The World That's Coming

I was surprised this weekend by a conversation in The Guardian between Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie and Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, ostensibly in support of Gillespie’s upcoming memoir, The Tenement Kid. What surprised me wasn’t that the two were talking, nor even that Gillespie had written a memoir — I’d found that out a few months ago, and have been lowkey looking forward to it ever since, especially because it stops before Primal Scream are successful, thereby avoiding the traditions and pitfalls of celebrity memoirs — but that, in reading the conversation, I found myself thinking feeling particularly, repeatedly, empathetic towards the points Gillespie was making.

More often than not, I’ll shy away from the idea that I’m particularly Scottish, or that my nationality holds any real sway over my personality. It’s not just that I’m particularly paranoid about nationalism, nor that I’ve spent almost half of my life outside of Scotland by this point in time — next year will be the 20th anniversary of me moving to the States, shockingly. Instead, it’s that I didn’t really see myself exhibit the various threads of a national personality that I did identify as “Scottish,” for better or worse. (I’m not entirely sure myself.)

Reading Gillespie, in particular, made me reconsider that — not least where he makes a joke about hating the Tories because he was raised in the west coast of Scotland, something that I read and instinctively went, yes, yes, that exactly. There are things that are deep rooted in my head and my heart that entirely come from where I was born and raised, as opposed to being specifically related to my family or friends, which was my previous explanation for things that felt very… Scottish, for want of a better way of putting it.

I’ve become more Scottish as I’ve gotten older, as well; it’s not been intentional, but it’s happened nonetheless. A mix of nostalgia, homesickness, and, I suspect, just simply age has made it happen. Perhaps I need to go back again, to see where my head is really at when it comes to my home country and heritage. It has been almost 10 years by this point, after all…

This year’s birthday proved to be a difficult one; not, I should make clear, because of the birthday itself — after 47 years, I’ve found that getting older is a fairly automated process if you manage to stay alive — but because of everything else that was happening on the day. By any regular standard, my birthday this year was filled with Things To Do that ranged from the low key (pitching stories for work, writing up one of those stories when it got accepted) to the major (a vet appointment that confirmed that one of the dogs has a sizable malignant tumor on his spleen), with more ranging to the latter end of that spectrum. It was, for any day, a lot.

It was suggested to me during the day that it’s become a tradition that I have unfortunate birthdays. This is perhaps a good thing to have forgotten, but apparently last year also saw the day hijacked by bad news — I think it was to do with paperwork relating to the divorce settlement, but I can’t really remember? — leading to the possibility that October 5th has become regularly full of bad luck and unpleasant events at some point of my life; not the most pleasant idea to play with, I think everyone would agree.

I spent part of the day thinking about how shitty a birthday it was — in no small part because others kept pointing it out, albeit in well meaning tones — and came to the realization that, if nothing else, it fit: 2021 has been, in no uncertain terms, what Queen Elizabeth II famously called an annus horriblis — a horrible, difficult year — for me, with career prospects disappearing, new opportunities arising only to vanish, and bad news plaguing loved ones on a depressingly regular basis. With that surrounding context, why should I expect a birthday that wasn’t filled with bad news, difficult conversations, and frustrations big and small?

Oddly enough, that realization helped, some. That said, if events could conspire to get better any time soon, I’d really appreciate that, please and thank you.

A true sign of how fast the last year has moved came the other day when I realized that the birthday post I made here for my 46th birthday was, in fact, almost a year old. What does that say about how I interact with the world, I wonder, that I find my birthdays marked by blog posts and finding new ways to talk about getting older? Nothing good, I suspect.

This birthday, the one happening tomorrow, is my 47th. For some reason, I’m getting hung up on that number over the last week, as if it’s the number that puts me closer to 50 than “in my mid-40s,” in some magical fashion that is inescapable and somehow, inexplicably, meaningful: Once you hit 47, there’s no turning back…

The obvious flaw in this argument is, of course, the inherent scariness of being 50. In my head, I know that it’s really a relatively arbitrary number — what is that different about 50 than 40, or 30? Each of those felt like milestones at the time, as if they were ends of one era and the beginning of another. The reality, of course, turned out to be far more complicated, with personal eras starting and stopping at inopportune times and hitting numbers that haven’t been attached with any larger societally agreed-upon meaning. (I was going to prove my point by saying that I got divorced at 44, and then had a moment of, “Is 44 some magic number because of the repetition?”)

Nonetheless, 50 looms in the near future for me, the latest in a line of ages that make me feel as if I should have everything figured out and lined up by that point. I know, too, that that idea is a flawed one; that there’s no such thing as having everything figured out, because life is messy and throws all kinds of distractions and problems in your way just when the road ahead looks smooth. Still, the idea floats ahead of me, a promise so far unmet but maybe possible by some method I haven’t quite worked out yet. Maybe that’s still to come; I have three years, after all.

Now that we’ve finally made it to October, I think it’s safe to finally tell the world: September was cursed.

I mean, that’s the only explanation for quite how strange (and, at times, difficult) the month ended up being, right? I know, I know; October should, by all rights — if not all rites, get it? — be the cursed month, considering it’s Spooky Central and the place where Hallowe’en resides and all, but the evidence doesn’t lie: I’ve never had any October that felt as trying and difficult as this past month has been. September 2021 was, by no stretch of the imagination, a cursed month.

If it wasn’t one dog’s dental surgery — 17 teeth removed at once! They even gave them to me in a tiny little test tube afterwards — then it was new of a tumor in another dog, or the possibility of yet another dog moving in, only for that to go wrong in such a fashion as to be concerning and no little amount of anxiety inducing. (The dog is a lovely dog, but he’s not a dog who could deal with the house as it currently exists, put it that way.)

That’s to say nothing about the wait to find out if the lease on the house would be renewed, or if we’d all be homeless in a couple of months. It was renewed, thankfully; going house hunting in these times would be a trial too far, I suspect. There was also the weekend of wondering if the nine year old had COVID, as well, although it thankfully was just a cold.

Oh, but then there’s the work elements, too; the publication of a piece I finished weeks earlier, prompting all kinds of discourse online that made me feel awkward and uncomfortable, as well as writing new pitches, one of which was for an entire job, many if not most of which came to nothing at all, because things are slowing up in a dramatic sense when it comes to my earning money. At one point, I was getting rejections left, right, and center and wanting to just respond, look at how popular this piece is, I could be doing that for you right now.

October may not be any easier on the work front, but at least everything else is unlikely to repeat in the next 31 days. After all, what are the odds of having two cursed months in a row…?

I ended last week in a few pieces, I have to admit, at least when it comes to emotions and thought processes. The week proved to be an especially difficult one, even though there wasn’t one particularly reason why that would be the case — there were, in my defense, about seventeen smaller ones, and Friday especially brought some news that was particularly difficult to deal with, if more than a little inconclusive. Nonetheless, it was one of those weeks that felt roughly three weeks longer than it should have been.

In sharing that observation with someone, the response came that, basically, that was the norm these days. When was the last time that a week hadn’t felt roughly a month long, they asked? When was the last time that it seemed as if everything had either worked out in everyone’s favor, or for that matter, just kept chugging along quietly without bothering anyone one way or another? It was a fair point, and the kind of reaction that simultaneously made me feel bad for complaining about my mental and emotional load and also wondering, wait, is everything just fucked now and that’s what we should consider the baseline for life? Doesn’t that mean that something is very wrong?

The thing is, even with the deluge of minor league bad news coming towards me, even with the unusually difficult year that 2021 has been for me professionally, I still can’t quite sign onto the idea that something is very wrong. There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that, personally, I’m actually in a far better place even with all of the shit happening right now than I was, say, five years ago — a fact that has me wondering just where my head and heart would’ve been if all of the bad news had struck when I was still where I was back then.

Things aren’t good, overall; there’s no denying that, and no real point in even trying. But, despite everything, I’m happier and in better shape for dealing with all this shit. That’s got to be something, at least.

I found myself listening to the new reissue of Super Furry Animals’ Rings Around the World album the other day, enjoying the unreleased tracks and the remixes. It was somewhere around the fourth or fifth track that I listened to, skipping around out of order, before it hit me: the fact that it was a 20th Anniversary Edition meant that Rings Around the World had come out two full decades earlier. Even now, that just doesn’t really feel possible.

It’s not that I feel as if music can’t have progressed since the release of what remains a perfectly wonderful, enjoyable album. (I’m amused, listening to it now, that so many of my favorite tracks today are the ones that I disliked on its initial release, and wonder what that says about me, and about aging in general; I’ve been singing “Alternate Route to Vulcan Street” for the last week.) More than that, it’s the sense that I can remember my experience of listening to the album the first time around in such detail that it feels almost impossible that this all happened 20 years earlier. Since when was my memory this good?

And yet: those memories place me in Scotland. Those memories have me still having hair, and being surrounded by piles of CDs — remember CDs? — as I sat at my iMac listening to the album. All of these things that, ironically, feel far older than happening two decades ago. The detail of the iMac alone feels roughly several lifetimes earlier; remember how modern they seemed at the time, and how, today, they feel as dated and signifiers of moments in design history as those weird bubble seats from the 1960s? (My iMac was “aquamarine,” which felt very exotic at the time. Oh, how innocent I was back then…! How little I knew…!)

Music has always felt more essential, more contemporary and now, than almost all other media, in my experience; it’s always had an easier connection to my memory and my responses, something more immediate and unavoidable. Now, thinking about it, I wonder how much of those connections are based on things that aren’t actually true, deep down.

(Rings Around the World is still a great album, and something you should all revisit, mind you.)