220713: NOT REALLY THERE

These past couple of months have been weird in that I've not really felt like being a "comicky" person at all. This is odd because if there's been one constant in my life for the past thirty-odd years it's been comics. Music, football, speedway, girls, beer - all have come and gone and come again but comics have stayed the course. If I look back, I can probably only have two or three "interests" at any one time, and this is why the others fall by the wayside to be replaced by something new, but comics? Hmm. I'm still reading them, occasionally, on my tablet, but there's four weeks' wroth sitting at the comic shop and I haven't drawn one in two months. Ah, well, I'm sure I'll get back on that particular horse once the weather stops being stupid.

 

Of those I've read recently, none have made as big an impact on me as The New Deadwardians. It's a crime procedural set in an alternate Victorian era, where the dead have risen and the upper classes have taken a cure to prevent them falling prey to becoming zombies. The cure, although not explicitly stated, is heavily implied to have turned them into vampires, and all that that entails. It's really very good, and I hope there's a sequel. I didn't write this, though, to do some kind of review job. I want to tell you why it affected me so much. One of the central themes of the vampires' (called "the young" in the comic) lives is their lack of appetite for anything the living enjoy. They eat and drink, even though they no longer need to, because that's what they used to do. They feel no desire towards anything that could remotely be described as "sins of the flesh". They are more dead than the zombie-like creatures they sought to avoid becoming.

 

Now here's the thing, the whiny, woe-is-me, isn't my life terrible thing: I feel the same way much of the time. I get no genuine pleasure from much of what I do. I only know that I should and that one day the memory of the things that I've done might spark some pleasant, nostalgic feeling. I participate in and even seek out new experiences, but I'm not sure that I ever really enjoy them. Is that odd? Am I alone in this? And if this is what's happening to me, why on earth do I insist on pretending to like things hat cost me money rather than free non-entertainment? Life, eh? It's an anti-duck. On the surface paddling like mad but underneath as dead as anyone who ever took the cure...

 

. . .

 

The ghosts - because what else could they be? Insubstantial, howling things, all tortured faces and terrible masques, intangible trails and chilling touches. None more ghost - whipped the room into a frenzied cyclone of pain and torment, encircling the girls as they huddled together for security they knew was not going to be found. The eldest of the two whispered that everything was going to be alright, as much to herself as to the younger girl, and though neither of them believed it there was some comfort in her words. Of a sudden, the door flew open and the shape of a man stepped through, uttering an incomphrensible word that stulled and silenced the ghosts, who turned their unseeing eyes towards him. His face was covered by the brim of his hat, and with a long duster silhouetted in the low light from beyond the room, he looked every inch the cowboy from the Saturday morning picture show the girls had enjoyed in the life they had before this moment. He lifted his head and the eldest girl screamed - the youngest unable to utter a sound - at the sight of the shifting, unsettling mass that sat where his face should have been, as if what lay there couldn't quite exist in our world. With what passed for a smile in that shapeless morass the ghosts resumed their attack, the evanscent suddenly very, very real...

 

. . .

 

"Every has a right to have a favourite song." Good quote, innit? I made it up myself, whilst watching The Joy Of Easy Listening, which I'd taped off of BBC4 a few weeks ago. It - the show, not the quote - was about the genre that sprung up as technology brought music into people's homes and, as the young people had rock and roll and all that jumping and jiving music, filled a gap in the older generation's earholes. Easy Listening has been a much-maligned genre, in every incarnation of the music, from genuine soft orchestral music like Mantovani, Conniff, or Kampfaert, through the lounge music of Bacharach, Alpert, and Webb, the adult contemporary sounds of The Carpenters and Neil Diamond, right up to the hipster reclaimation of the form. All of it laughed at, derided by the music press and the cool people, but all of it brilliant. How could you not like music that is easy to listen to?

 

I've always been a fan. I didn't know that what I liked was Easy Listening until I heard it called that, around twenty years ago. I just knew that, of all the music my parents listened to, I liked this stuff the best. Bread rather than The Beatles. The Carpenters over Abba. Neil Diamond over Elvis Presley. But not Richard Clayderman. I wasn't deaf. The music I bought myself, my music, couldn't have been further from Easy Listening, all noise and angst and guitars and drums and youthful energy. But even then if a decent arrangement turned up I was all over it, I just didn't know why, and was probably a little bit ashamed. But by the mid-90s I knew, and I wasn't worried any more. I called the university music society I co-founded Easy Listening and I was probably the only one for whom it wasn't ironic. I even put The Carpenters on the flyer, hidden amongst Green Day, The Beastie Boys, and Nirvana, but mistyped it "Carpetners" - perhaps the shame wasn't all gone, subsonciously at least.

 

The music that is lumped under the umbrella title Easy Listening is actually a whole host of things but the one thing that unites it is that, somewhere amongst the thousands and thousands of songs, is the favourite song of people who you don't think really like music, like your Dad or your Nan. Everyone has a right to have a favourite song and there has to be a favourite song for everyone - chances are, it's got strings on it and it's something you don't have to think particularly hard about...

180713: BRITISH PEOPLE IN HOT WEATHER

So the heat's still here, and with it comes everything that is glorious about a British summer. Cocksure boys with their t-shirts off, thinking they look all cool and suntanned when, in fact, they're just making a great argument for eugenics. Stinking BBQs, as though hot weather gives you the right to pollute your neighbours with foul smoke and meat smells - you can't imagine these same people, in midwinter, standing at their kitchen window, wafting the smell of their rancid sausages out at passers-by, though they probably would if they could. And the moaning, all the moaning, all of it done by me.

There's one thing missing, though, and that's riots. Where are the riots? It's hot, the underclass are still oppressed, where are the riots? I make no bones about it - I'm a disasterbator, I want to turn on the news and find out it's the "shit is burning" channel, all day, every day, but so far nothing. Disappointing. Today's youth, eh? Oh well, I'm sure the Metropolitan Police will kill someone they shouldn't have soon, that'll do it.

. . .

Much to my doctor's chagrin - if she actually knew who I was - I self-medicate. It's the only way I can get anything done, because if I dosed correctly I'd be a grey, nodding cameo of a man, walking a line so mediocre they'd paint it magnolia. So I skip days if I have to get stuff done, and sometimes this tips me into depression and other times, more often, into mania.

Being manic is not actually a very helpful thing to be, unless you're preaching on some street, and it can make me a horrible person - like the kind of person I imagine I'd be if I were any kind of boss or manager. I get short, angry, unaccommodating of anyone else's weaknesses, like Danny DeVito in Taxi. On the other hand I also get creative, and able, and I'm fantastic company - my self-worth goes through the roof, often to the point where none of you little ants could possibly match up to me, and then the negatives start again.

I wish there was some other way but I can't find it. Bi-polar is what I am, no more able to change it than an amputee can grow a new limb or a diabetic can stop injecting, and so the cycle continues. Up, up, up, up, UP!, medicate. Down, medicate. Repeat until fade...

. . . 

It's the fifteenth anniversary of my Summer Of Gin, when I grew a full beard and spent most of the time in my room, with occasional jaunts to Brighton. All my housemates had left, and so I had a big empty house to myself, which I took advantage of by walking around naked all the time. I must have looked, for all the world, like a stumpy Action Man, only with a gin problem.

Yeah, gin - what a drink! As Milk & Cheese said, "Gin makes a man mean!" and they're not wrong. I once considered a smash & grab at a Brighton comic shop because the gin told me how simple it would be, even though the books in the window were pretty rubbish. This was after watching the Eurovision Song Contest and having been up all night the night before because we'd dropped something. Good times. Many of the stories from that time are embarrassing and awful but I'm the Larry David so it's all good.

I've not drunk gin since. You can drink so much of a spirit that you can't face it much again. Whiskey, fortified wine, Cinzano Bianco... the list goes on, and each with a most un-Bukowski story attached to it. You all have these stories. Life's okay, innit?

130713: HIHOWAREYA?

Dan Hartman is screaming at me from the TV but the sound is down and Steely Dan is playing on Spotify so Dan can shout all he likes. It's Instant Replay, anyway, because what else would it be?

. . .

The heat is oppressive. But that's all anyone says so it's lost its power. The heat isn't oppressive, it's boring. Someone said something about us not hating the heat, or the cold, or the rain, or the snow, but rather hating anything that lasts for more than 2 days, and I wonder if that's just the weather?

. . .

I'm nostalgic for something so flimsy that it didn't really exist when it actually existed and there'd be so little of it left to go back there's no point being nostalgic about it. But it's there, it happens, and you can't blame me for wanting a little holiday once in a while, and spending it in the past. Alan Whicker died yesterday, time was he was the only one who ever went abroad - I wonder if he took holidays in the past, too, or if the modern world was a sense of wonder to him, like the arl fella who came into my library once and stood, pleasantly amazed by everything he could see?

. . .

I've been thinking a lot about my friends lately, particularly three very special ones who I need more in my life than is probably possible. I see ghosts of one everywhere, the form and taste glimpsed, tangible and pleasing and disappointing in their fraudulence. Another doesn't need me anymore, which was always the plan, and I'm happy about that because the circumstances of our shared time always exhausted and crushed me a little inside, and third needs me more than ever and needs support I can't geographically provide. There's a fourth, but my thoughts are always warm and never longing, because that's the way it is, and I realise this is all cryptic bullshit. Sorry.

. . .

So it's been six months since I last wrote. I've been doing other things (and not very much at all). I'm trying writing again. You never know.