Lens

I saw The Fall live for the first time last night.

The guitarist looked like Nicolas Cage, the bassist was a funky skinhead, the keyboardist resembled a pixie on the Enterprise, the drummer was an android on speed, Mark E Smith prowled around like a drunk uncle splitting the atom.

It was very good.

***

I was going to write about how I get annoyed by people complaining about the early onset of Christmas. They think it gets earlier every year.

It doesn't.

I remember thinking Christmas adverts/displays/promotions were arriving too early. That was fifteen years ago. If they were getting earlier every year, the adverts would now be appearing before the previous Christmas.

But I got bored by that. I get worried about expressing my opinions. The trouble is, I'm always right. Always.

Which means that other correct people have already said what I want to say.

If only I was wrong: I'd have the opportunity to be revolutionary.

But I'm not wrong. I'm never wrong.

That's my gift. It's also my curse.

[The preceding section was mainly wrong]


***

When I'm in a bad mood, the whole world frowns with me. I see evidence everywhere of shallowness and cruelty. If I'm feeling down, scrolling through the TV channels becomes a showcase of society's many cancers.

People on the bus become emblems of disgusting inhumanity, all adverts become painfully cynical, all tasks become pointless.

That's the trouble with the human brain. You use it as a filter to interpret the arbitrary world. So you can view everything through rose-tinted spectacles or a visor of shit.

I'm wearing the shit-visor now, and it's unpleasant. I can't see much, and it's reluctant to stay on my head.

We should be able to master our subjective viewpoints by now. I suppose that's what meditation is about, and religion, and psychology, and philosophy, and Jeremy Kyle (with his black, black blood).

But we wouldn't want to have complete control. It would be boring. So much of human activity is based on avoiding complacency. We need the impetus to grow, which means we'll never be totally satisfied. We'll never know the meaning of life.

Except that growing and evolving is the meaning of life. But we can't relax with that knowledge. Because we have to keep up with all the other evolving things in the world. It's the whole Red Queen thing.

I should probably talk about it in more detail, but I'm really just trying to distract myself from a bad day.

That's my coping strategy: misery, whining, philosophising, one glorious moment of epiphany, a less-glorious epiphany realising I've wasted my time, a conclusion listing all the stages of the process, a self-reflexive parting remark.

I should probably change things up a bit, but it's difficult to see the keyboard with all this excrement over my eyes.