Major Tom! Move to Mars!

I don't often get New Scientist any more, although when I was a student I was pretty fond of it. I don't know exactly what put me off it, I do enjoy hearing about current discoveries and theories and despite the occasional derision of snobby educated friends of mine (it's too "pop" science, as if writing something people can understand is somehow a crime) I find it to be well written and informative.
Yesterday I though I'd forgo the usual depressing paper (does nothing good *ever* happen anymore?) and get a New Scientist instead.

First page editorial was gloomy predictions about social collapse. Next page, first boxout - "Will the Tsunami hit?" with a picture of Hong kong. Across the page, endangered species are all gonna die (picture of colombus monkey looking decidedly edgy) and another box out "Sentence of DEATH" about people who have been in prison dying early (no shit Sherlock). Turn the page again and the next thing is a four page article about noise pollution and how they suspect it makes you ill and is killing people.

I was halfway through the articles section of the damn magazine before I found anything that wasn't a portent of doom. I had to go outside just to check that the sun was still shining and the sky was still blue, and there were no Tsunami or Asteroids or Giant Mutant Beavers (GMBs) poised to destroy life as we know it. I though science periodicals were supposed to show me what hope we have for the future, the exciting and cutting edge of human development, not confirm that I should be looking to move to Mars. It seems to me that everything is doom and gloom. Everywhere you look, turn on a TV, open a paper, search on the Internet, we are alternately being told the world is ending! Evil is near! Followed by Buy! Buy! Buy! Only a limited time!

I think we can take it as read that the world will one day end. I think we can take it as proven that the world is warming and we need to do something, that people are dying of poverty and we need to act. Why can't we be given hope instead of fear? Get those Limey Fruit Market Worshipping Capitalist Pig-Dogs (LFMWCPDs)on the case- instead of selling us Laptops and MP3 players and cruises to Egypt get them to sell us carbon neutral cars and fucking sailing boats and bicycling holidays in Wales. Get the fuckers that made Crazy Frog on the case - if they can make that such a success then making Green and Fair-trade stuff should be falling off a log!

Then afterwards we can set the GMBs on the LFMWCPDs and sell tickets!

Assholes!

Don't look down.

Due to the nature of the universe there will be no strike today. There will be no more clemency for your foibles. Tomorrow will be something to regret, not to look forward to and a promise will remain just that: promise without realisation. You have passed reason. Unseen forces rule your life and if you have problems accepting *that* then my current suggestion is look to the law. The law of coincidences. It will exist if you believe in it enough. There is hope, hope in patience and patience through time. So I hope you have the time, because it is coming. Not just cataclysmically, not intruding on your meal at six with carbombs and crashes and mudslides and the death of children. No, not yet. It comes creeping in as fast as it dares, chipping away at your complacency and leaving you with a gnawing hint of dread, with disease in the farms and epidemics round the corner. With changes in the weather, with flood and wind and rain. But don't worry. Don't worry at all. You have the means to wash it all from your mind, the drug is in your hand, in the shops, in your breakfast cereal, on the couch with Anne and Nick, in banner adds and for sale at Amazon. It walks you to the shops and blazes from the sides of buses, takes you on holidays to Greece and opens Tapas bars for you to take loved ones too, so you can forget together. If it won't go, if you're getting sleepless and careworn, if you stop subscribing, well that's ok too. Because it's covered. We don't want you to do anything! Just come to our rock concert, watch on TV, drop a few coins in the tin, get a badge, get a bracelet, buy the t-shirt, buy the life. Recycle that life and turn the TV off standby, but keep the holiday and the car because hey, being free is important. Get high but don't look down guys, don't let anyone *bring* you down guys, those fuckers will kill you. Change the world? Sure you can! Support me and I'll change it *for you*! Keep living that life, keep consuming. You're a shark, you're a killer. If you stop moving, you're dead. It might look like I'm sneering at you, that's just a cold. I have it all worked out. Trust me. No, don't ask why. You won't like the answer.

Autumn comes with such surprising speed.

I love days like this.

I went down to the beach in town today and the whole bay was a seething mass of chaos and white foam. Massive waves driven in off the Pentland firth by a strong south easterly were just smashing into the shore with such force I could feel the rumble coming up through the bones in my legs.

The wind was thick with salt spray and disgruntled gulls who, having been ousted from their favourite spot on the wave-line had nothing better to do that mill around above the sea-wall like bored teenagers, squawking, squabbling and occasionally swooping down to pick at rubbish.

Some hardy people were being blown up and down the shore, but most sensible people stayed camped out in their cars. Summer tends to breed a kind of complacency in people about the weather and the forces of nature that Autumn comes to smash away, so a brisk wind and drop of a few degrees is christened "wild" weather by a couple of people in the bank. In just a few short weeks, as the world turns and the days darken, a day like this will be "warm and windy" and by April will be a sign that Summer is back on the way.

It's the wildness in the sky and sea that I love so much, the free power of it all as the world tumbles around itself. It is a time of change, a turbulent passage from one season to the next where everything is shuffled ready for the next hand, there is a charged excitement just in one short walk that reminds you how good it is to be alive, how beautiful every breath you take, every wind-blown leaf in the sky can be.

The air is sweet and fresh and clear, and full of thousands, no, millions of different noises, from high pitched rushing through trees to the gut-deep thrum as it forces itself past buildings, the clang and chime of the rigging on boast tapping against masts or the creak from the frames of old houses. the clank of a gate carelessly left ajar or the fading in and out of everyday noises as they are blown around in the storm.

The world is in chaos, every wave utterly different as it foams and crumbles up the shore but part of a larger pattern of advancing lines that are speeding towards the land. Leaves and rubbish are sucked in to spinning dances performed illicitly in the lees of walls, dragging any small debris in to the madly whirling tune while tress become shivering, rocking giants, moshing to their own exclusive beat, all slightly out of time with each other.

There is so much detail we miss just because we don't listen, or look.

So if it's windy and wild where you are now, I really recommend you wrap up warm and go for a walk.

If you're like me, you wont regret it.

Don't call me Scarface....

I’m an anarchist. A proto-socialist feminist pro-libertarian animal lover with leanings towards the anti-establishment and anarchical sympathies.

Or so I would have you believe. I could also say I was a Marxist neo-neo-socialist revolutionary fluffmonkey with massive identity problems. Or I could just say I was…..me.

I have a problem with these kind of labels. A huge problem.

I’m still of an age that I can remember my adolescence quite vividly, and at that age boxes and categories were a comfort. I was trying to make sense of the world and of all the confusing, conflicting information and people I was meeting. (how can people be pro-abortion but anti-death sentence? How can people say they hate inequality yet support a free market society that creates that very thing? How can you like football and rugby?) On the threshold between the simplicity of childhood and the utter chaos of adulthood meant that having some handle on all these conflicting concepts is irresistible - feminist, socialist, racist, communist, Libertarian, radical, punk, gay, all these wonderful tribal labels to stick on people so I didn’t have to think too much. Now I’m reaching a place in my life where I now want to take everything back out of the box into which it was carelessly shoved more than a decade ago and really understand it. I can now handle contradictions and I understand now that what people say, and what they really believe are often two very different things.

Now there are some things you just are. The accident of my birth made me Scottish, other people are Jewish, others Royal. These are not so much labels as descriptions, cultural or racial features that you cannot really choose to be, any more than I can decide to be a member of the royal family (god forbid). But describing myself as a Socialist is just an expression of opinion, a considered viewpoint that differs in many different ways from other "Socialists" and there is the rub.

You see when you take something you feel, for example "women are equal to men and should be treated as such" and slap a name on it, in this case feminism, you create a monster. It is immediately defined from one position so that some people are Feminists, while others are not, even if they had the same thought in the first place.

It works both ways too. You can masquerade under the banner of feminism, pay lip service to it's tenets, ponce about making dodgy statements, or in extreme cases porn, to "liberate" women. By exploiting them. Those that question just "don't get it".

Porn is a good example of what I'm talking about: as it becomes more mainstream we hear more and more people describe it as "empowering" for the women. They are the object of desire and this gives them this power, apparently. Erm, HELLO? They are the object of desire. Object.

You want to tell me that is good for women? Then I'll tell you what. Go make it regulated, only employ people who are screened to be psychologically capable of handling (even enjoying) having sex for public titilation, put no pressure on the performers to do anything they aren't into, there are strong storylines and the performers are not treated like exhibits of meat even when they are not working and above all else you make it equal, then I'll agree with you.

No more faceless men with Exocet missiles between their legs and ridiculous howling and yelping from moistened fuckpuppets. No more "gangbangz in da hood" and "Candy slut bangs the Detroit Dixies". Give them names, faces, motivations, emotion. Make them people. I digress.

It is a sad feature of our nature, regardless of society or standing, that we look at the differences first and to a certain extent define ourselves by them. The crazy thing is we are driven to conform too, peer pressure is the one largest influence on your whole life. You want to be cool and out there but also accepted and looked upon favourably. You want to be a player in the gang. Deep down you want to be "us" not "them", and where there isn't a "them" eventually you'll make one. Feminism might bring like-mided people together, but they will eventually divide up like bacteria into ever multiplying factions.

Philosopy sits inside belief inside Philosophy, like Russian dolls. You aren't just a feminist, you can be a traditional one or a neo-feminist one! Bra-burner! Ladette! My side! Your side! It isn't long before we have divided up a concept and totally lost sight of the original feeling under all the infighting and squabbling over the definition. Who has walked the true path? Who has "sold out"?

Who is coming up with all of this? Good lord! Since the beginning of society our species have been locked in this idiocy. I can just see stone age people gathered round the giant boulder they have all just dragged tens of kilometres, one set shouting "Shrine to the gods!" and the others shouting "Tomb for our ancestors!" and brandishing weapons. And of course when the shrine guys win, we all know they will just start arguing amongst themselves about which god the shrine is for, while in the confusion a smaller group of them quietly drag it further away and describe to the village this great idea they have had for a calendar.

True story.

The low road home

I grew up in a small community.

In a small place. On a small island. In a village that is a couple of kilometres long and a couple of houses wide. The village had three shops, four pubs (at its peak) and more bed and breakfasts that you could shake a rather large stick at.
As I grew up I became aware that most people would bang on about how it was sheltered, living in a bubble, away from the real world where real things happened, where it was all harder but so much more rewarding. Most of these people had lived in this real world (so they said) and could tell me with some authority that I was better off here. While of course retaining that mystique and obvious superiority that having lived and experienced this real world brought.

There has always been a prevailing attitude there that somehow the evils of the "outside" world somehow stop at the ferry terminal on the mainland, and to a certain extent it is true.

The population is mainly in the over 50s bracket, people looking for a quiet place to get on with the next step in their lives, people fleeing the "rat race", people looking for a haven from unsatisfactory lives elsewhere, so it is little wonder that people feel this way. There is little crime, indeed the resident crime lords are petty drug peddlers flogging second rate class "C" recreational drugs to the minority youths on the island, providing an expensive but vaguely thrilling alternative to getting pissed up. Which they will do after anyway. You can't steal anything large or expensive as there are only two ways off the island and they both have a sufficiently awkward frequency as to make any kind of getaway impractical and dangerous. In short, not many nefarious deeds happen there.

Having said all of that I have lived in the "real" world since my childhood and found it no more "real" that the island. Indeed everywhere I go I find the same attitudes, mostly from people that come to a place, be it rural or urban. A kind of anti-greener grass attitude where people cling to the hope that the place they have come to is somehow is remarkably better that that the one they hail from, that people here are somehow simpleton hicks and that they have seen things that those people wouldn't believe, attacked ships on fire off the belt of Orion.....yeah yeah and the rest.

The hard truth is that everywhere is as real as the next place. Sure the problems might be different, the living might be harder depending on circumstance and opportunity but less real? The fact I might not have first hand experience of a mugging or live in an area where you wouldn't go into certain areas if you were white somehow makes my life worth less? That there is some strange glory in having been through “it all”, something that makes you so much more admirable a person? Certainly someone to look up too and take the worldly advice of?

The problems at home are nationwide problems. The main ones are alcoholism, unemployment, depression. I have lost one friend to an alcoholism related suicide, my father died painfully and slowly at 52 as his body fell apart due to his massive drinking problem. My mother is an alcoholic and I am seeing the same thing happen to her. I go home and I go out to see friends I knew ten and fifteen years ago hitting the bar like they were eighteen at a party. Every night. I see the locals in the pubs, wizened and twisted after a lifetime of the same, smile sagely at them as they live one dram at a time, taking the pitying looks without a flinch because they know, they know the score, and they are just keeping the stool warm for them. If they make it.

Sure I can walk down a street there at 3am and not get raped or set on fire. But don't you ever fucking tell me it isn't real.