This Week In Dentalists

I'm in a frankly indecent amount of pain at the moment, and it's all the fault of the Toothache Of Death. Which is all my fault, tracing it back, as two years plus of drinking, chain-smoking and poor diet have been about as good for my dental health as for my mental health. It may also have something to do with not having seen a dentist for years and years; this is because dentistry comprises a sizeable part of the list of things I'm scared to death of. Which, incidentally, also features:

• Clowns
• Killer robots
• Words that have a Q not followed by a U
• Commitment

Anyway, when I was a kid I was so terrified of the whole thing I needed a general anaesthetic to have fillings done. Then again, I was a really nervous kid. Of course, you might well ask, 'Alex, why the fuck are you so freaked out about dentists, of all things?'. To which my response would be, 'You never saw Marathon Man, did you?'.
In any case, I anticipate something like this happening. For the moment, though, constantly feeling like an angry man is jamming needles into my jaw is rather taking the shine off the whole happy-jolly-imminent-Christmas-spirit thing for me. Then again, I suspect I'd feel that way regardless, given that everywhere I go seems to be blasting irritating Christmas songs at me. Nothing says enforced goodwill to all men than Jingle Bells played through a tannoy eight hundred times, after all.
Everything else is ups and downs, college included. The only interesting thing going on at the moment is my Film Studies coursework; at some point soonish, I'm going to have to film an original two-to-three-minute sequence or trailer, based on ideas I've nicked from other, better films (you're more or less told to do this). I'm thinking noir. Suggestions on a postcard to/brick through the window of the usual address.
More later. Now, I need to try and get some sleep. Not that I can sleep anyway, but that's not the point.

The World Turns Too Fast

So, things are still going. I'm not dead, or giving up on the blog; it's just that college is taking up a hell of a lot of time. Primarily this has been time spent wrestling with the vending machines in the Media Department (I vonted orange! It gave me lemon-lime.). Oh, and coursework. But mostly vending machines. Even so, it's not been that bad. Last week I was all set to write a 'bloody hell, this is really getting to me' post, but this past week's not been too bad at all. Apart from leaving home and coming home in the dark, but that's just a seasonal thing. What's inspired this change of heart, strangely enough, has been Film Studies. For a subject that was originally a second choice, it's turned out to be the only one of four I'm genuinely eager to learn more about. It's even fun, and that's not really something I can say about any of my other subjects. Sociology's interesting enough in that I knew next to nothing about it previously (plus, I can taunt/provoke my fairly-homophobic* class), but it's not the same thing.
Plus, I actually seem to have a social life now. No idea how that happened, other than that tequila was involved. I'm not going to get all Sally Field ('You like me! You really like me!'), but it's meant that I've been a lot more confident. Consequently, a lot more irritating, but at least I get to make facetious comments in class now.
Mentally, the state of the union is mixed. I'm still having the occasional depressive moment, but it's not been sticking around for long enough to be that much of a concern. What does worry me is that the propensity for it is still there; it's almost like the really bad depression is dormant, waiting for something that taxes my nerves enough to send me right back to square one. That the length of these depressive episodes is shortening and that there are fewer of them is heartening, and tells me that I'm learning to cope with it a lot better, but the intensity of them hasn't improved a great deal, which suggests to me that to a certain extent I'm in this for the long haul. It's much the same with self-harm - I'm getting the urge less often, but it's the exact same feeling when I do, and I doubt I'll ever be rid of it entirely. I don't know that that's the result I was hoping for, but as a famous war criminal once said, you go to war with the army you have.
I'm also having some boyfriend troubles. More specifically, lack-of-boyfriend troubles. I'm not exactly planning to settle down and get a house in the suburbs, but there are times when I want something a bit more significant than just drunken idiocy/infidelity (see also Walk of Shame). Unfortunately, Croydon isn't exactly bursting at the seams with opportunities (I double the gay population every time I come in in the morning), which leaves me with clubbing or the interwebs (I haven't had the time for the gay youth group lately, and even then it's not a dating service). Since I don't like meat-markets or being murdered, I've something of a dilemma at the moment. Answers on a postcard to the usual address, preferably with the heading 'Alex, I am a beautiful effeminate male model with a wonderful personality, an IQ of 200, amazing [censored] and [censored] with a [censored] like a firehose, who thinks you're the best thing since sliced bread. Will you go out with me, please?'.
...well, it was worth a try, wasn't it?

* And they are. I was going to be all hearts-and-minds, right up until the point when someone told me being gay was 'my fault'. At which point I resolved to do to that logic what Nixon did to Cambodia. The end result of this was me giving a presentation on the sociology of homosexuality from marxist and feminist perspectives, which led to the better part of 30 people all staring at me like a dog that's just been shown a card trick. It was priceless.

Partay!

Well, I am hosting a party in my tiny, tiny house, and the Francesca whom you may remember from a couple of posts ago (if you were paying proper attention) is endeavouring totake on my identity and compose a blog post. Fun diddly um pum pum!

Shall I tell you what Alex is really like? Hmm, all right then; he's lovely as fuck! Interpret that as you will.

See ya laters alligators.

The Bums Will Always Lose, Mr. Lebowski

Of course they will. That's the point.

It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space...[who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...:
Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this:
From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

So, I have had some drinks and am about to be very pretentious. But fuck, everybody's pretentious in their own way; the best you can hope for is to be pretentious in the service of the right ideas. I think the problem at the moment is that all the dramatic ideas floating around are heinous bastardry, in one way or the other. Call that a simplistic worldview, but it applies pretty well to the islamists who think blowing up an aeroplane is martyrdom, the neoconservatives and 'muscular' liberals (the ones still around) who think blowing up a wedding party is collateral damage, and the white supremacists who think Britain would be a lot better off without all those nasty brown people. Marxism is dead*, and liberalism is pretty uninspiring at the best of times. In any case, there's nothing quite like a meeting of a handful of grey-haired, grey-faced trade unionists still holding out hope for a popular uprising against a society that, to paraphrase an old situationalist slogan, won't let them die of starvation but risks them dying of boredom, to turn you off the future of socialism in Britain.
Possibly the problem is that my generation missed the boat for the 60s. The world is just as much of a bordel now as it was then, if not more so, but there doesn't seem to be a sense that anyone's going to do anything about it, brief Hope For Change idolatry aside. Maybe it's just me, but the bastard spawn of late-stage capitalism** seem a bit too jaded to start throwing paving stones. You can go on all the protests and the marches, write terrible songs, even (God help you) read the philosophy, but the inspiration just isn't there. In which case, maybe the best course of action is a retreat into bohemianism; have another drink and forget about it. Lose yourself in drink, drugs and sleeping with a different stranger every night of the week. So much for being realistic and demanding the impossible.
Of course, all the same problems Marx had about class and inequality and so forth still exist. I'm going to finish with a very immature joke about the class system in this country, which the old German probably did not have in mind when he was writing Das Kapital. I know this to be absolutely true, because I just made it up. When I was at Dulwich, there was a local comp down the road. I think it's probably some manner of academy now. In between the two schools was a pub where, amongst others, the local girls would congregate. One night, a guy from Dulwich chats up one of these girls, and she responds favourably. He takes her somewhere private, and being something of a gentleman, asks if she would like to see his 'member'. She tells him to go for it, and he disrobes. The girl takes a look and, recalling her experience with the comprehensive-school contingent, says, 'Ohhhh. It's like a cock, only smaller!'.

* Note that this hasn't stopped the corpse from shambling around.
** Watch this, and despair for everyone raised on MTV. Also the genre that spawned Public Enemy and Grandmaster Flash being reduced to rich white girls 'hip'-hoppin''. But, y'know, feel free to tell me that I'm not allowed to have opinions about that and that I should stick to indie-rock.

Was It Bad For You, Too?

My latest review for Stereokill's gone up (actually it did on the 4th, but what with everything going on I'd missed it). It is not, how you say, favourable. I don't actually like writing bad reviews (as in, reviews of things I rate badly; I write badly-written reviews often enough that I've become desensitised to it); I'm fine with ranting against the general population, but I'm not so much of a sociopath that I get a kick out of criticising individual musicians or bands.
In any case, Dave Hughes has a response here. The most pertinent bit:

Also, people who are turned on by “harmonica abuse” and poor vocal capability will still have to listen to the CD to find out about its content, themes, style, instruments and political viewpoints (my own, not Evan Greer’s).

Which is fair enough. With the proviso of not wanting to start an Angry Internet Man fight, I would say that I had a fairly restraining word limit for that piece, and that if I went in listing everything I was looking for like a hipster singles ad, that'd have left me no room for an actual opinion. That, incidentally, is as much of a review process as I've got; listen to the album, write down what strikes me. Which is what I did.
This is all sounding a little defensive, isn't it? The best I can say is 'no hard feelings'. Although perhaps that's a little rich. Let's just hope this doesn't cause as many problems for Stereokill as, say, this did.

I'm Not Dead

Disappointing, right? Anyway, I'm just busy. At the moment, busy with a Powerpoint presentation (I know) about the Birmingham campaign (not that Birmingham, the other Birmingham). As a topic it's fascinating, but it's common knowledge that Powerpoint can make just about any subject into the dullest thing ever.
Anyway, a lot of stuff has happened since my last post. I started college, which is actually not bad. It's very much unlike Dulwich, for which I'm profoundly grateful. Met lots of lovely people there, including Francesca, who is wonderful and awesome in all respects and never forces bloggers to be complimentary about her. Ever.
As for the academic side, things are going about as well as could be expected. Film Studies, in particular, is turning out to be rather wonderful. I managed to escape from Psychology (you haven't been shouted at until you've been shouted at about the textbook definitions of independent and dependent variables) into Sociology, but I haven't actually started the latter yet, having been off the past few days with Super-Deadly Flu Of Death.
In terms of mental healthiness, I think I'm doing OK. I've only had to flee from one lesson in the midst of a panic attack, and amazingly managed to go this far with no self-harm (unless you count cigarettes or alcohol). Probably the most important thing is that being in full-time education is making me feel more like an actual person again. In this case, a person who hates his commute and so forth. But you take my point.

Meanwhile, back at the kolkhoz...


Subversive socialist activities continue apace. I and a couple of comrades did a bit of leafleting at East Croydon station for Socialism 09, which went surprisingly well. A remarkable number of people took leaflets, and only one person told me it was crap. Furthermore, I didn't get my head kicked in. No actual revolutions started yet, but oh well.

In the news...

• Ageing ex-Hitlerjugend member brings the Spiritual Toxic Waste Tour to Africa, condemning 'spiritual toxic waste'. Apparently political colonialism is over, which shows a rather charming naiveté on the pontiff's part when it comes to China's business in Africa. Also, materialism is a greater threat to African peace and prosperity than war, famine or disease. A greater cynic than I might point out the role of the Church, and the current pontiff in particular, in perpetuating some of that disease.

• Sour-faced, intellectually-lazy, faux-rebellious art bitch doesn't want to pay tax.
  

Anyway, that's about all for now. More later, and more often. Promise.

I'm A Student

My new ID card tells me so. It's right there in big white letters, above the obligatory embarrassing photo and the NUS logo. I think this means I have to spend my afternoons watching Countdown now.
That's right, higher education fans, I've insinuated myself into Croydon College. My first day is on the 14th. Just got back from the enrolment day, having signed up for AS levels in History, Psychology and English Literature. Goverment and Politics was full (my bastarding luck), so my fourth is Film Studies. I nearly did Meedya Studies instead, but then I remembered this.
Yes, Croydon College! The self-described 'only "GOOD" college in Croydon', which now I've named I can't be libelous about. But the campus looks nice, it's easy to get to, I can get A-levels, and I think I'm comparatively unlikely to get my head kicked in, so it's all good. Seems a lot less formal than Dulwich, I get Tuesdays off, and by and large the rules boil down to 'don't do anything illegal, don't forget your ID card, and don't smoke'.
Obviously it's going to be a bit of an adjustment from sitting around all day and occasionally doing some hack writing, but I think (I hope) I'll do OK at it. I did manage to get top marks in the numeracy and literacy assessments, which at least proves that I haven't forgotten how to count.
Oh, and they even gave me an alarm clock with 'The early bird catches the worm!' on it as part of my welcome pack. I'm living the dream, folks.