DON'T FORGET TO TURN OFF YOUR TV: APRIL 24th - 30th

Had a minor revelation yesterday while writing one of the short stories for this collection I've been signed up for. Been a bit bummed recently, as some of the last few posts make pretty clear, but the last few days have been especially frustrating as I've been without my good friend Mary.

Now I know there're some of you out there who, for all the best reasons, probably wouldn't consider an abject lack of weed as being a bad thing for me. Well the great thing about communication between reasonable and caring people like us is that we can utterly disagree with one another without it being a whole big thing.

Basically, Easter crept up on me, I didn't plan ahead and now al the students have gone and with them their friendly dealers. This leaves only the street dealers, ie. the guys who sell only dope as a sideling to smack and would cut you soon as look at you. Now that's really not my scene so I'm doing without, but I'm not happy about it.

Anyway, I do admit that my relationship with my beautiful green lady friend has changed over recent times and become dominated by escapism rather than self exploration. Before we all get a bit Harry Anslinger(1) however and start hysterically denouncing the evils of substance abuse let me tell you about me revelation.

As regular readers will probably have worked out, I tend to do a lot of thinking. In fact I've been told by a wide array of people throughout my life, 'friends', teachers, bosses, that I think too much. Well yesterday it occurred to me that I've always been this way, I've always found myself lost in the abstract, analysing, pondering etc. but why?

Well something else I've experienced all my life is depression, 'a simple chemical imbalance in the brain' apparently. Sitting here typing away roughly twenty-four hours ago I was describing a character when I put the two together for the first time.

I've developed thinking skills over my life not through any inherent talent or intelligence, but simply through a great deal of practice. How have I motivated myself to such cerebral dedication? By running away. Being in the here and now, feeling my everyday life has always been painful so I escaped into my thoughts.

I remember writing as a teenager, struggling with the new edge that the typical angst added to my mental illness, that escaping was ok as long as you brought something back, as long as it produced something. What running away to me thoughts, and with Mary, has produced in me are habitual thinking skills and a powerful back burner.

Quite regularly when writing or thinking I will reach a point where I know I just can't go any further. Over time however I've learned that such impasses are but temporary and come to trust deeply in my back burner.

Basically I know that if I leave it alone the thought process will not stop but bubble away somewhere towards the rear of my mind. I give it a few days then look again to discover the fruits of my unconscious mental efforts. There are things that simply cannot be forced but require time to fall quietly into place.

I've sat here a couple of times over the last three days to try and write a post, I could feel one brewing, but just couldn't make it happen. Waking today however, it was just all laid out like a great and golden path. So here we go, enough intro, let's get right to the heart of this thing.(2)

Like all my favourite ideas this draws various apparently unrelated strings together, how many? Hmm, three I think ;)

Firstly a post I wrote recently called 'inside the outside'. I wrote about the feeling of being excluded from society, a feeling of utter isolation, of being, to quote a most excellent Phillip K Dick story I read recently, 'out of phase with society'.

I went on however to outline how this beautiful online community we have here, among other things, had helped me to see that I was not the only one out here in the darkness. Actually, it seems, most of our race are outside the bubble of the bright, feeling lost and alone.

Such an observation causes a fundamental shift in the unavoidable questions of life. Fear and sadness and 'what's wrong with me?' become anger and hope and 'what's wrong with society?

Now a lot of things i read in Adbusters stick in my mind, it's that kind of mag, but one particularly relevant piece recounted some statistics about mental illness. I mentioned this in response to a comment from my good friend oojamaflip the other day but it's interesting enough to warrant repetition:

in our society you are more likely to suffer from mental illness if you re:

female rather than male,
young rather than old,
poor rather than rich,
from an ethnic minority rather than being white,

Simply put, the further away from being a rich, middle aged white guy the more likely your mind is to be scrambled. Could this be because our society is run by and for rich, middle aged white guys? I say yes, yes it is.

Ok, so there's string number one. String number two? The most beautiful place in the world: YORKSHIRE. Yes, if you were to crack open my head and pull out the all the things that make me who I am you'd find a pure white rose in there, among other things.

Before I really get into this, yuo may notice I'm not in any great hurry today, I thought I break with tradition and recount a couple of cheesy jokes.

#1 A US tourist is visiting Westminster Abbey when he notices a large gold telephone on the wall. He finds a guy in a dog collar and asks what the phone is for.

"Why that's our direct line to god," he's told, "for just £25 a minute you can speak to the lord himself."

Amazed the tourist continues on his tour of the UK. Stopping at Lincoln Cathedral he spies another phone and asks if it's the same thing.

"That's right," he's told, "£25 a minute and you can speak to god."

Finally the guy is looking round York Minster when he overhears someone asking about the gold phone on the wall. Proud of his own knowledge he ambles over and explains the purpose and price. The guy in the dog collar interrupts to correct him however.

"No no, it's only 50p a minute to talk to god from this phone."

Puzzled the tourist asks why. The man of the cloth looks at him in some confusion before explaining.

"Well it's a local call isn't it."

#2 An elderly Yorkshire man is dealing with the unenviable tasks of arranging his beloved wife's funeral. Among all the other things that need to be sorted is the tombstone. He ponders long and hard over a fitting epitaph, considering his wife's life long devotion to the church. Having spent her life loving and serving the lord he decides on "She Was Thine" as being both simple and dignified.

He tells the stonemason what he's after and turns his attention elsewhere. The night before the funeral he pops in to check on the progress of the stone only to find, to his horror, that a terrible mistake has been made. Beautifully carved the stone reads: "She Was Thin".

"No, no, no!" he tells the stonemason, "you've missed out the E!" The stonemason apologies and assures the upset gent that he'll work through the night to ensure it's right for the next day.

The funeral arrives and the mourners make their way to the grave side where the modified stone is sat in place. "E, She Was Thin" it reads.

Ho, ho, ho.

Anyway, there're plenty of stereotypes about Yorkshire, and Yorkshiremen in particular. Now my late grandfather was a great old Yorkshireman who made things last. When I visit my grandma these days we sit on furniture he bought over a half a century ago. Nothing would be replaced if it could be fixed.

Just as I can't help but look both ways when I cross a road thanks to relentless brainwashing from my mother, I can't help but close doors after me thanks to both my grandfather and father both being obsessed with 'keeping the heat in'.

Yes this plays right into the cliché of the tight fisted Yorkshireman but over the years I've found myself arriving at a similar place along a different route. My persistent concern for our environment together with my inherent dislike of capitalism and consumerism both inspire me to conserve resources.

It's not about having to pay for new furniture or heating bills, it's about recognising that the fuels and materials that go into making and transporting these things are terrifyingly finite. We're so locked into this 'financial freedom' trip that the idea of not buying something you can afford simply does not compute.

It may be old fashioned and clichéd, a hangover from a different time, but the tight fisted Yorkshireman still has something to offer our current world of rampant consumerism.

So, the third and final string. Remember the shambles that was the fox hunting ban? All that parliamentary time and money and all the media effort to convince us that this issue was more important than terror laws or invading other countries.

And what about the "CIVIL WAR" promised by the Daily Mail? The deep divide between the our urban and rural populations that was to tear the very fabric of our society asunder? Possibly one of the largest scale and most successful acts of polarisation in recent times. The two opposite were laid out, there was to be no sitting on the fence, you're either with us or against us.

In the red corner we had the young, urban activists, Guardian readers all about animal rights and anti-capitalism, railing against the oppressive old ways, determined to see a new era of justice and equality. In the blue were the old school country folk, Daily Mail reading, anti drug types in silly costumes, clinging fiercely to their ancient traditions.

Of course the hunting bill was nothing like the assault on their way of life that the media presented. In fact the actual content of the bill restricted nothing but the most minor details of their pastime. Of course in this society that we're all so very proud of, the actual details of the laws governing our land never actually make it to the people they affect. Instead we just get the most controversial bits before falling back into the good old us vs them scrap we seem to enjoy most of all.

Seeing as how this is shaping up to be the longest post I've ever written let's pull these three strings together and make some kind of bow with which to play this damn tune. My point here is that we, all of us, have been both divided and conquered and we don't even seem to realise it.

We're all here, hiding our mental illnesses from one another in the belief that we're the only ones. For some reason we think there is, or should be, some great difference between the frugal attitudes of our grandparents and the oh-so modern ideal of sustainable living.

We've got young people in hoodies trying to save the world from the very farmers who, if given half a chance, could pull the whole capitalist machine down around our ears. If we want communities and small scale businesses, local produce and healthy food, our rural communities are the people with the know how.

We sit at our PCs amid the urban sprawl, reflecting on the detrimental effects of removing ourselves from nature, mourning the loss of a deep connection with the earth and all the craziness that brings with it. At the same time we look down our noses at those old fashioned country types who we think represent the establishment, the posh and bigoted.

What fools we are! Those are the only people in our society who've managed to retain that connection we miss so much. The fact is that the 'mainstream', the 'norm' actually consists of a very small minority of people.

The rest of us have somehow allowed ourselves to be split into further minorities, fighting one another when actually the root of all our problems is the same. If we could just get past the petty differences, overcome our snobbery when it comes to 'damn kids' or 'old duffers', and work together there is nothing we could not do.

There's just so much more that unites us than divides us, not least the unbelievably ignored fact that we're ALL suffering at the hands of the same people. Those kids on estates for whom there is no meaningful work or opportunity are getting fucked by exactly the same people and in exactly the same way as all the farmers who top themselves each year.(3)

Now it's tempting to say that's it's all down to the politicians but this is giving them far too much credit. Regardless of how puffed up their chests may be when they start banging on about the noble 'democracy' we 'enjoy' in this country they have less power today than ever before, they can't change a thing.

No, they are just bitches to the money, and that's where the real problem is. The people with the real power when it comes to employment or quality of life etc etc are the suits, the guys chasing the dollar. We're being royally fucked people, all of us, and until we stand together we're just going to keep bending over.

footnotes

(1) Harry Anslinger was a US puritanical christian and high profile prohibitionist. It was his belief that people had to be saved from themselves and that making drugs and alcohol illegal was the way to do this. He was the guy who, eventually, managed to convince each of the US's states to sign up to a law making marijuana illegal, against the advice of the American Medical Association by the way.

He also founded the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), which later became the dreaded Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) who shoot quite literally hundreds of innocent US citizens dead in their own homes every year by going to the wrong address with their 'no-knock warrants'.

Anslinger also managed to get UN member states, including the UK, to sign up to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics, which was the first step in this country to the outlawing of dope, even though cannabis is officially NOT a narcotic.

All in all he was, in my opinion, an utter scumbag whose breathtaking arrogance and wilful ignorance has caused more pain and suffering than can be calculated or even imagined. What a twat.

(2) HST RIP

(3) apparently farmers have the highest suicide rate of any profession in the UK, given the fact that our political system over the last century or so has systematically fucked the agricultural industry of this country at every turn I cannot, unfortunately, say I am surprised.