Beardlessness

Now I’m quite a hairy little person. Particularly when concerned with my head. More specifically the top half of my head. I have a dark prominent brow, which I sever in the centre like a worm in order to make it appear like two separate entities. Above this expression-magnifying mantelpiece, I have a thick fluffy nest of black hair that grows as soon as threatened by a pair of scissors. I combatted this for a large period in my youth by shaving it off. Often. 18080_102858833070002_8015363_n

In my teenage years I began to shave, like most boys my age, earlier than I needed to. The only parts that really needed attention were the aforementioned monobrow and the newly developed moustache. It’s as though my hair was dividing my face into thirds, making me easier to draw or photograph maybe. Next in were the sideburns, and gradually it crept around my face so that in my early twenties I could maybe get away with wearing stubble in order to try and look more mature. A chin-strap, evidently, would show my lack of maturity and limited space in which I could grow facial hair and if I attempted to let it grow more than a couple of centimeteres it would turn red in patches – thanks to my Irish heritage I am, it turns out, a chinger.

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Skip forward to the last few years and I’m somewhat able to grow a very low grade but face-covering amount of hair – that’s not to speak of the desperate attempt my eyebrows are making to connect to the larger body of hair above (a legitimate concern). I’ve played around with different styles but now I fear I’ve missed my chance.

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About 6 months ago I noticed a penny sized bald patch under my chin. Written off as the wearaway of pretentious chin-stroking that graduates are prone to do once back in the real world, I have noticed in the last few weeks that it has spread – that is to say I’m going bald from the bottom of my face up.

Now with a 2″ x 1″ stripe beside the initial penny I look for answers online. In this the age of the hipster there are plenty of beard maintenance sites and forums apparently, so I skip through a few and find the diagnosis of Alopecia Barbae. All the information amounts to – it’s hereditary, maybe, and can come and go over a day, month, year or never. Oh yeah and it can spread. So right now I’m just hoping it stays under my chin, because if it goes near my eyebrows I might lose my sense of self entirely.

Here’s something I learned recently that kind of relates: Roal Dahl, the children’s author and playboy content writer, hated beards. Didn’t trust people with them and saw them as unhygienic. Mr Twit is essentially the personification of a dirty beard. That’s not to say ol’ Dahl was always right on with his hate, I mean for an anti-semite who reasoned that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason”… A stinker presumably because he had facial hair.

July 11, 2016 1

Leave It To Beaver

It’s funny how some films are released in accordance with a date on the calendar, embedding itself into the present and thereby gifting itself with some sort of temporary relevance. I mean not funny ha-ha, just amusing maybe. Like Christmas or Halloween films, except more obscure or oddly specific. Like New Years Eve. Or the recent Mother’s Day from the director of Valentine’s Day.

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Beyond the cynical reading of studios simply trying to cash in on that immovable but very much reliable cycle of time, a film that reflects or feeds into the context in which it is presented has a special quality to it. A heightened, permeating immersiveness that transcends the confines of the film and places it in your world at that moment. I mean it isn’t strictly holiday based films and it may be personal to you as an individual, but when this synchronicity occurs in any medium it shapes your opinion and anchors it to this moment in time.

(Sidenote: This incidental synchronicity has spawned some great reads that I hold dear, influenced I’m sure by the context in which I read them. I read Bukowski’s Factotum just as I started temping, and happened upon Post Office whilst working in a Post Room. One of the most uniquely structured pieces of fiction that I’ve ever read, with footnotes larger than passages, Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker – a book that obsesses over the trivial mundanity of corporate life – I stumbled upon after giving over to the long term tedium of office work.)

The recent number of superhero civil war, pick-a-side films, appeared around the same time that Bernie and Trump were defining the dichotomy of the American peoples. And now we have this new old sequel, Independence Day with a 20 year resurgence, but for some reason or other it lands a couple weeks ahead of July the 4th. An opportunity missed? But fear not it ends up having some cultural relevance in my neck of the woods.

aliens-obliterate-london-in-latest-independence-day-resurgence-movie-still — London in bits as prophesied by ID:R

So today the island on which I was born, the United Kingdom, has lopped itself off of from the neighbouring countries with which we used to form a union – we’re now fully independent like. Well we were before, we just have less friends now. The band are still together mind, we’ve just decided to go it alone. And though the majority (of those that voted) wanted to leave, they aren’t really the circles that I roam about in and so when I heard the news and discussed the news and wallowed about in the thoughts of what this news meant, I actually just felt a bit sad.

Like many others I hadn’t actually thought this was going to happen. It felt like a joke, even when it was on my doorstep. A Vote Leave sign found it’s way up on my street, but some swift comic justice adjusted it to read Vote Beaver. Excellent. Well, the Beaver’s have only fucking done it haven’t they. We’re Beaving. We’ve Beft.

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Expecting to have a relatively quiet Friday morning contemplating this turnout, my time was cut short by crowds of children all off to see The Secret Life of Pets. An inset day evidently, and a break from the generous dose of sunshine that was being offered to them skyways. They’ve got no clue and sadly they’ll be the ones most affected. Well I say that, one of them’s called Octavious. These children will all look back and say – ‘I remember when we left the EU, a gorgeous day, we went to see a film together, such fun it was – and then just flames for 20 years. Now I have to drink battery acid just to fit in, what with that Prince Octavious upping the taxes again. I wish we could go back to that day when we were watching that film and end it all’.

Probably unfair to push my suicidal thoughts into the minds of these gleeful children, I’ll just let them enjoy the talking animals.

2 legs good, 4 legs bad.

June 25, 2016 0

On Call

Work messages have bound me to the workplace from home, or wherever I may be, ripping me from the zen of my safespace and forcing me to constantly think about work on my own time. An alert on my phone now has me anxious as to what the news will be and where it is coming from. No longer do I want to hear my phone chirp or feel it vibrate in my pocket, I’d much rather it just laid still and unmoving. Maybe this is better for me…

When you receive a text message, or any notification on your hand-held pocket-stored mobile device, you also receive a hit of dopamine. The vibration gives you a rush. Whether someone has liked something of yours, tagged you in something, or noticed you in any capacity – this feeling of being affirmed or acknowledged is addictive. We chase this rush in every form we can, so that we have multiple channels through which we can receive these microdose braingasms. A drip feed of feel good hormones that don’t fill us but stimulate us for the moment and make us crave more.

It has gotten to the point for me now where I have cut down the channels of contact so that I receive a balance of alerts that I want and that I don’t want. Ones that make me feel good and positively stimulated, and ones that make me feel bad, almost anxious in anticipation. I wonder if I am messing with the dopamine system, if I’m making it better or worse.

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June 6, 2016 0

chaos reigns

I killed a fox a few nights ago. A little cub.

Thought I’d get it off my conscience and write down some reflections that it has forced on me.

I have only recently started driving, happily being ferried about my nearest and dearest and using public transport until moving out into the country, onto farmland without pavements or streetlights to connect me to anything. As I headed away from the city and moved into converted stables, finding a job outside of London, I felt like I was closer to nature – waking up to birdsong and finding my way home in the bright moonlight of the unpolluted sky. But it came to be impractical and I would need to learn to drive. This was the reality of my situation.

The novelty wore off pretty quickly having to drive an hour to and from work daily. I was talking to friend recently, a Kerouac-idolising romantic, about how he gave up his car in favour of cycling and he made some points that struck me. About how driving separates you from your community by making you so able to work further away from home instead of supporting local businesses. In one sense it would seem you have opened up access to the rest of the world, but in another you shield yourself from experiencing it, on the journey anyway. Constrained to your bubble you are transported place to place with only glances out of the window stolen from the road. artwork_duncan_trussell_family_hour

I’m reminded of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, a few episodes from a few years back, in which he had just started cycling and had some personal revelation more powerful than the cumulative affect of all the acid he has taken. In these few episodes he would open the podcast with a lengthy monologue about how cycling was connecting him to the world, how he was experiencing hills. For Trussell, hills serve as a symbol – you work harder to ride up and you earn the pleasure and ease of riding back down. In a car you mow through them and experience nothing.

Okay I’m not a cycling enthusiast, and am irked by the self-righteousness that usually accompanies the eco-warrior, even if I am sympathetic to the cause and have never done anything about it. It’s more that these ponderings were the very same that were plaguing me this past week when I travelling down one of these country roads and from nowhere a small fox ran out under my car.

I didn’t even feel any impact, it was just the timing. I had to turn the car around and patrol the road to see if I had in fact caught it. Sure enough there in the middle of the road was an adorable little cub, paws twitching an all. Fucksake. Hazards on I pulled up, angry and upset I had to work out how I was going to deal with this, how I was going to fix or finish what I had started. I knelt down in the road to pick him up, careful to hold him properly. In that moment, when I was worrying about what gore I might be uncovering, if I was doing any damage, he became extremely light and lifeless. In my hands no less. So there’s weak and weary ol’ me wandering down a country road holding a tiny cub that I’d just slain with my car. I walk in as far as I can and lay him down before going back to my car.

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Since that night I’ve been stuck thinking about the entitlement of road using, of how there is a pecking order that has vehicles prioritised, bikes even. It’s strange that the onus is on the people around the roads to take care, rather than the other way around. There’s a short article well worth reading about the invention of Jaywalking that shows how this entitlement has been manufactured and the blame has shifted hands, how cars were seen as the intruders of roads meant for people up until the 1930s, but now vehicles are protected and there are laws that blame the people that aren’t in metal cage for not crossing roads properly.

I guess I’ll blame my actions on the fox not being alert enough, for not using crossings properly.

May 25, 2016 0

Clever Girl

So my son has reached raptor level intelligence. Not the true-to-life chicken sized dinosaurs, I mean Jurassic Park velociraptors – in that he can open doors. He has, though, a certain courtesy, genetic or learned who can say. I was having a shower this morning and heard a sharp, deliberate knock, thinking it was a grown considerate adult until I heard the floor-high announcement ‘Knock-knock-knock’, followed by the horror-film close-up on the doorknob, as it rattled and gradually jutted around to reveal the beaming face of little Jackson, delighted with his new developments; his next stage of evolution.

May 5, 2016 0