Jesus Harry Christ, is there anything to be optimistic about any more?
Last week, one of the most positive and glass half full people I knew made the comment, "We all know life is shit and we just live for the good moments." That did nothing more than depress me some more, but not straight away. The person is a lapsed Catholic and I commented that we were in fact all in pergatory and the good moments only made the rest even worse.
Wow... this was one hell of an up tempo discussion, but the thing was neither of us were particularly depressed about this insight, it was like a resignation rather than a revelation.
It was only over the next few days that I started to realise that the world is basically a shit place and it doesn't matter how many optimists you meet, how many incredibly upbeat party animals you bump into, or the numerous people who seem to walk around town with a rictus grin on their face - smiling about something as pointless as the sun coming out or a pedestrian being run over by a bus, every one of us suffers woe, heartache, bad news, bad luck, incompetent services, over-charging, being under-valued. We feel dissatisfaction, disdain and hatred for just about anything you care to think of, from politics to public services, the next door neighbours, the kids down the street in their hoodies with fuck all to do, the imbeciles on the roads, the unnecessary speed cameras in places where they are used as revenue traps and not for public safety, the idiots on a Saturday night who turn your city or town centre into a sea of violence and vomit, taxes, rates, VAT, booking fees, lotteries, charities, companies pretending to be charities... If you sat down and made two columns, one for good things in life and one for the bad things, you'd soon find that the bad things that happen far outstrips the good things. Then, you look at all the good things in your life and then work out which of them are bad for you, or are detrimental in large quantities, suddenly you're left with very few things that can make you smile or happy, and even some of these things have hidden dangers or woes attached. Sex - be sure you know and trust your partner. The countryside - global warming is killing off species and replacing them with dangerous European varieties and the odd weather patterns mean we spend all the wrong times of the year looking like a desert and all the times we should look like a desert up to our knees in floods. Going on holiday - well, if you go by bike, then you're not damaging the environment, but if you fancy a trip to Spain or Florida then consider the amount of emissions your mode of transport is pumping into the atmosphere.
For fuck's sake... I just sat here and reeled that off in a few minutes; can you imagine what that would look like if I had a long time to contemplate it all?
You know what annoys me, people who insist that life is great and we should all cheer up. These people should be killed, or at least made to suffer in the same way as the rest of us.
Is there anything left that we can enjoy without having to earn money, or suffer in some way either physcially or mentally? Probably not and that's why life is ultimately depressing, because unless you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth or are blissfully unaware of your surroundings, life just catches up with and kicks you in the teeth, on a regular basis.
I'm actually having a good weekend, you wouldn't think so by reading that. But, there is nothing in the world that says you can't feel negative but still appreciate highs when they come along, however small they might be.
While I'm on odds n sods subjects. I find it really annoying when people say 'self-depreciating' when they mean 'self-deprecating' - are they just losing value all the time they stand there?
I'm quite taken by a slew of new(ish) bands that have taken my fancy. So underwhelmed by the BBC's Reading/Leeds festivals and the fact the hosts were getting orgasmically excited about bands that would have seemed amateurish in the early 1990s. Frankly, I'm still trying to understand why everyone and their aunts get worked up by Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys, Dirty Pretty Things, Muse and treat bands such as Primal Scream like they have the same iconic status as The Beatles or The Stones. Yeah, I'm older and maybe my tastes are mellowing, but that doesn't stop me from listening to stuff that's obscure, new or hip and trendy, even if it does look like a list of bands who raided their hippy parents' record collections. Bands like Mew, The Secret Machines, Blow Up Hollywood and the more commercially viable Kasabian all feature on heavy rotation on my CD player, so I can't be that bloody old.
Still think 80% of music produced nowadays has little or nothing to compliment it, or is basically just shite.
Music has been a great pleasure, even if it costs if you want to do it legally - which I do.
