. So I’m writing this early — and I suspect I’ll continue to come back to it throughout the day — as a way of tricking myself into writing something in case that teaches me my lesson. I hate mornings like this, where the deadlines are hanging over my head, and I’m just “Come on brain, work, dammit” and things don’t come into play. And yet.

**

Here’s a drawing I did this weekend, based on a misunderstanding. Seeing as it’ll never get used for the purpose I thought it was intended for, I’m sharing it here. Took about 15 minutes, all told, because that’s all I had.

(So much white space at the bottom! Ah well.)

**

That trick worked; I wrote the above eight hours ago, and then wrote all the other things I had to between now and then. (I also made and ate both breakfast and lunch, as well as visited a neighbor’s house to let their dog out the back while they were at work, visited another neighbor to lend them a vacuum, and other assorted business, but that’s neither here nor there.) Now it’s the end of the day, and my mood has shifted from exhaustion at the day ahead to some kind of mix of relief that I got through the work part okay, and uncertainty about what I’m going to be doing this evening.

This was a strange weekend, which is adding to my unsettled mindset. Thanks to other people’s schedules, we ended up having to clear our basement of everything in two days, which sounds easy until you start realizing quite how much stuff is actually in a basement. I spend all of Saturday and all of Sunday (with the exception of meals) moving furniture, packing up shelves of things (tools, pottery equipment, gardening equipment, painting equipment, and so on), and just generally lifting things, which had the dual effect of literally exhausting my body — I was so achy afterwards that, Sunday morning, I honestly woke up because my body ached so much that turning over in my sleep provoked a sharp enough pain to stir me — and ruining a pair of pants, because I literally tore a hole in the ass as I bent down to lift something up.

What it didn’t do, though, was give me the mindspace to recover from the previous week. And worse, the meals for the weekend, with the exception of Saturday’s breakfast, were all socializing events. (Well, I didn’t have lunch either day, but that’s no surprise for me.) I was, in effect, “on” the entire time, and the cumulative effect of that was to leave me, this morning, just entirely done and wanting a day to myself, to let my brain drain of everything I’d just gone through and then fill back up with energy and ideas to face the week ahead.

I didn’t get that, of course. But maybe next weekend.

**

As I’m typing, there’s a Donald Trump rally going on where he apparently talked about the need to “close up” the Internet because it’s turning people against “us.” Quite who the “us” is in that statement isn’t clear to me — Trump supporters? Americans? Trump, I’m sure, would see no difference between the two, and neither would his supporters, which is but one of the problems with that whole thing.

(I am, I realized when the Scottish Independence debate was happening last year, astonishingly suspicious of patriotism; I can’t look at it without seeing the stirrings of xenophobia in there, even to a tiny degree. Patriotism relies on the “Them and Us” concept as much as any bigotry, after all, and that kind of thinking is always difficult for me to come to terms with. Ever since the General Election in the UK where the SNP swept into power in Scotland, I’ve felt far more removed from the country and the national identity than ever before. I literally feel pushed out, somehow.)

The notion of “closing off” the Internet in general is fascinating, however; for all its (many) flaws, the one thing that people have held close to their/our hearts about the Internet as The Great Hope is that it can and does democratize media and conversation — all those online have a voice, as much as that can seem horrible, overwhelming or frustrating at different times. “Closing off” the Internet, then, feels like a specifically anti-Internet idea, something that betrays the thing that we all believed in to some degree.

The more Trump says ridiculous, unbelievable, nasty things — today, he also said that all Muslims should be barred from the US, for the love of God — the more I think to myself, surely, surely this is the thing that will make people realize that it’s all gone too far and his support will fall apart. But, no, just the opposite happens: people rally around him and somehow, he continues to… well, be Donald Trump. It’s surreal, depressing and something that makes you want to drop out of paying attention to this kind of thing, except that to do so surrenders the world to those who support Trump in the first place.

All I can say is that I want common sense to win in the end, but let’s be honest; it’s politics. What is the likelihood of that happening, realistically?

**

And so, I’m going to try and get back into the swing of doing these Monday evenings again, every week. Between Thanksgiving planning and workloads and trying to write ahead on the Wait, What? Advent Calendar (Patreon supporters know of which I speak, because it’s for them alone), I’ve felt too scattered in the last few weeks to get it done, but I’ll try harder in future.

I’ll try harder to be kinder to myself, as well, and find some mental space to recharge and renew. It’s the holiday season, after all. We’re all supposed to be kind, right now.