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I Can’t Stop My Brain You Know It’s Three Weeks

After five weeks of either not working or very low impact working, last week saw a confluence of events that meant that, not only did I have enough freelance gigs to keep me busy all week, but the deadlines for them were all such that I was left with a week that would have been busy even before I lost all my regular gigs, and got out of practice of, you know, actually sitting down and writing.

The upshot of this was that I spent the week thinking about my job a lot more than usual; not just what I was writing and what I was trying to say, but also the when and the how and the why of it all — as well as the just how much am I managing to make from this, and the will I be able to make a living doing this moving forward, for real? (Spoilers: those last two were the more stressful of the subjects to consider for the entire week, and I still don’t really have answers to either, yet.)

During all of this, I realized two things. Firstly, that my job is weird. The thing that I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life or so doing, day in and day out, is a very strange way of earning a living, and I’m very fortunate to have been able to succeed doing it for as long as I have. Secondly, that it’s also a particularly exhausting job, which I’m not sure that I’d ever actually realized before, or had the time and/or opportunity to do so.

I don’t just mean the fact that it can be physically tiring, although I had forgotten the back ache that comes with sitting there all day for a week;  constantly having to “generate content,” as the kids say, is an endurance race I’d never really stopped to consider. The brain space required to have to write multiple extended argumentative or informative pieces per day isn’t nothing, especially when you add in the pitch process which means you’re coming up with three ideas for every one you manage to get accepted.

This is my new normal, and I’m sure that I’ll get back up to speed sooner rather than later, but right now…? I’m just left thinking that I’ve been doing more than I thought for a long time, and perhaps that was harder than I really knew.

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O La La

That we’ve now made it a full year into official, all-across-the-country (if not the world, but let’s keep things in some kind of sensible perspective) COVID-inspired lockdown is the kind of thing that has inspired multiple threads of journalistic coverage over the past week or so: retrospectives of where we were one year ago, oral histories of whatever particular industry you want to think of about just how their specific slice of the world has been impacted by what’s happened in the past 52 weeks, and so on. As with every notable anniversary of anything, there’s been a substantial amount of reflection happening and being shared across media.

Which means that it’s time to take note that, as of writing, we are somewhere like 54 weeks since I decided that I should really take my laptop into a repair shop to take care of the fact that the “O” key is broken, and has a tendency to come off when hit, or else not work at all, and therefore force me to type more slowly and deliberately — or else have to retype certain words after the fact. (It doesn’t escape my notice that the last sentence had a fair amount of “O”s in it; does that count as irony?)

Weirdly, I remember this so clearly because I more or less made the decision to deal with the problem — which had actually started when I was on the plane to Brazil, months earlier — just before lockdown started, but I procrastinated as is my tendency, and suddenly, the word was given. Specifically, I remember thinking innocently, fine, I’ll just put it into the shop when lockdown is over, it’s probably only going to be a few weeks and I can put up with it until that’s done.

Ah, if only I knew then what I know now…!

Of course, what I know now is that I can be remarkably patient with typing if I need to be, and that somehow I can survive without a fully working keyboard longer than I’d expected. Admittedly, I did almost buy an entirely new laptop as a solution at one point last year, but at least I knew enough to know that was an overreaction at the time…

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How Does It Feel To Feel?

In two separate conversations lately, I’ve been giving friends updates on my current work and financial situation — spoilers: both have been better than they currently are — only to receive roughly the same response: “I’m surprised how upbeat you sound, despite everything that’s going on!”

I’m paraphrasing; one of the responses was more along the lines of, “Why do you sound so happy?” as if I was doing something wrong by not being more depressed, which I admit that I love. There’s something amusing to me about admonishing someone for not being distraught enough in reaction to dire circumstances, as if they’re doing it wrong. Aren’t we… supposed to not surrender to the history of the world, and all that kind of thing…?

Nonetheless, I’ve been caught with the idea that I am happier than I have the right to be over the last few days. Not that I feel as if I’m being criticized, per se, because that really is just a funny idea to me — be more sad, dammit — but, instead, that maybe I’m missing something that means far worse things than I have properly taken into account. What if I really should be more sad, or more worried, or more angry, than I currently am?

Ironically, that concern — that I’m missing some implication or meaning that others are instinctively, immediately grasping, and it’ll all end in tears — is what’s been keeping me up at night, almost literally. I’ve had dreams about things going worse and me not seeing it coming, and woken up uncertain and wishing I could remember the details more clearly, just in case.

The idea that there’s worse around the corner and I’ve been blissfully unaware has slowly been becoming the worse that’s been around the corner all along, and now it’s derailing whatever good mood I was in before this. Is this a sign that memetic warfare is possible and potent, or merely that I’m particularly impressionable when things are up in the air?

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Start Getting Real

Watching The Real World: Homecoming or whatever it’s called yesterday proved to be a nostalgic experience, if not for the exact reasons that the show’s makers had intended. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun enough to watch Kevin, Heather, Julie, Norman, and the other three whose names I forget go on at genuinely extraordinary and dull length about how unbelievable it was that they were in exactly the same loft space as they’d been in 29 years earlier — that the show couldn’t have been filmed a year later to coincide with an actual anniversary feels as if it says everything about how lazy and contrived the whole thing is, wonderfully — but the nostalgia I felt wasn’t actually anything to do with the show itself, not really.

In the UK, the first season of Real World didn’t air on MTV, but as a Sunday lunchtime show on mainstream network Channel 4. As such, it picked up a lot of viewers who would otherwise have passed it by out of ignorance or simply never watching MTV. For example, me. Even better, for a further example, my mother.

While I’ll happily put my hands up as a fan of reality show trash, the same would never be true of my mum, who never watched an episode of Big Brother or any similar show in her life. But that first season of Real World obsessed her as much as it did me, feeling like the social experiment that the show claimed to be at the time — Michael Apted’s 7Up series on fast-forward and filled with particularly insufferable people.

We’d watch the show together as we ate lunch, the rest of the family doing more important things. (It was a Sunday, so they were probably reading the newspapers; buying seven or eight massive Sunday papers, with all the supplements and the magazines, was a weekly tradition in my family; we’d spend the rest of the day reading them.) It was a small, silly thing, our watching together and getting breathlessly sucked in — and reacting together, at whatever ridiculousness was happening that week — but, even at the time, it felt comforting and important, an unexpected thing we shared and bonded over quietly.

Far more than what had happened to the original cast, that’s what the reunion made me think of; a summer of lunchtimes with my mum, almost three decades ago. It’s a favorite memory, when I return to it.

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Start Walkin’

I’m not entirely sure why it happened, but yesterday I heard “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” and became utterly obsessed with the second verse. I’ve known the song for decades, and like all good people have long loved its casual cool in the amazing bass line, the sassy Nancy Sinatra delivery, and the ridiculous, overly enthusiastic horn section at the fade out, but this was something new — and, I suspect, something long overdue.

It’s not as if I was unaware of how good the lyrics to the song were; there’s no way you can hear the song and not notice lines like “you’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t be messin’” or the amazing “I just found me a brand new box of matches/And what he knows, you ain’t had time to learn.” Even the verse that caught my ear yesterday starts with the iconic “you’ve been lyin’ when you oughtta be truthin’,” another memorable earworm.

There’s something about that line that sets up what struck me, though; the confidence about it — here’s how you should behave — and the wonder of “truthing,” a word that, if it did exist previously, certainly wasn’t commonly used. It’s so bold, so self-assured, that it’s utterly compelling in how quickly it communicates the attitude of the entire song: I’m not like everyone else, and you’re going to realize that when I’m gone.

The rest of the verse follows suit, with each new line a masterclass in both wordplay and attitude. “And you keep losing when you oughta not bet” is such a great put down of the song’s target — it’s not just that they’re losing, they’re dumb enough not to know when to quit — while “you keep samin’ when you oughta be a’changin’,” is more of “truthing” again; a word that doesn’t exist but should, creating something that just feels true and easily understandable in opposition to the norm. We know what changing is, so of course “saming” makes sense.

And then, of course, the killer kiss-off, to end the verse (and, likely, the heart of the song’s target): “Now what’s right is right, but you ain’t been right yet.” Good luck coming back from that.

Yes, Nancy Sinatra performs the shit out of the song, and, yes, the arrangement is a masterpiece. But what caught me yesterday was, to be blunt, sheer jealousy over how well-written these lyrics really are. If only I had even half the skill to be able to write like this. Good job, Lee Hazlewood, you talented fuck.

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Not The Droids You’re Looking For

One of the unexpected side effects of getting back to pitching and sending out feelers for work is that I suddenly have to pay attention to my email again. That’s not to say that I’ve been completely ignoring my email before now — although I have, I confess, been guilty of paying less attention to it than I should — but there’s a new hunger and need in me to pounce every time a notification appears that I have new mail: what if it’s someone saying yes? What if it means I get to write one of the stories I really want to write?

(This suggests that I’ve pitched stories that I don’t really want to write; reader, the truth is, I’ve pitched a number of those stories, mostly because I think they might be useful to editors and/or outlets, and I want to be someone who appears useful to editors and/or outlets. I’m my own worst enemy, especially if those are the pitches everyone says yes to.)

The problem with this is that I’m not entirely sure that it’s healthy to get as excited — or, perhaps “agitated” would be a more appropriate term to use — whenever I get email, given just how much email I’m still getting from the days when I was writing for two high-profile outlets and therefore placed on seemingly every PR person’s mailing list. I’m seeing notifications come in and thinking, maybe this is the one, and it’s really just the one from someone I’ve never heard about telling me that this is the time I need to start listening to this particularly country artist, or that I need to treat myself and they have the ideal product to help with that.

On the one hand, these emails aren’t really a problem; I scan them and, for the most part, delete them, all of which is easy enough to do. But I’m getting tired from the emotional rollercoaster of thinking that things were about to change, only to realize that the only thing changing is the exciting life story of the creator of a new and exciting vegan restaurant in Los Angeles.

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Insect Infect Insect Infect

Of all the fake names ever used in spam comments on this site, “Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine” is perhaps the most amusing and the most timely. I’ve been thinking a lot about the vaccine lately; about its availability, about when I’ll be able to get it, and about just how successful it’s going to be in the grand scheme of things.

In some abstract way, as we approach a full year in lockdown — although, it strikes me, few have fully observed the lockdown for that entire time; the seemingly increasing number of people wandering the streets without masks makes that all too clear, sadly — the idea that the vaccines will work, and that we may one day return to something close to what we used to call “normal,” feels almost impossible.

This, by now, is normal. This weird world where we don’t really go out and do things, is the world as it is and has been for the length of our short-term memory; even moreso, the idea of doing something else, whether it’s going to the movies, or going to a restaurant, or anything that used to be considered an usual social occurrence, feels not only alien, but more than a little unsettling to boot. Imagine being that close to strangers without wearing a mask at all times!

(Or two masks, even; I’ve taken to wearing two masks out in public after reading advice that it would be advisable considering the new COVID variants, and even that has become less strange and uncomfortable incredibly quickly — it was only a couple of weeks ago when I felt as if it was too much, and that I was breathing oddly, but now I do it without even thinking and feel entirely normal when I do.)

Perhaps this is just what happens, perhaps it’s just how our brains work. All I know is that, this far into COVID lockdown, the very notion that there’s an “other side” to the virus and to lockdown that we’re headed towards feels as if it’s science fiction.

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With A-Mixed Emotions

I spent some time yesterday writing a pitch for a piece that I might be working on in the future, if all goes well; it’s something that I, ironically, was hoping to do for THR, before I was laid off and was then invited to pitch for elsewhere. The plus side of this is, I have a pretty good idea of what I’d want to do, given the chance. On the other hand, my pitch alone turned out to be longer than some stories I’ve written for outlets in the past, so it would be a significant undertaking.

(But, oh! If I had a chance to do it! It could be so much fun, despite the workload…!)

I am returning, in my head, to work — or the idea of working, anyway. I’d planned to use February to step away and get my head straight, to plane future moves and take a break before returning to things properly in March and pitching everywhere, writing some things for outlets old and new, and generally discovering what the future “swing of things” would look like. It felt like a good idea at the time, not least of all because, while I didn’t realize quite how much I’d been affected by being laid off, I knew the answer was “probably more than I know right now.”

Now that I’m here, though, I find myself both excited at the thought of working again — which is, in itself, surprising and exciting — but also quietly terrified about the vague plan I have for my future. Really, the fear centers around a very simple idea: what if I fail? What if I can’t make a living doing this anymore?

It’s a fear born of rejection anxiety after being laid off as much as any practical, “real” concern, I’m well aware. It’s also coming from the knowledge that I really did have it unnaturally good before, with my relationships with THR and Wired, and that things will never be that good again. I’m trying to be okay with knowing that, though, and embracing whatever is next, in whatever shape it comes. Even if it means writing enormously long pitches and crossing my fingers that someone says yes.

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There On The Stair, Right There

Watching It’s A Sin has unleashed a wave of unlikely 1980s nostalgia in me, and not because much of the show’s period soundtrack turns out to be surprisingly great; instead, what I was reminded of was the way in which the decade felt, at times, like the end of the world.

I remember, for example, the AIDS crisis becoming mainstream, and the panic and misinformation that brought with it — everything from the apocalyptic adverts on television and in newspapers, made by the government, that basically said, there’s this illness, we’re not sure how it’s transmitted, but don’t get it or you will die, good luck, to the rumors of how you could get it from using public toilets. There was a sense that it was an almost Biblical plague and, as such, it was incurable, so the only option was to surrender to it and accept its spread as unstoppable.

(I half-remember some of the context that It’s A Sin provides, but I wish I’d known more at the time; I was just a kid at the time, sure, but nonetheless, I wish I’d known more.)

It wasn’t just AIDS, though; I remember the free floating feeling, almost a certainly from many, that we were almost guaranteed to die in an imminent nuclear war. I remember hearing discussions about the US Navy base at Holy Loch, just across the river from my hometown, and how that was almost sure to be one of the first targets if and when war broke out. We were, I learned, pretty much assured to be vaporized when the US and Russia went to war, which I was all but assured was going to happen any moment.

Again, I was just a child during all of this; I was five when 1980 started. I never really stopped to wonder whatever that must have done to me, growing up with a background certainty that the end was nigh, but I’m sure the answer isn’t “nothing, that kind of thing is good for a developing mind.” It makes me wonder, not for the first time, what this COVID era is doing to kids today.

That might be the thing, though; maybe it’s always the end of the world for kids, and it’s just we adults that learn to tune it out.