Lush green grass sways with
the breathless brushing of boots;
chasing down the ball.
Category: TV
Smooth green baize is the perfect podium,
To crown our King of the Pot Black table.
“Glory” flashes inside their craniums,
Yet, “defeat” is the unwanted label.
Williams’ smoking century break,
But Trump does not take that just lying down.
This final will not be a piece of cake;
Errors will be punished in London-town.
The Welsh Potting Machine inconsistent;
Capable of some thrilling snooker play,
Until his polish all seems to be spent,
You have to feel that this won’t be his day.
Then two frames snatched late and he’s back in it:
We await the night with a 5-3 split.
Winners reel off
like tickets from a doctor’s office.
They fall to the floor gracelessly;
tossed aside,
kicked to the kerb.
Bright block colours
of the deepest, jarring shades.
Hot pinks and sickly custard yellows
illuminate the screens we shield ourselves behind.
We shiver until that next hit
as our wrist starts to ache
and our eyes bleed for delusion.
Flashing and dancing before us,
but our desire can’t be met,
we just huff like a dog, tired and bored
after frolicking in the sun, pretending to have a fun time.
The dog thinks he did enjoy himself,
man’s best friend doesn’t know us at all.
We turn back to the screens.
Waiting for the next one.
The next show.
The next winner.
The next bloody poem?
What a day to be a royal, ey. I’ve got a lot of respect for Megan and Harry. It was a weird interview. I went into it with popcorn (fried chicken) in hand and was really hoping for a Royal Knockout. It didn’t matter for me who was going to look better out of this; I didn’t mind if The Firm or Megan and Harry wanted to kick seven shades of shite out of each other.
Yes, I certainly came out on one side. I have definitely felt that Harry and Megan’s account makes sense. It’s an absolute embarrassment. At the same time, it’s kind of troubling how Britain’s Royal family could slowly transition from an archaic anomaly of inbred patronage to a sleek corporate machine. The institution was discussed in terms by Megan in American corporatist language. HR departments, CEOs (mentioned in an unaired clip in the UK, but shown within the US), and endless bureaucracy. This could well be the move the Royal Family tries to take in order to revitalize it’s image and rut out the troublemakers charged with ballooning the scandal.
Categories
Line of duty coming back
Good to see that Line of Duty is heading back to the tv within March. It’ll be interesting to see who “H” is, if we’re even sure that is his initial. I mean, if it isn’t, where the hell would you stop? I think the last season had a lot of potential, but it seemed to be poorly executed. They dragged the whole “Hastings-is-‘H’”-thing on far too long, and then had to come up with some ridiculous reason as to why he was busted torching his hard drive… Yeah, I didn’t buy that.
All the same, looking forward to it. Funny that despite the criticism I give it, I can love the show.
Another one of those fucking days. We all have them.
After a long slog at the desk, me and my fair lady decided to unwind rather erotically and then settle down to a homecooked meal. Afterwards, we flicked on a Louis Theroux documentary – the one where he visits the “hospital” for those who were acquitted from violent crimes by reason of insanity. I believe that’s the correct description anyway.
One of the inmates/patients, quite early on, when faced with the realisation that he could be moving out of the hospital and into his own pad (subject to various checks and balances) and probed by his thoughts on this by his warden/psychologist he states, “it sounds lonely.” There’s a lot of truth in this.
It’s sad and at the same time, for me, it raises serious questions about what being mentally indicates. This isn’t to question what mental illness is (although that is an interesting question). No, the real question is what it can show us – is there something which particular types of mental illness can show or illuminate for us?
There’s something about the shaking that the patients exhibit which is… disturbing. It looks wrong and unnatural. Its natural movements set into motion by drugs and chemical – done to limit and shape. Limit and shape. Limit and shape. There are things which are cut down, pulled apart, analysed, destroyed, rebuilt and monitored. The shaking is the price you pay.
Unnaturalness sticks together. It pales against the beauty of nature, and its artificialness means that it is one. Nature contains multitudes and manifolds; the unnatural is shaped by man and this becomes the overwhelming element within it. It can be broken up into anything else. So, what else can we see as unnatural, shaped by man, and can be identified as problematic by those with mental health issues, particularly depression and even schizophrenia?
One thing, something also noticeable in the documentary, is that work/wage slavery is also something unnatural. Living in your one bed flat sure is “lonely”. Standing at a grill in McDonalds is “alienating”. Recording your admin productivity each hour is “humiliating”.
The modern workplace is just a mental health stamina arena. Let’s see how you get on – who can put up with the most shit? Those who handle their mental health well, get ahead. Those who don’t, are losers. They are justified on facing further humiliation, losing their jobs, and ultimately suffering. They didn’t try hard enough. There is no assistance for mental health issues, and that’s because the modern world does see it as weakness. They really do. They don’t care if you suffer, as long as you keep going at a level that doesn’t harm their bottom line.
Until we shake ourselves from the fetters of the Romanesque style gladiatorial battle with one another and see that the reason we hold ourselves to an impossible, inhuman, unnatural standard is because the human world does, we won’t ever get over it. It’s not to say that we won’t develop more mental health issues, far from it, it will get worse. But those of us who suffer mental health issues can see how really crazy the world is and we’re not wrong, although yes, maybe still not all there.
We need a mental health manifesto. If capitalism really does want to continue, it will need to accommodate natural humanity. We get stressed and need a break – we can’t just choose to “use” our stress for higher sales figures or KPI hitting. No, we need to take a fucking break and learn from those who’ve already seen through the eye of the needle and bear witness to their lives falling down around them. I doubt we’ll listen and nothing will change.
I guess this is more of a note-to-self for another time down the line, but it’s something I really do want to consider.
I don’t know what it was but I’ll put it down to something akin to Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image”, or Theodor Adorno’s “constellation”. Recently, I’ve been meditating on the theme of Stoicism and its contrasts with Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and especially Taoism.
My reason for doing so is that my mental health has taken a bit of a kicking trying to move past things which I would regard as “outside my self-control”. Now, I use this definition of Stoicism, as I feel it is a relatively popular conception of it. I won’t pretend that I know the philosophy inside out, nor have I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. It’s typical in philosophy I assume, that the more you think the more you realise you have to read. Lord help us all.
However, as I say, using this popular definition of what Stoicism is: “the letting go of things that are not under your control”, I have a question that plagues me. Namely, at what point are things actually out of our control?
- For instance, if I was due to write an article with a looming deadline and my Wi-Fi connection cuts out; is this out of my control? What if I know that I can go to my brothers’ house, even if it is midnight and he lives one hour away? Is this still sufficiently within my control?
- How about if I can’t find a job and I need to find a way to feed my family? I know I can throw a brick through the supermarket window and steal from it. Is this within my control, or not?
- How about if I have an uncle who is sick for a long period of time? Would the act of me doing well in my school exams and going onto become a world famous researcher or surgeon, constitute his condition as being under my control? Have I made it my concern? Would it then, stoically-speaking, be better to not try to fix it? Or would this course of (in-)action be something in my control which I am actively rejecting? An affront to Stoic principles, it would seem.
I find that something interesting about the modern capitalist world is that it is programmed into us that we are supposed to find a way. If anyone has seen the excellent documentary Fyre, the story of how an influencer-targeted musical festival was so shoddily put together (if it even made it that far), that it fell apart within minutes of people arriving, you’ll probably remember one of the organisers’ disbelief at the co-founder Billy stating, “we want solutions, not problems.”
Those who have watched the documentary will see how Fyre fell into a negative snowball, becoming more drawn out, ugly and impractical as the start date approached. But Billy’s out-of-touch response to his team’s concerns is shared more widely. I would go as far to say that it is the battle cry for entrepreneurs of the 21st century. These people see the problems and just want solutions, whether or not these can be fixed.
There was no a priori reason that Fyre could not have been successful. It wasn’t destined by anything in particular. Mitt Romney saved the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics when it all looked doomed, who’s not to say that someone could have done a similar job here? Super Mitt could have potentially stepped in. Arguably, even postponing the festival until it was ready could have classed as affecting an issue into creating a desirable outcome. Although, then again, this seems to suggest a similar but slightly different, more pregnant question about Stoicism I can talk about another time: what are the parameters of the issue?
Right now, in 2020, it seems that the boundaries over a priori and a posteriori boundaries are shifted by business and capitalism. To the modern business man, everything should be a posteriori – everything should be capable of being fixed, and if not, you’re getting the sack, mate.
With this in mind, how far can we adopt Stoicism for ourselves? It has always struck me as a deeply personal philosophy. You are aware of your limitations and you know when something is out of your control. However in reality, to me, this is part of the problem I face when I am stressed is drawing this distinction myself. Does Stoicism rest on an assumption that we can make these determinations? That we have the courage or agency to say, “no”, even if something states that a responsibility is within our power? Let’s us this as a working example:
What about if one day I say “no” to my boss’ request to work on a project as I feel that the desired outcomes are out of my reach. He, on the other hand, states that it’s well within my grasp, and if I refuse, it would be a dereliction of duty and I would be disciplined. I may say that keeping my job is within my control and could say that “I will do it” knowing it is not possible, yet the project itself causes me more undue stress to take part in.
By widening the contextual net like this, it feels like we’ve fallen onto a contradiction of Stoicism as applied in practice. Seeing ourselves as the object and our boss as the subject and them holding the power in this relationship, we could be unable to apply Stoicism within our life as our boss could be negating its ability. We would be forced into caring; something which on my limited understanding of it would mean it is incapable of being utilised.
But like I say, just a thought!
Nicky Anelka –
Not quite what he seems.
A little hard to follow the logic,
But what a turn of pace.
Get him his own documentary;
Plenty of scraps to feed on.
Nicky Anelka: A Phenomenon
This one’s a freshie!
Dunno if we’ll ever get “H”,
But we’re back on track.
Ode to Line of Duty Season 5
Is binge-watching television (particularly The Simpsons on Disney+) a form of us pursuing the path of the least possible resistance in our lives? I ask this because I think that for the last three days, this is all I’ve done. The problem with this is that it’s so hard to shake off. You get in the zone and start watching it on day one, zero hour, and three days later you’re still reluctant to turn it off and do something else. Surely, to an extent, with so much television saturating your mind, you can’t be enjoying it anymore. In fact, even when you watch, you know that you don’t enjoy it – you just can’t stop.
Here you are: three days deep in the binge, unable to get up and not even really enjoying it anymore. You get sucked in and time just seems to fly. It’s just one episode, and you cut yourself some slack because you’re not watching it for long – after all, there are no adverts or commercials – you’re making time! But it adds up and gets harder to pull yourself away from. From the time you started watching at 10:00, it’s suddenly 16:10 and you’ve done nothing but loll around. You make plans not to do it the following day, but you will anyway most likely, as it’s so easy.
So again I ask, is there an almost passive attitude cultured through binge-watching? Could one adopt and almost Frankfurt School opinion that the “culture industry” enacts it’s pacification of us in a rather direct manner? Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer would roll if they could see us sat in front of the box and not just acquiesce to the pretty colours and demands television forces us to obey with regard to consumption, but it arguably makes us impotent and weak too. We’re not just going along with what it tells us, by 2020, we’ve just given up all together. We’re softened and just happy to stick the next episode on – in fact, we don’t need to even select it, auto-play is our God now.
The Disinterested Philosopher Gets By 