Written without purpose
Deep yoga breath in. Through the nose and out the mouth. Ahhhh… it’s nice to just sit at a laptop and start aimlessly typing. At this moment in time I have no idea where things will lead to, just mashing together some thoughts along the way and hopefully coming up with something better than your local drunk. Contrary to the cider-fisted vagabond, everything I see online these days is about how everyone is an overtly coherent expert — regurgitating the same old tired lines they read somewhere else on LinkedIn. It’s hard to escape “advice” on how to be incredible. I’ve read so many of them I should be immortal let alone a six-packed CEO of at least two Fortune 500 companies. Every article, between the lines is saying, “how could you be so stupid as to not know this — you would be rich by now!”. 99% of the people sharing and writing these things aren’t rich either but they’ll have you believe otherwise. It’s a very London thing to be lavish amongst friends and colleagues, then return home to your cardboard box apartment. Or i’m just bitter and wrong, and everyone else is really fucking rich. I better read some more articles.
This is the thing. Marketing lingo has become so mainstream that it’s impossible to tell parody from truth. This is pretty much true of all news come to think of it. If you read a headline such as, “Cameron calls in Andy McNab to lead fight against Corbyn’s refugee militia”, you really wouldn’t know whether it was true or not. At least, it seems like something David Cameron would say and The Mail would “report”. Information is pretty pointless these days unless you really concentrate on one thing. An increasingly difficult thing to do. Businesses worry about ‘Big data’ but I think we should too. I’m even getting distracted from writing this by pretty much anything that isn’t this. It’s not surprising then that we live in a world of gimmicks. I swear if I see another one of those ‘artists’ who has ‘redrawn Disney characters as they would look as middle-aged politicians’ things then I will literally scroll even quicker down my feed in a passive aggressive manner.
Third paragraph. This should really be a crescendo but seeing as I had no purpose when I set out other than trying to rediscover the joy of writing — it’s not looking promising. I bet Charlie Brooker never has these problems. In a similar vein, I recently bought Richard Ayoade’s book in which he talks to himself. I quickly discovered that he is much better at talking to other people and probably shouldn’t be left alone. The book was terrible.
This reminded me that my kryptonite is actor’s names. I can never remember them. Susan Boyle, Danny Boyle, Danny DeVito — they’re all the same to me. I find that so many actors look more or less exactly the same and are in fact interchangeable. Like that time in Neighbours where Cheryl Stark (Lou’s wife) suddenly became a new person and then everyone forgot. It’s like I suffer from some sort of actor racism. This acute actorism really puts me at a disadvantage in a pub quiz but I make up for it when it comes to the music round. Unless it’s music I don’t know.
Starting to think I mentioned that ‘crescendo’ too soon now as I still haven’t got to the climax I know I definitely didn’t promise to deliver. Let me just Amazon Prime that disappointment to you right now.
The other day I posted on Facebook about how nice it would be write some long letters to some old friends. Of course, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to hide all your content from old friends and so it was a completely fruitless exercise. No interactions. It makes me wonder — if someone writes something truly depressing on Facebook, a cry for help, does Facebook’s algorithm just go ‘hell no’, further worsening that person’s mental state? Algorithms truly do manage our relationships for us. That’s pretty much the worse thing ever. It’s not AI but it might as well be.
I’ll leave you with one other thought I had recently. Who did shoot the deputy? You would have thought there had been some further investigations? Dire Straits know how to keep them private. Was it Bob Marley or Eric Clapton? They’re all so similar these murderers. Someone call the special forces — I bet Jeremy Corbyn shot the deputy. It’s exactly the sort of thing he loves doing.
