At the beginning of February 2016 I decided to use a goal tracker app to create and to keep in touch with blogging and other streaks. I was pretty conservative with my targets, not wishing to place undue pressure on myself.
Five posts a week? It SEEMED easy.
I checked just now; such is my lackadaisical approach to the discipline, as of today I must create 22 blog posts a week to hit my target.
I posted an image yesterday, to Twitter and to Facebook: ironic, sarcastic, call it what you will - a take on the trend to post words designed to both highlight injustice and put it right at the same time. Or expressing one’s individuality by choosing something funny from a preprepared list of names. And all without needing to exercise one’s scrolling digit. Instant gratification.
The words from MY image:
“Get your porn name by changing your name to that of your favourite porn star.”
And later, on Twitter, I was asked a simple question:
“What would yours be?”
Thanks Neil! A very good question, very good indeed. A question to expose one’s interests, proclivities, inadequacies, you know, those private things one simply doesn’t talk about except with close friends. Very close friends.
So, a dilemma. Do I write any further?
Of course I do!
At this point I could be forgiven for writing about:
Innocuous stuff, you’d think, but nonetheless addictive if one allows it. But no, I’m not going to write about those.
I’m about to launch into an in-depth treatise at times exploring the deepest darkest reaches of the human psyche. Those of a nervous disposition, please look away now.
…
Are you ready?
…
Just kidding. I’ve got my reputation as an intellectual lightweight to uphold. Besides, the UK government probably already knows what I’m into; give it a few years and I’ll be leaking all OVER the place!
A question: How patient are you?
The Sex Pistols accompanied me to work this morning; MOST unusual, as I usually rely on the calming sounds of the car’s ventilation fan to insulate me from the dullards queuing around me or indulging their moronic desires to occupy the bit of road my sensible car wishes to continue to exist unscathed in.
Oh yes, dullards.
Stuck behind drivers without the knowledge of how tiny their insignificantly-wide city car happens to be as they sit immobile before a gap through which my leviathan of a sensible family car fits with ease, I often ponder the meaning of life. Or wish carnage on the individuals around me. And their families.
So in my next life I should like to be a Time Lord; omnipotent, free of the petty restrictions polite society imposes, and with the ability to rearrange, er… things. (I’m assuming I’d work out the detail at the time.)
Every time someone intrudes, does something that bends, or breaks, the laws of British roads, I lose something.
Reasonable-ness? Benevolence? After this morning’s commute am I the same as I was yesterday? I don’t effing think so!
(sighs…) It wasn’t BAD per se, but the stupid WAS strong today. Maybe The Sex Pistols helped me make sense of it. Not bad for a near-forty-year-old band.
#message
If you’re a certain age, grew up and entered your teens in a pre-Internet era, you’ll have had a limited choice of music. Ok, I don’t mean a limited choice, I mean it wasn’t instantaneously there, at your fingertips.
Take your favourite streaming service, look at the breadth and depth of music; from classical to the latest ephemeral nonsense. Er… no, let’s not let prejudice intrude here eh. Simply put, aren’t we lucky? If there’s nothing on a self-produced play list, pick a ‘station’ thrown together by someone else, find inspiration from RANDOMNESS - something not available even at the height of the anarchically-sited radio stations of the golden age of radio!
Yes, lucky.
Right now I’m not listening to my old stuff (late-seventies to early nineties), no. I’m instead listening to twenty one pilots’ Blurryface album. Over and over again. Played loud on my rather nice Bluetooth headphones.*
A journey of discovery. So yeah, I’m 14 again and, do you know, it’s not all bad.
*Bluedio R+ Legend. Look them up. They’re comfortable, well-suited to my ears, maybe they have a bit of a heavy low end, and leak a bit around the edges… but heck, so do I these days!
Heading into the festive season most people would assume the worst of 2016 would be over by now.
It just got worse.*
It’s been getting worse for some time, but…
There’s one thing** that would lead me to believe there is hope for a brighter future: that the US President would attend Fidel Castro’s funeral. Officially. Sure it’d upset a metric shedload of closed-minded morons, but for the rest of us…
I’m not talking here about an indicator or a signal, I’m not inclined to use the weasel words politicians use when they cannot bring themselves to explicitly state a POSITION. I’d like Barack Obama simply to state he’s going to pay respects to another head of state.
We’ve been given only hope that lots of things will be brighter soon, we’ll be more prosperous soon, enjoy greater safety in SO many areas… soon. Or eventually. And yet the political classes simply cannot state HOW.
So let’s have the classy, though outgoing, President of the greatest country on the planet*** send an actual message to the future. No, he’d be better sending it to the present.
The message is a simple one: it’s not about them and us, it’s about us.
I for one want something rational, easily-explained, to be included in a process (even if it’s to be spoon-fed an outline of the plans affecting my future) and something that can’t be taken back, something that isn’t vague promises or populist soundbites.
It seems though that 2017 isn’t going to bring us stability, to benefit ‘normal’ people.
So, @POTUS, how’s about a trip to Cuba?
What other indicators do we have that this modern age of enlightenment is NOT about to end?
*And, do you know, the year is not over yet, not by a long way.
**If you’re interested I do have more than one thing.
***Hmmm… even self-proclaimed isn’t right any more, the current message is about making it great AGAIN, implying it isn’t now. What a sad admission.