who is your audience?

my wife asked me this the other day  after looking at my site psg daily who are you writing it for? well, something along those lines of who in my mind were the posts being addressed to. and you know what, it was kind of hard to answer, because unless someone comments, unless someone posts a link to the entry, i do not know. i can look at my dashboard stats and i can see where they are coming from, but i also look at my dashboard and i see the amount of spam comments that my akismet has blocked and the amount of spam that doesn’t make it through the filter and i have to ask myself, how many of the unique hits that i get are really unique hits,and how many are electronic ghosts just crawling the site looking for an excuse to post a sex advert?

sometimes it doesn’t necessarily pay off to look to closely at that kind of thing. i suppose i expect that my writer friends and my musician friends and my artist friends might occasionally drop in after seeing something of interest in my twitterstream or my facebook wall, and i would hope that the odd random stranger would wash up on the shore, but really i can’t determine that until, as i said, someone actually responds.

would i stop writing if i thought that no one at all was looking here or there to actually ingest the words? i’m not sure – i don’t think so. some people might read this stuff and think it’s kind of ancillary to the other stuff i produce (the fiction and the poetry) but some of the ideas that i work out in these rambling blogs do inform those projects, and i think that some of the stuff i write here is creative in its own right. i mean, i have to sit here and type this stuff out and craft it into some kind of cohesive form so that even if no one reads it i am not embarrassed by my output. i cringe at typos made here as much as i do when i see them in a book. why wouldn’t i? if i didn’t have enough care for something to make sure that it was the best it could possibly be, why would i bother to waste any time and effort on it in the first place? wouldn’t make sense, would it?  at least i hope it wouldn’t. shit, you could read my stuff and absolutely hate it but i hope even then you might be able to glimpse the effort and care that went into it.

i don’t want to say that i am writing it all for myself because that would be a little disingenuous. what kind of moron sits there mentally masturbating day after day, turning out thousands of words just to keep themselves amused? i may be a bit of a scribomaniac but that is because i really enjoy the art and craft of writing. it is not the horrible painful emotionally draining activity that some people would have you believe it is, and if they do really find it that way then it is a flaw in themselves that they should either deal with or find something else to do that doesn’t rake them over the coals quite so much.

i do then in a way write partially to please myself — to round out and flesh out thoughts; this is somewhere to let the flotsam and jetsam wash up; kind of like a backroom where you keep works in progress. i am assembling the nuts and bolts into one place so i can draw on them when i want to make my frankensteinian creations waltz out into the world.

did i answer the question i was asked here? maybe. i hope to some degree i did.

collecting

do you collect something? most people do. i definitely have the packrat mentality, something i have in common with both my mum and my dad. my dad collected stamps, matchboxes, and cigarette cards. variously i have collected stamps, comics, magazines, books, cds, beer mats, badges, erasers, and key rings. i still collect some of that stuff but other hobbies fell by the wayside.

sometimes i think just for the sake of collecting – it has a certain goal usually and that is to have a complete set of something, and then once that is done you move on to something else. i have found with books and comics this is especially satisfying because it generally means you have a whole story there – a complete universe, and the reading of it is totally immersive.

a weird perverseness can sometimes plague a collector, it accompanies the manic drive to get anything an artist or writer has done – and that is for the career to be done with so it is finite and the ownership of the products is achievable. a kind of fatigue can set in if you have chosen to collect someone like prince for instance who can turn out more records than someone on an average wage can ever hope to keep up with.

i know i have a kind of mania for collecting, and it sometimes results in a situation where i have loads of shit sat there i have not read and then i have to wade through it. sure the eventual consumption is great, but it can be overwhelming the amount of culture one has inadvertently accrued, and it can leave you feeling bloated and constipated and in need of some light relief. you want some fast food culture – something that doesn’t branch off into fifteen billion intricate details of a universe built over twenty years; something that does not rely on an anally retentive attention to detail over continuity.

i have heard that it is a very male thing but i have seen some women who collect shoes, dresses and ornaments in a similar fashion. it is as if we have to surround ourselves with anchors that make us more solid in this ephemeral fad driven world, but if it actually achieved that would we really wind up with house that look like bric-a-brac shops? probably not. perhaps as the stone stop rolling quite so much this is the moss it gathers.

religion

another blog about religion? sure, why not?

i was sitting here and i was thinking, how honestly have i ever really looked at my relationship with religion? i know that there is the party line that i trot out to people whenever the subject gets brought up but i feel like i sometimes either truncate the whole thing, blow it out of proportion or just don’t give certain truths concerning myself enough weight. does this make what i have said or told to people in the past about my religious conviction a lie or dishonest? i don’t think so – the way a conversation goes  is often instrumental in what parts of the jigsaw get laid out on the table.

one of the big things that i always play up is the role that my parent’s own religion played in my life, but i don’t think that i necessarily always portray it in exactly the way it should be portrayed. yes, it is true that my parents are from different denominations of the christian religion – my dad being church of england and my mum being catholic, but i think that only took on significance for me when i actually started to meet people who found that kind of stuff important.

i think my mum’s dad and some of her family consider themselves catholic and the whole divided between them and the protestants actually has some meaning for them in their daily lives. i have met people in my own life for whom this is true too and when i have been in conversations with them i have felt awkward enough to become some kind of apologist for my own situation – kind of like the religious equivalent of white guilt. but my parents? i don’t think they really cared that much about it. sure, my dad still thought of himself as a christian and still didn’t like it when i was blasphemous, but my mum and her experiences with the catholic church had left her a little more vague about the whole thing, or at least that was the impression i always got. this maybe  contributed to my own vagueness for so many years – agnostic is such lily-livered stance and never at right with me, but when you are so uncertain i suppose if that hat fits you have to wear it.

my grandparents were regular churchgoers and i would sometimes go to various religious holiday services with them – harvest and easter, etc, but i don’t think i saw it as anything different to going to the beach with them or whatever else i did with my grandparents. there was a certain element of boredom involved in the whole procedure once the interest in certain quirks of church behaviour had worn off, but it never made me think of myself as a christian. i never liked the preachy aspect of the whole thing; never liked the apparent hypocrisy of much of those in attendance – people decked out in their sunday best playing at being righteous for one day of the week and being obnoxious the rest of the time when they were out of the house of god; it didn’t sit right and still doesn’t.

i read the bible at five from cover to cover, and not one of those kid’s bibles either – the real deal with the onion paper pages. and i remember having this huge question about god as the first cause – it never did get answered satisfactorily by any of the christians that i asked. to be honest the failure of christians on a regular basis to answer any of the questions which i had pushed me away from them; made me look elsewhere for answers. i found myself only ever turning to god when i need something – he became some abstract that i would pray to when i didn’t think crossing my fingers was enough; and that eventually lead to me deciding that even if god was real i had no right to a relationship with him because i was treating him like he was santa claus or something. the lack of any kind of answer from the sky and a couple of really bad examples of christians eventually put the nail in the coffin and that disenchantment turned to disbelief and finally atheism – i even joked at one point about starting up a group of evangelical atheists who would got out there and spread the word.

i studied both psychology and philosophy, something i have a degree in, in an attempt to see whether or not some of these alternative paths might have some kind of clue as to the nature of man but they all seemed incomplete. psychology had a lot of theories, all which seemed to have some grain of truth, but some of which seemed ridiculous and counter-intuitive, and during the whole time i studied the subject i don’t think a single one of the teacher’s i had would be able to answer the questions i had without referring to one or other of these multitudinous disparate theories.

philosophy was a whole different ballgame – what philosophy gave me constantly was a litany of ‘we can never really know anything’; it sought, or so it seems, to undermine the certainty of everything and replace it with series of possible points of view that could all be argued out of existence if you persisted long enough. for me, the key thing was writing an essay on incommensurate theories where i came to the conclusion that people who were using the same words in different ways couldn’t ever really talk about the world or anything in it because they never meant the same thing as each other when they opened their mouths – it truly was our gift from some kind of tower of babel descent that had thrown us all into confusion.

and so i came to physics – quantum physics to be precise, and i found its complexity and its attempt to unify everything into one theory very satisfying. the things that it couldn’t answer though it just seemed to throw away. but it seemed to answer the big bang, and i had read theories elsewhere in the physical sciences that seemed to answer the questions about the soul which had always troubled me. i say seemed advisedly, because i would read these things and then i would go through something – something like profound loss of a family member, and it would suddenly seem overly reductive, sadly lacking.

so, where did that leave me? apathetic. spiritually uncommitted; uncommitted as an atheist; and defiantly not an agnostic. i talked in theories and i never really meant anything i said because i was talking in other peoples theories – i was like a walking scrapbook.

and now? well, things definitely changed. my wife started working for scientologists, and at the time she started there she was writing a book on the nature of god and the spirit; ideas that challenged a lot of things i had always believed came at me and so did answers. i fought against it for the longest time – not able to fully process what it was that i was reading about. i went into the church and i received a dianetics session, which worked to relieve both some physical and emotional pain – still nothing particularly spiritual was happening with me though. i started to study dianetics and i also started to get some more sessions, and then i had a major realisation during one of my sessions – an experience which confirmed for me my own spiritual nature, and there i was, unable to deny the truth of the situation.

this for me was the major difference between scientology and other religions i had some experience of – all of these other religions basically told me what it was that i needed to believe and here was someone showing me something, or rather allowing me to get to a place where i could see it for myself. i think this is something not a lot of people understand about scientology – that the spiritual awakening that people in the religion undergo is driven by themselves … comes from a process of discovery they themselves undergo. this is not the second hand revelation paine talks about. auditors, those trained in scientology and dianetics, are expressly not allowed to evaluate for the people they work with; holding with the belief that “what is true, is what is true for you”.

those who might look at me and see that i am changed by my experiences are observing nothing more than life working its alchemy on me to a degree (we all change through time) but what they are also witnessing is me putting myself back in the driving seat of my life. so my relationship with religion has gone through some fairly usual twists and turns and i finally arrive at a place where i understand it as not being some relationship with some  mystical outside force but as a re-acquaintance with my own self – becoming familiar with what i truly am and am truly capable of.

mental health bullshit

every single kind of human behaviour is being re-labelled as some  kind of mental disorder in such a cynical inhumane manner that seeks to make it impossible for a single human being to be considered anything other than mentally ill. it has been a wonderfully run campaign by the mental health industry – using viral marketing, great design and investing in large marketplace presence in order to infiltrate the everyday thinking of your average joe on the street.

look at your facebook wall and the status updates rife with psychological tests that tell you what your psychological profile is, which crazy writer or painter you are most like. how many people out there don’t know at least one person who has taken some kind of psychiatric medication or had some run in with the psychiatric industry? it is getting rarer and rarer, and it is scary how many people, even people who think taking drugs is wrong, are comfortable taking a pill to set right things which are rarely rooted in any kind of neuro-chemical issue; in neuro-chemical issues which cannot be tested for – cannot be proved to exist.

we are not even allowed to retain our claim on the positive traits either – these too are linked to mental health issues: creativity as schizophrenia, or brain malfunction. if you are creative you are mental, if you are mental you can be helped, and there is a drug that can help you – this is the erroneous message that is put out there. and what it boils down to is the idea that being human is wrong – you need to occupy some drug-induced stupor to measure up to the norm that is talked up.

why would anyone want this state of affairs? well – addicts are reliant upon their fix and they can be controlled by their pushers. think that is a wrong-headed analogy – look at how much money is in this whole industry and then ask yourself what, other than filthy lucre and control, would motivate people to perpetrate  these crimes upon their fellow human beings?

friendship

do you ever sit there and wonder just how many of the people that you call friends actually really deserve the title? and by that i do not mean that they are necessarily of the opposite kind – enemies. but if you sit there and you look at it and analyse the amount of interaction that you have with a certain person and the kinds of interaction that you have – the amount of face time that you spend with them and the amount of time you dedicate to that person, are there not differing degrees to friendship that are so marked that you might want to start using a different term?

if this is not the case then fair enough, be on your way and read no further. for some though, i am sure that the idea that this word is bandied about so easily with little thoughts of the ramifications of its use, is of some concern. the currency of certain words is diminished when they are not used correctly and their frequency seems ill-fitting. there are regular status update, for instance, on facebook which ask how many of the people on your friendlist you actually know, and with most people the number is woefully small.

being friends on a social network is most often not the same as being a friend in ‘real life’, and the term friend is usually modified by appending the name off whichever site is in question to the word friend. but even in daily life there are people who you happily call friends who do not occupy the same status in your life as others who you denote in that way. there are those who would take a bullet for you and there are those with whom you only exchange pleasantries.

would it destabilise the general friendliness that exists between you and the world if you were to be more careful with the way in which you use “friend”? or would the care which you take in using the language you are communicating with actually invest “friend” with more significance?

as a kid i would slap the label on anyone i met who was nice to me. it shifted through the years to mean those who had common interests and would hang out with me. now? i think i am looking for something more – i am looking for someone who adds something to my life and doesn’t take anything away from it. why would you want to spend time around people who do nothing to make your life better? for some people being a friend means that you have to constantly listen their litany of woes; for some it means that you have to sit there and consume drugs with them twenty-four seven; for others it means that you must constantly prove how cool you are. are any of these definitions of any use in determining whether a person is a good friend?

 

friend  (frnd)

n.

1. A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.

2. A person whom one knows; an acquaintance.

3. A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; a comrade.

4. One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement: friends of the clean air movement.

5. Friend A member of the Society of Friends; a Quaker.

tr.v. friend·ed, friend·ing, friends

1. To add (someone) as a friend on a social networking website.

2. Archaic To befriend.

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[Middle English, from Old English frond; see pr- in Indo-European roots.]

knowing when to hold your tongue

when is it ok to join in a discussion? some people believe that it is ok to open their mouths and add their two pence whenever they feel like it, and in a way that is true obviously, because there is freedom of speech. but i think if everyone asked themselves before they spoke what is the point in them speaking? meaning, do they have one to make or are they just getting high off the sound of their own voice, then discussions might remain a whole lot more a to b and be a whole lot more productive.

when you get two or more well-informed people involved in a discussion on how best to achieve a set of goals a decision can be hammered out – or it should be possible. when you get some people who actually know something about a subject and then you have someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about and hasn’t bothered to do any research at all then you get irrelevant questions, ill-informed suggestions and pointless diversion that usually descend into circuitous arguments about what the subject is, rather than any forward movement.

there is no shame in admitting to yourself and others that you do not know something – no shame in saying that until you are informed you would rather not get into sharing a whole load of hot air with people. not knowing something is not a permanent state of affairs – as soon as you have recognised your ignorance you can start working on it to become educated. running headlong into a fight with your sword drawn when you don’t know what the fight is about and whose side you are actually on is the height of idiocy – you might end up lopping the head off of someone whose purpose is truly aligned with your own and siding with someone who you have nothing in common with.

sure, free speech says everyone has a right to share their opinion, but there is also that notion that opinions are like arseholes and that everyone has one. people who have informed opinions can be as rare as hen’s teeth and if you look at arenas where there appears to be a persistent clusterfuck with no resolution in sight you are likely to find one or more people coming to the table with incomplete data.

knock it off – come to a fight with all your ducks in a row. save everyone some time and stop being ignorant … it serves no one.

New Year’s Resolution

New Year – another arbitrary on the route that allows you to tick off something completed on your list. Even for those of us who are sometimes not that great at completing cycles of action, the calendar allows us to chalk up at least a few victories. I always had a problem with Star Trek and its re-set button that hacked out any lasting changes inflicted on a character by the events of a story, but it was just a fictional iteration of something we are looking for in our daily lives; a way to get us existing wholly in present time and not obsessing about the past.

Resolution in the sense of resolving to do something different is a great idea – look at the unsuccessful actions you have been doing and eradicate them; that is a great survival mechanism. Resolution in the sense of – this resolves the story of last year and puts it to bed, and this is a notional new beginning. Resolution in the sense that things are definitely clearer than they were last year.

It is coming up on the year anniversary of my father’s death. It is past the year mark since I became aware of myself as a spiritual being. It is a year in which I have learned many new things and worked to correct some of the deficits of character and behaviour which have plagued me in the past. It is also a year in which I have helped a lot of people with the volunteer work which I have been doing. I have finished and published a lot of books, bringing projects to fruition that had sat there  incomplete for a long time.

The real test of anything learned is the application of that knowledge however, and in order to fully push forward and start getting things handled which have remained unhandled, I am going to look at areas where I  have not applied correctly what I know to work and I am going to rectify those problems.

Getting yourself sorted out and getting your life up and running as it should be isn’t some horrible laborious task either – all of it can be fun; all you have to remember is that all of it is a process of creation, and creation is something that makes you feel good, or should. I have never been one of those creative types that believed I had to descend into hell to bring back something that was worthwhile – I like writing and have fun with it; I think though for a fairly long time I have looked at the problems in my life and have seen them in terms of having to do horrible things in order to get where I want to be; this last year has changed that drastically … I have partially got myself back in the driving seat this  year but for 2011 I am no longer a back seat driver in my own life; I am in charge of navigating and driving and I am going to have fun doing it.

I have a great family and I have some great friends and what is the best thing one can do for them? Make them glad to know you and help them to be happy, carry your own weight, and be able to take up any slack when they need a helping hand. Wake up, wake up, wake up – how long has your fucking alarm been going off?

linear and cyclical

it is funny that despite it being fairly easy to spot the cyclical nature of fashion, which mimics the cyclical nature of the seasons and so many other things in the natural world, that some people still insist on viewing culture as moving in a purely linear direction where something dies out and something new is born.

the death knell sounding for cultural movements always seem strange because they never really totally die out – people who work in a particular genre may move on and produce something distinct from the products they produced when younger, but they often carry some element through their career. people’s present work is involved in a dialogue with things that they themselves have produced and the things which they were inspired by. sometimes enough people are having a dialogue with one particular element of culture that interest reaches a level high enough to provoke a revival, a renaissance.

yet those arbiters of culture who want to be the ones who say this is new and exciting and this is old and dead keep pushing this idea that there is a clear cut stopping point, when it is patently untrue. people are not born unique with no roots in history.

look at someone’s facebook page, excavate someone’s linkblog and see how the old and the new are packed in cheek by jowl, working to revive the long dead and germinate the not yet thought of. remixing isn’t anything new – shakespeare was doing it. while some people want some self-referential, ironic, post-modern, decontextualised word salad to read other people still like a story, and there is still something unique on offer that a book provides.

i was sitting here reading a article called the digital death of the author and the impact of technology on the art of writing, and sitting here typing away on a piece for my own blog i can’t deny the influence, but i believe the author as currently thought of and the story as currently thought of will persist. sure, new iterations and interpretations will come around, but i find it hard to believe that the function the story serves, specifically as a written story with a narrative arc that has a beginning, middle and end, is not still relevant to us as human beings. just because you have the option of forever editing and adding to something in real time it doesn’t mean you should – writing, like painting can become overworked if you don’t leave it alone after a while.

for a moment fashion may sweep people further away from traditional bookforms, but tides return. fashion is fleeting, and an idea that works will persist.

talking cliches

as a writer one thing you want to avoid is cliches – it is the thing which distinguishes someone with a mastery of the language from a hack who can barely scrape an original sentence up out of the muck of their derivative narrative.

ok, so think about your daily speech, and then apply this same rule. i know some people might be thinking well, it’s kind of like music – there are only so many notes so no wonder some tunes end up sounding the same, but there is a difference.

some of it has to do with delivery, i suppose, because if you are delivering it in the same voice you have always delivered the answer, with the same thoughts crowded in behind it, then whose question are you really answering? the person stood before you or someone who asked a similar question ten years ago?

i know i have used several phrases as catch-alls, as umbrella responses designed to cover a multitude of sins, but all they really ever did was display a lack of ability to really communicate and showed up my inability to answer a bloody question.

when you meet a new person and they haven’t got used to your bad habits then cliches might work because you might have different cliches to them, but hang around with them for long enough and those cliches become shared property and it soon becomes obvious when you’re avoiding answering or just not paying attention.

so how do you get over this? well, the first thing you have to do is actually take notice of what it being communicated and properly acknowledge it. you have to care about the communication enough to give it a real response not something that you are reading off a script of indifference.

i recently took a course in communication and i saw all these really bad habits i had picked up over time, and every time i notice i am saying something that really isn’t working, which acts as a signpost of noncommital to communicating i remove it.

if i wrote the way i sometimes communicated i might be thought of as very limited – a one trick pony or even a one sentence pony. being more responsible for the words which i let leave my mouth is, for me, much more important now than it has been in a long time. look at how you speak to others and see what you are truly putting out there.

a year old

i hadn’t realised that this blog was a year old this month, and i have to say i have really enjoyed writing on here. it has been as its remit determined it to be – signally random, covering whatever topic happened to be in my head when i sat down and opened the dashboard ready to post.

it has been an interesting year of course, but is always the future that looks brighter and more interesting and it is with renewed vigour that i look to the new year and all the possibilities that it presents. at some point i see the site birthing a book of some kind,, and then what? after that, what then? who knows, because this blog has and always will be about randomity and the possibility of a random thought landing.

a lot of fiction projects are approaching their culmination and i am thinking that maybe 2011 will be a year that is full of non-fiction too – undisguised and unmitigated truth. watch and wait and see.