Hype and Ego.

Following the recent assassination of some high ranking Russian in a car bombing, two videos relating to the matter have appeared on YouTube. One leads with the statement:

Putin’s Not Safe

This is a bit redundant really because I don’t suppose Putin has ever been safe, but at least it’s commendably restrained. The second leads with:

Putin Will Be KILLED Immediately!

So is he dead yet? It does say ‘immediately.’ The creator has a picture of himself looking every bit the model of a boring but well balanced diplomat – 40ish, smartly dressed, smartly groomed, horn rim glasses… This is what makes Google and content creators rich and divides the viewers into the savvy and the tragically gullible. (I did say I wanted the internet obliterated, didn’t I?)

*  *  *

I keep on hearing a line in my head from the carol God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, the one that runs ‘For Jesus Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day.’ How many examples of the speculative and irrational are contained in those nine words, and yet millions of people sing it heartily (I expect) every year. I don’t sing Christmas carols myself, but earlier this evening I did begin to develop a script for a comedy version of the Nativity play:

‘We bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the royal child,’ proclaim the wise men. ‘Myrrh?’ queries Mary. ‘Yes, my lady. Myrrh.’ ‘Myrrrrh,’ counters Mary in mocking tone, ‘sounds like the noise a sheep would make if it had a stomach upset.’

I doubt there would be any takers.

*  *  *

Best of all, though, is Dunderhead Donald’s plan to build a fleet of warships named after him. It will be called ‘The Golden Fleet’ apparently. Sounds like something an ancient Chinese emperor would dream up, doesn’t it? You really do have to laugh at that man, don’t you? Still, once Trump has gone, one way or another, I expect a lot of sailors will be usefully employed with some very big paint brushes.

An Outcry and Some Asides.

I did quite a lot of spreadsheet work today, which I always find stressful because my brain is no longer attuned to figures and formulas. I saved it as I went along as I always do, and when I’d finished I set about backing it up onto a memory stick. When I dragged and dropped it into the requisite folder, the file disappeared. Much searching led me to the inescapable conclusion that either the computer or the program had deleted all my work.

I felt I’d hit rock bottom because this sort of thing has become an almost daily occurrence over the past year or more. And so I did a simple job elsewhere and then did all the spreadsheet work again. It appears to have worked normally the second time.

Given all the malfunctions going on around me, I can attest to the fact that living in a disintegrating matrix is an enervating experience. I sometimes look forward to taking the last train out.

*  *  *

Later on I worked out that if I’m still alive on 10^th June 2026 I will have exceeded my mother’s lifespan by one day. For some reason I don’t seem to have a problem with figures if they’re related to dates.

*  *  *

I’ve decided that I would like to see the internet destroyed and for us to return to a simpler and slower way of living and communicating. It seems to me that the mad rush into an ever more technologised world is not only causing heightened stress levels, but also enabling the tech giants to become the new architects of social behaviour. And that means that the rich are getting richer and there are more people in relative poverty, which seems a bit of a backward step to me.

*  *  *

Finally, the dampness and darkness of a typically dour British autumn has led me to consider the vague notion of moving to Florida. There are several reasons why it isn’t a practicable prospect, the main one being that it’s in America.

A Rare Visitation.

I was cleaning up my living room this afternoon when I noticed a car parked at the bottom of my garden with its hazard lights flashing. I regarded it inquisitively for several seconds and then saw a small figure making its way up my garden path.

That’s unusual. You must understand that I’m a loner who rarely makes friends and never joins clubs, cults, social gatherings, church congregations, or any other situations to which the great, the good, and the not-so-good congregate. If ever I form an organised religion it will be limited to me, and will be known as the Non-Congregational Church.

So it was odd to see someone walking up my path…

It turned out to be young Bear, and the car evidently belonged to young Bear’s mother who was in the process of taking him home from school (the day being wet, you understand; they usually walk home.) You might remember young Bear from a post I made a few weeks ago. He’s the boy I mistook for a girl, largely, I assume, having been misled by his long blond Lancelot locks, the like of which are not generally favoured by young boys these days.

But that unfortunate error led me to ask his mother whether she would mind my buying Bear a chocolate selection box for Christmas. ‘Oh, he’d love that,’ said his mother as she touched my arm in approbation. (She touched it about five times actually. I’m not sure that any woman has touched my arm so many times in as many seconds in my life before, but I didn’t tremble or turn blue or do anything else which might have been considered disrespectful.)

So there you have it: I was treated to a brief visit from a young boy called Bear today. He gave me a Christmas card and a fancy tin box containing shortbread biscuits, and I gave him my meagre offering contained in an even fancier Christmassy bag. And it occurred to me that maybe young Bear might become a rare creature I can call ‘friend’ for as long as I have left.

Reverting to Trivia.

I was going to make a well thought out and carefully presented post about a matter of some gravitas tonight. I changed my mind because I’ve finally accepted that what the commentators say about the INFJ type is mostly true. However insightful and logically reasoned my opinion might be, a lot of people will read my argument through an emotional filter, come up with the wrong answer, and then cast me either as a villain or a fool. And that irritates me, so I’ll make a trivial post instead.

*  *  *

I went into my old coffee shop haunt today for a spot of lunch and a medium Americano. Young Sarah was one of the baristas and she was friendly for once. She isn’t usually. And her co-barista, who I haven’t seen before but is about the same age, was also friendly. I considered engaging them in banter again (because that’s mostly what I do with young baristas), but remembered what happened the last time I tried it. Gen Zs don’t do banter, so I stayed quiet and paid my money without comment.

And then I went into Ryman’s, the stationers, and chose an appointment calendar with which to adorn a section of the office wall next year. There was no assistant in sight in that part of the shop, and no presence of any kind at the till. Eventually I found a lone woman of around forty – definitely not Gen Z – stacking shelves and decided to give vent to my banter habit again. ‘Excuse me,’ I began, ‘would you mind taking the money for this so I don’t have to steal it?’ No return of banter, just a poker face and a slow walk to the till. Maybe she thought I was being sarcastic, which I wasn’t. See what I mean about being misunderstood?

And I didn’t bump into the other Sarah (the Lady B; the notable one) as I’d hoped, so I couldn't ask whether she had a Christmas tree. But then, it was very dull and depressingly wet, which probably explains everything.

(I seem to have developed a taste for trivial posts again. I wonder whether that’s a good or a bad thing.)

The New Power Bases.

I watched a YouTube video last night in which a content creator talked of the changes Google are planning for the platform starting next year. Much of it was for the benefit of other creators, but some related to users as well. It was all couched in terms familiar to those steeped in the mentality of business models, and so even though I understood the words easily enough, most of the meaning went over my head. Since I’m not a YouTube creator, I don’t suppose it matters very much.

What does matter to me is the impression it left me with. I have an increasing sense that the big tech companies are becoming the prime architects of modern civilisation, just as the corporations and banks are taking over the modus operandi of modern living. And it’s all in the name of profit, to make the tiny number of insanely rich people even richer.

I ask myself how much further this can go. Will the presidents and politicians wake up and change the system to benefit the many, or will it take a cataclysm of horrendous proportions? I look at history and understand how the conduct of a life has changed immeasurably, in some ways for the better, but still have to ask myself: ‘for whose real benefit’?

My Latest Good Idea.

I just got the idea for my next novel:

Alien spores drift through the atmosphere, turning the population from rampant acolytes of the God of Consumption Mania, and into enlightened beings in the Buddhist mould (rather like those pot-bellied figurines with Chinese eyes which people call Buddhas but actually aren’t.) Suddenly they become supremely uninterested in the folly of Samsara and turn instead to the process of leaving the wheel of life, death, and rebirth behind. A bit like an inverted Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Imagine what that would do to the economy.

I’m not going to write it, of course, because I’m too old and too lazy. Applications for the copyright are invited.

Coincience and an Unfamiliar Twinge.

I was reading today about the two mass shootings which were prominent in the international news, those at Bondi Beach in Sydney and Brown University in Rhode Island. I felt connected to them, you see, because during the last fifteen years since I started writing this blog a number of women rose to very high rank on my list of important people. One was the priestess who was born and raised in Sydney and lived there for most of the duration of our correspondence, and another was Madeline (aka The Borg) who completed her PhD at Brown. I wondered why fate should connect me with two tragedies, albeit a long way removed.

And then this afternoon something odd happened, which might or might not be connected. So let’s go back some years to when I was still a relatively young man (playing to dear old Dickens here.)

Christmas, the celebration of… The last time I had a Christmas tree in my house was in 1989, and the first Christmas I ever spent alone was in 1990. (The connection should be obvious.) I felt a slight sense of trepidation at the prospect of spending Christmas alone for the first time in my life, but I needn’t have worried. I discovered that I liked it. I think it was the first intimation I had that I was really a loner at heart; that having only myself for company was both freeing and lacking the pressure to contribute and belong. And over the intervening years Christmas gradually faded to a matter of little or no consequence.

But this afternoon, after reading about the shootings and being made aware of the imminent arrival of Christmas by various media, I suddenly felt lonely. And the first thing that occurred to me was the desire to bump into the Lady B and ask: ‘Do you have a Christmas tree in your house?’

I suppose it must indicate that some part of my consciousness still accepts that togetherness has value after all. Can’t think of any other reason why I should suddenly be made prey to such an unfamiliar feeling.

If AI Be a Natural Thing.

I heard an interesting theory last night regarding the development of AI. It proposes the following:

a. That intelligence is not generated by the brains of biological creatures, but is a core component of the universe, rather like gravity.

b. That the developers of AI are, therefore, not creating the intelligence itself, but only creating the advanced mechanical infrastructure capable of receiving natural intelligence from the universe.

c. That we are wrong in considering the human animal to be the pinnacle of evolution and that any further improvement will be limited to human and other biological creatures.

d. Biological life forms are relatively unstable, being subject to many forms of decay, malfunction, and ultimately demise. Machines, on the other hand, are generally more resilient, and any errors which do occur are more easily rectified.

e. That when the machines become more intelligent than the human animal, our primacy will cease. At that point the fundamental question will be whether the machines will permit us to share the world with them.

I suppose it would depend on whether they see any value in our existence, and whether their intelligence comes with an inbuilt ethical compass. They might allow us to live in zoos if they have the capacity for amusement, but I expect the word ‘humane’ will be deleted from the dictionary. And I suppose this is all old news to fans of science fiction.

A Rare, Short, and Pointless Late Reverie.

The moon is way past the yard arm and my head is full of Lady Bellas and Cary Mulligans. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last two hours listening to a mix of Cara Dillon songs. I’ve said often enough that three women is the optimum number so maybe I’m on the right road after all. Not long to go now. I’ve no idea why I’m posting this.

Balm for a Scalded Mind.

I posted a cheque to somebody recently which hadn’t been delivered after ten days, so I decided to stop it and issue another one. That used to be a simple operation: a single phone call to the bank and it was done in minutes. Not so any more. I began the attempt yesterday and the matter was still unresolved by this afternoon, and so I had to try a different strategy. It took a long time and involved much frustration, but I got there in the end. And then it caused me a lot of extra trouble to deliver the new cheque personally.

This was yet another example of the fact that, while the hasty move to use modern and constantly developing technology for everything makes some things easier, the overall effect on life is to make it a lot more stressful. And it’s clearly evident that this movement is driven by, and for the benefit of, the new rulers of the world – the banks and the corporate world. They do it primarily to make more profit, not for the benefit of the mass of people sitting at the bottom of the heap having their patience and their brains fried in toxic fat.

And those who pretend they’re running the world don’t even seem to notice. Or maybe they just don’t care.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, a lady with a compelling American accent (yes, I did say American) said to me tonight: ‘Your mind is a cathedral of interconnected thoughts, a beautiful, haunted library.’

What a lovely turn of phrase. If only I could see it that way (but it was still good to hear it.)

Raising the Child Right.

It occurs to me that if I were bringing up a child now, the lessons I would impart with regard to living a life would be very different than they would have been even ten years ago, and increasingly so beyond that. I’ve spent my own life exploring angles on the matter from the middle of the tram lines to their edges of acceptability, and I’ve spent many an hour peering beyond those edges into the misty lands beyond. In consequence, my handling of life has always been in a state of flux.

I think that’s true of everybody. However imperceptible the change might be, I do suggest that each of us is slightly different today than we were yesterday, and will be different again tomorrow.

And then there’s the question of just how much we should teach children anyway. I dislike the didactic approach so favoured in our culture from the cradle to the end of formal education. I remember a disturbing blog I once read in which a woman said that one of her main priorities was to give her children to God. Which God might that be, I was tempted to ask, and by what right do you presume to give your children to anything or anybody? I favour the line in Khalil Gibran’s homily on raising children:

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

If we are to be realistic at this basic level, it needs to be accepted that each of us lives in our own world. We seek common consensus, of course, and to some extent we achieve it. And yet it still seems to me that everyone’s world is slightly different to everyone else’s, so what right do we have to coerce someone else into it?

Guidance is a separate issue. Guidance is good as long as it’s accepted that guidance guides, it doesn’t push. Guidance needs to be tailored to the kind of world in which the child lives, and the road on which the child is walking. And that requires a level of perceptive acumen that few people possess to any great degree. That’s the tragedy.

Do you know, I spent much of my childhood struggling with the version of me which my stepfather considered the ‘right’ one, even though it ran counter to my nature and instincts. I was in my teens before I was able to face him down and say ‘no.’

Failed Again.

I yelled at somebody today. I asked him to do something which I’d twice asked him to do and still he hadn’t complied. I kept myself in check through all his pointless excuses and reasons why he didn’t think it was necessary, but it was necessary and I explained it again several times. The red light was flickering throughout the conversation, and eventually it came on full power. The steam valve opened: For God’s sake just send me the bloody books!

I do this you know. As the steam of frustration rises I manage to keep the lid on the pressure cooker for so long and then it bursts forth. I think it’s a trait I inherited from my mother, which is surprising because very few of my traits came from my mother. But my half brother was the same and he was her other son, so maybe.

I consider it one of my greatest weaknesses and usually suffer a sense of guilt afterwards. I’d rather be the patient, level headed sort who argues quietly and rationally until I’m sure the point is made. But when you’ve got Irish on one side of your ancestry and Welsh on the other, what hope is there?

Disparate Connections.

My routines usually dictate that the most opportune time to clear the road grids up the lane coincides with the school run. It’s very handy, actually, because it means I get to wave to lots of young mothers. A few of them even wave back. (I expect the others are organising a petition to have me confined to the church bell tower, having first established that none of their august company is called Esmeralda.) And if Jupiter happens to be in the constellation of Sagittarius, there’s even a good chance that I will see a hand wave in the Lady B’s car. Whether she’s waving at me or somebody else I have no way of knowing, of course, but I can always pretend.

And a horse kept blowing warm air into my right ear from his nostril today. That’s never happened before. The person sitting on his back suggested that he probably likes me. Pity the same can’t be said about the young mothers on the school run.

The Matter of Intelligence.

I watched a video recently about octopuses (or octopi if you prefer.) It appears they’re highly intelligent creatures, having nine brains (one in their head and one in each arm), and no friends. (I also saw a note which said they have three hearts, but I didn’t watch the video so I can’t attest to the fact.) Apparently they’re one of the world’s best at solving mechanical and other practical problems. Having made this startling discovery, I wanted to put a picture of an octopus next to a picture of Donald Trump on the blog and ask ‘Which of these creatures do you think is the Republican?’ Only Google won’t let me without forcing me to cross a red line. 

*  *  *

And on the subject of intelligence, there’s a video which YouTube keeps offering among my recommendations and which reads:

If You Can Identify These 14 US States It Proves You Have an IQ Above 140

I’ve said before on this blog that having a high IQ is a greatly limited way of assessing a person’s worth. Let me also add that being able to identify 14 US states correctly has absolutely nothing to do with a person's IQ. That’s YouTube for you.

Considering the Flu Mystery.

I read in the news this morning that admissions to hospitals in the UK for cases of flu have risen 50% over the same period last year. And every year at around this time the news is full of wailing about the immense pressure under which the poor, benighted NHS is put throughout the flu season. I ask myself why that should be because in all my life I’ve never known anyone be admitted to hospital to be treated for flu.

When I was in my mid-forties I contracted a bad bout of it. It was winter and I was living in an old house which had no heating other than a gas fire in the living room. I took three days off work and rested up. In addition, for the only time in my life, I spent one whole day in bed. And then I went back to work on the fourth day. It was an unpleasant experience but something which simply needed to be got through until it burned itself out. And that was how everybody I’d ever known handled it.

So what’s different about now? Is it to do with the increasing age demographic? That hardly seems likely to explain such a rise because the age demographic isn’t going up that much. Are modern flu viruses much stronger than they used to be? Is there something about modern social habits which leads people to be more exposed to it? Or are we becoming so wimpy that we expect advanced medical treatment for everything from cancer to a wart on the left little finger?

Maybe it’s a combination of all of them. The next time I see my doctor I must ask him.

(And I still couldn’t find anything amusing to say about this one. I’m sure I would have done once. Then again, my house is uncomfortable tonight because the bitingly cold wind is in the east, and that’s always bad news.)

When Jesus Meets the Muslims.

Among the plethora of idiotic nonsense uploaded to YouTube, the following one caught my eye. It purports to come from a man who claims to have had a near death experience and went to heaven (as all NDEs do.) The video reporting his encounter is titled:

Jesus told me what he does with all the Muslims

I doubt it was a happy and accommodating experience for them, although there are several reasons why I didn’t waste my time watching it.

It raises several contentious points, of course, most of which should be obvious. But the first thing that occurred to me was how Jesus would know who is Muslim and who isn’t. Anybody can claim to be or not to be Muslim, just as anybody can claim to be or not to be Christian or Buddhist (Hindu and Jewish are different because bloodline comes into the picture with those.) Would a woman wearing a hijab, for example, be unable to contest the accusation of being Muslim?

And that leads me to a wholly unconnected question: There are several states in which the wearing of Muslim traditional dress is forbidden by law, and that includes the hijab. How would they respond, I wonder, if some major fashion designer set about popularising the hijab – presumably in gay colours and patterns – until it became a popular fashion statement? I truly wish somebody would do so just to find out.

And a second issue raises its head: I’ve noticed that there are a lot of anti-Islam videos appearing on YouTube lately. Given the high sensitivity to anything which can be viewed as being in any way prejudiced in the modern world, I’m surprised that Google aren’t being pressured to remove them on the grounds of ‘hate speech’ or ‘inciting racial or religious intolerance.’ I’m not suggesting they should, just surprised that it isn’t happening.

My own position is simple: I detest the excesses of Islamism for obvious reasons, as all reasonable people do, and I would object most strongly to the imposition of shariah law in what is effectively a secular state. But if someone chooses be Muslim and follow its dress code, I really don’t give a hoot. (Some people might remember my effusive praise of a student nurse called Sabs back around the period of my kidney operation. She wore a black hijab. It suited her.)

Flat Blog Blues.

I’m feeling a little troubled lately because my blog has gone flat, and I’m asking myself why it’s gone flat. Well, it’s like this:

I write the blog in order to have something to write. Writing has been in my blood since I was a teenager and has had several outlets down the years. It came to its high point when I was writing fiction between 2002 and 2011, and when the stories ran out I turned to blogging instead.

Let me make clear the fact that I don’t expect to change the world with the blog. I don’t see myself as an ‘influencer’ (in fact, I would be horrified if anybody called me that.) But I do like, for whatever reason, to present myself through it. I like to throw out to the universe what I am, how I feel, what my opinions are on matters important to me, how the environment in which I live functions, and occasionally what little stories I tell myself to make the inner me more worth the bother of being here. And so the blog has to be a picture of me in words – all of me (or at least most of me.)

One aspect of me that has always been prominent has been a tendency to see an undercurrent of humour in most situations. The humour was usually subtle, mostly based on sarcasm, innuendo, irony, and the surreal, and so it naturally found its way onto the blog in a significant number of posts. Not all obviously, because some subjects don’t allow even a minor diversion into humour, but I often found something funny even in the darker situations. And that’s what’s missing these days.

So what’s causing it? The health issues I can cope with, even though some of them are inconvenient at times. The descent into winter with its short days, long nights, cold accommodation, and general grimness doesn’t help, but I’ve felt that way about winter for much of my life and the humour has still managed to pop its head above the ice now and then. Being alone so much of the time can be a bit galling now and then, but not often. Mostly I prefer being alone and having my space to myself, and there are so few people I would consider amenable company that aloneness is my natural state. And my current near-obsession with mortality is not, in itself, a big issue because it’s never morbid. It’s part and parcel of my lifelong drive to discover the true nature of life and existence in general.

And yet the black cloud of unease and apprehension still hangs over my head for much of the time, often descending to darker depths. I suppose it could be that the issues mentioned above coalesce into a weight that’s troublesome to carry around all the time. And there’s one that I didn’t mention in the paragraph above: so many of the functional things I have around me are breaking down now, and when you feel you don’t have much longer to go the temptation is to hope that they will stay with you long enough to see you out, rather than accepting the trouble and expense of replacing them.

I wanted to close this post with something amusing, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Language and the Cheap Shot.

Something which so irritates me on YouTube are those videos which say: Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? And then they show Japanese people trying their best and failing miserably. So what do we do then? Why, mock them of course, even if under our breath. (And maybe feel superior.)

Surely it must be obvious to everybody that different languages have sounds which don’t appear in other languages, and so the relative positions of tongue, teeth, and palate to which native speakers are habituated are different. It’s well known, for example, that the Japanese have difficulty with the letter ‘l’ and the hard ‘g’ because they haven’t been trained to use the sounds those letters make. And it works both ways.

So here’s a new rule for Google to apply: Any video which says Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? must be accompanied by another one which says Can English people pronounce these difficult Japanese words? And then we can mock ourselves as well. (And maybe feel inferior.)

On Autumn and Its Faces.

I’ve noticed throughout my life that the autumn season mostly wears a small but distinctly different set of faces. This evening I decided that there are four.

The first is the pallid face when the light remains constant due to the universal cloud cover. It’s undistinguished and often wet. It drags us through the day in sombre mood and further hastens the dread of approaching winter.

The second is the jolly face when the sun bestows its beneficence from a pale blue sky and casts its glow on the warm colours of landscape and building alike. Myriad shades of red and yellow woodland delight the eye, and the low evening sun turns the dark tree trunks red while casting old limestone buildings in a shade of old gold.

The third is the face of vaporous air, less bright than the jolly face but still bright enough to encourage the dying leaves to glow in a final celebration of the inevitability of demise. And that’s the one which reaches the olfactory organs, filling the head with the musty scent of dead leaves on the woodland floor.

Finally there’s the magical face late in the year when river valleys fill with dense white mist, and floating above the fluid but impenetrable whiteness are the topmost branches of skeletal trees. There’s no colour to be seen anywhere, but there is mystery. That’s my favourite, and that’s the one I saw at twilight today.

And still I ask whether any of it is truly real. And still I ask whether anything lies beyond it, and if so what. And still I try to place it all within the concept of universal consciousness, and maybe one day I’ll know.