There is awesome in the world...

Jellyfish that can live forever?  This seems pretty damn excellent!

An Open Letter to Changed Friends

This is to all the friends that I still love, just not quite in the same way anymore:

     I’ll still speak to you in endearments, ask about your day.  You’ll still be on my mind when I'm making arrangements.  I’ll still text or call whenever something important happens.  But now, there’s that sense of duty, you’re not natural to me anymore.

     When we first met, I wasn't quite comfortable with you at first, but then I never am with people that are new to me.  We got to know each other, and then came to a consensus that we enjoyed each other’s company.  Our personalities complemented each other and so we were friends.  Your opinions were always stronger than mine, but they were still along the same lines.  We planned a holiday together, even though it didn't quite happen. It was fun.

     Then something changed.  Was it the change in circumstance; was it something that one of us did?  Was it the new people you met, or the trouble I was having in my own life?  Either way, we’re not quite in synchrony any more.  It’s like one of us has changed time signatures without telling the other and we can’t work out how to get back to the same place.  The things you say are no longer such that I agree with you unthinking, and reciprocally it seems as though you feel a lot of  confusion at what spills from my mouth, and much though I feel I want to engage with you, I don’t think we’re on the same page anymore.  I start avoiding you without even realising, while I look forwards to seeing other friends, with you it feels a little like a chore. 

     I still want to be nice to you, so we don’t talk about the fact that one of us has changed.  I don’t know if you've noticed it too, if to you everything’s fine, or if you, like me, don’t want to admit that it’s happened.  Are we both just pretending for the sake of old times?  Is that a good thing?  Should we be being more frank?

I don’t know, so I just keep on acting the same, and I hope that’s alright by you.

Snow (epilogue)

     Then, after the novelty has worn off, after the weather starts to change, after councils get their act together and put down grit, colour starts to be seen again.  A thaw seeps into your bones.   You remember just how bright is the green of the trees, how warm the naked winter dirt.

     And there’s a smile on your face as a familiar, calm, drizzle washes the weird magic of the snow away.

The Existential Crisis of Alternative Culture

(Credit goes to a good friend for telling me I should write this)

     We all know what is meant by the term “hipster”. Someone who dresses in “retro” clothes, listens to music that you wouldn’t have heard of, and whose greatest ambition is to have a cult following for their music/art/poetry – but to still end up starving in a garret anyway.   Someone who is dissatisfied with popular culture, the much reviled “mainstream” and by way of protest affiliates themselves as exclusively as possible with alternative culture.  Someone who seems deliberately aloof, obscure, inaccessible.

     We all know what is meant by the term because alternative culture has become such a universal phenomenon.   Hipsters are becoming an accepted, numerous breed of subculture to be spotted regularly on the high street.  And here is where today’s reflections lie.  Since alternative culture has become so trendy, so common, so...mainstream – what does this mean for its future?

     In metamorphosing into the very thing that it opposes, what has alternative culture become?  With high street shops stocking hipster trends of only a year or two ago, will alternative culture, with its retrospective trailblazing, be caught up by its less cool, popular sister?  Will hipsters be able to cope when the point comes that every new old thing that they find to champion is snatched away and shoved into the limelight that is the mainstream media?

      My predictions are twofold.  They might both occur, or maybe neither of them will, but then they’re just ideas.

Prediction 1:  A shiny new subculture will emerge

     Once alternative culture is well and truly established as one of the predominant influences over music, art and fashion, something else will come along to counter it.   In the same way that the last few decades have seen mods, rockers, hippies, punks, goths, emokids, indie kids and more, something else, something new and its own will come about.  An alternative to the alternative if you will.  Perhaps it’ll be an evolution of something already around, steampunk, Gothic Lolita or somesuch.   Perhaps they’ll be ironically futuristic, or have a carefully crafted “normal” persona, an antithesis to the obsession with non-conformism.

Prediction 2:  The “true” hipsters will rise again.

      Despite alternative culture being ever increasingly popularised, the very fact that it has lost sight of its original “different” identity might just be its saving grace.  Even with all the bandwagon-jumpers that have vintage-style jeans bought at Topshop and a mix-tape with Pitchfork’s favourite bands, there are still those select few who genuinely trawl through charity shops, vintage shops and eBay looking for the particular model of that one shirt.  There are those who truly feel at their most comfortable in clothes that remind them of times gone by, that can’t stand what music is now in the charts, so revel in what it is that they can find by word of mouth or  at underground gigs, that they relate to and get involved with.  There are those who are themselves creating and reinventing alternative culture with their music and art and fashion and poetry.

 It is the ones who originated it in the first place who are the ones who will help hipsterism maintain its non-conformist identity, by being immune to the conventional media’s influence and turning a blind eye to whatever it is they are being told is cool, because to them, it doesn’t matter .  It is they who will keep a stronghold of true alternative culture until the mainstream populous moves onto its next craze.

      Whether or not alternative culture is in immediate danger of breakdown, it cannot keep this momentum up too much longer.   Sooner or later, either the indifferent masses will find a new target, or what we now know as alternative culture will undergo fission, imploding under its own popularity. But what new creatures will step out from the mist to take its place?

In the interests of sharing what is good in the world...

A friend showed these to me today.  I am in awe.

Anis Mojgani : For Those Who Can Still Ride An Airplane For The First Time

                      Shake The Dust

                       

Sarah Kay :     If I Should Have A Daughter

Snow (secret time)

Something a little more light-hearted today...

     Living in Wales, today, it snowed.  Usually, this would mean a sprinkle that doesn't last, like icing sugar melting into a cake, but today it has stayed, a solid layer on the ground.  The forecast is for more and more, exams have been cancelled, and for just a little time (until we remember that we've had snow before) the world is in awe.

     Last night, staying up with my housemates, the anticipation had already set in.  Every few minutes we’d twitch the curtain in order to confirm that it hadn't quite yet started.  BBC Weather was checked regularly, it told us again and again that yes, it would snow, yes, it would be most intense here.

     And then this morning, there was that vast silence.  More than just our house not having woken up; it was as though the whole street had rolled over to see white quilts thrown everything outside, and was just sitting at the window, yawning, blinking, marvelling at the metamorphosis.  I spent longer in bed than usual, then ventured downstairs to see if anyone else was around, the intrepid explorer off to find the inhabitants of the strange new land I’d woken up in.  On a normal morning, my housemates and I would have been at the stage of getting up, firing our engines to get on with the day.  But today, perhaps due to a hangover from childhood when snow meant no school meant no obligations meant time for fun, there was something different in the air.

     Downstairs I found one of my housemates.   We talked about the snow, excited like small children even though we knew there wasn't that much reason to be.  And then, as they heard our voices, the others crept out of their rooms, emerging from their warm caves to revel with us in the newness of the world outside.  We chatted and laughed about nothing of huge consequence, all a little jumpy, ready to smile, looking forwards to what could happen later on, as though we were at a station or an airport about to leave on a holiday together.

     A good friend has an excellent simile for that feeling.  She says it’s like the secret time early in the morning, before the day is really happening, when everything is quiet and everything is new and nothing has quite happened yet that gives a clue of how the day is going to go.  It’s the same feeling as when you and someone else are the first to show up to a big event, a feeling that is best experienced with someone else.  It’s a fragile one though, and this morning, as soon as someone decided that they were going to go and do some work, to get on with the day, it went, ebbing away and stranding us in the real world.

     And so I've come back to my room, to clutch at the last tendrils of the secret time, before I accept real life again.

There's a coldness in this room.

There’s a coldness in this room.

     Not an uncomfortable one, not yet.  Enough to keep me awake, alert, not quite enough to reach for a blanket, another jumper.  I can feel my hair half on end as my body figures out what to do, the appropriate measure of response.  I’ve never been good at controlling my temperature.  I seem to be naturally a couple of degrees colder than I should be.

     Friends, lovers have played on this.  Pulling me closer to “give” me their heat.  Telling me I had “cold hands, warm heart” as though human beings can only maintain either physical or emotional warmth, not both. 

     Why is that?  Where did the concept of a “warm personality” come from?  Is it because of how we feel when some people are around, the coddled and cosy feeling somewhere in the chest, of our brains and bodies saying “we like this person, you’re safe around them”.  As if any instinct can truly make that judgement.  My current state of cynicism has left me in doubt of what any instinct tells me to do.   Since I alternate between wanting to be an absolute recluse, and wishing I could burn up, tear everything apart, that’s probably a good thing.

     Much though I spend plenty of time moaning to my friends about the inanity of social norms, without such norms, such friends would not stoop to be mine.  My self-abusing, humble, cutesy, naïve, overtired, sideways, loathsome nature is a carefully crafted compromise between what I know, what I want to be known and what must never, never be known about myself.  I moon over people, thinking “they would want me, if only they knew me” when in reality, they know all that they would need.

     Then there are those who know me too well, those who know, knew, a different me to the current version I’m selling.

     He was one of those.  His knowledge of me was based on himself, so was bound to go sour.   Now, he knows himself through me, which I can’t take, I can’t stand, why can’t he just leave me be?  Whenever I see him, I punish myself, for failing him, failing us, failing my dream.  Why couldn’t I keep my head, stay on task?

     And then.

     Was he always this melodramatic?  I must have enjoyed it, back then.  Now, it grates.  Did he always have such narrow-minded views?  I must have justified it, made it my mission to open him, back then.  Was everything always to do with him?  I must have ignored it, revelled in it, fed the fire when I danced around him, back then.  Worshipping him, loving him, wanting him, ever ignored until it was too late.

     Now I am different, I am new. More mature, or less, or just revolving in another sphere.  And yet he still fetters me to the corpse of what I was, with his actions, his words, the very memory I have of him.

     There’s a coldness in this room.

Obligatory Introductory Post

Hello, people of the Internet, and welcome to my blog.  

     I've set this up in order to have somewhere to post stories, prose or whatever I feel should be shared.  Expect a lot of trains of meaningless, disconnected thought, pretentiousness and embarrassing mild idiocy hopefully with the odd bit of something interesting thrown in.  There'll be angst, hope, confusion and with a little luck, the odd bit of humour.  And to be honest, I'll probably have given this up before too long anyway.  

     So before I waffle too much, thank you for taking the time to read this, whoever you are on the other side of the screen, and I hope it was worth your while.