Random Thought of the Day

[Otherside]

So, it's been 3 years since the first lockdown happened, and it's honestly weird thinking back.

I remember that everybody got obsessed with baking sourdough, banana bread and got obsessed with making that weird dalgona coffee stiff by shaking milk in a plastic bag. Everyone panic buyed toilet roll and pasta, and we decided to clap for the nurses, because apparently they appreciate that more than pound sterling. And we all thought "few weeks and this won't be a problem".

And then of course you got to lockdown #3 and it was less baking sourdough and "just a few weeks to flatten the curve" and more "ah hell" - which, we all knew was going to happen, despite the constant insistence that it wasn't going to happen and they wouldn't be cancelling Christmas, but nevertheless you were watching Australia celebrating the new years with fireworks whilst you were sat indoors with the police threatening to fine you if you met other people in your home Spoiler: and you didn't work at Downing Street or have concerns about your eyesight.

And then it lifted, and we were masks for a few months, and so you forgot how the tube actual stinks of...whatever that smell is. And if you wanted to go abroad you needed a test and/or a vaccine pass, and to actually get back into the UK you had to fill out this form which was apparently essential to enter the UK, but nobody bothered to ask to see it at the border. And then purchase a covid test when you flew back from an official list of approved sellers, some of whom wouldn't send the test and just scammed you. Which, despite the "you must take a test or be fined", they never really enforced it.

[Heelsbythebridge]

If my 12yo self knew what my life would be now, she would have wished I'd killed myself.

It's interesting how much humans are willing to tolerate in order to live.

[Heelsbythebridge]

Beer is disgusting

Gimme wine

[Doseone]

It's amazing how the mind works. During dreaming I can create entire songs that don't exist, and they're good! I don't have the ability to write music in real life.

Also Incubus is one of the most underrated bands talent-wise.

[Heelsbythebridge]

Man, this is the best rabbit hole I've fallen into in years. I WISH I experienced this drama live. (KARMA please no bite me)

[Heelsbythebridge]

I'm feeling unbearable stress right now

[Heelsbythebridge]

Western Canada is dreamy to me.

Hazy like a summer during grade school... why haven't I felt it since I came back?

I don't belong here, do I? But this is home, so what do I do?

[Heelsbythebridge]

If I had wheels, I'd be a wagon

[Heelsbythebridge]

2017-2018 were the best years EVER

I experienced things i never thought I ever would in this lifetime

Is that enough?

Never to be happy again? If it already happened once?

[Nyctophilia]

I don't really get this channel. I thought maybe they were just reuploading interviews and talks etc from elsewhere due to the inconsistency in people present and venues etc, but I guess someone involved in the process allows them to 'host' stuff? I mean I just clicked on this video because it's Alan Moore lol. Some interesting quotes here:

"The places where we live to some degree they write us. That we are dependent on all of the influences of the place and time that we emerge in and grow up in. At the same time we write the places where we live. I'd say Northampton certainly since it collapsed into a financial blackhole in 2018 but certainly Northampton and probably most other places at the present moment would seem to be particularly disenchanted. That there is no meaning in anything, there is no joy, there is no enchantment at all in our newspaper headlines in the streets that we walk. So one of the duties of literature seems to me and of art in general is a reenchantment to lend meaning to these forgotten spaces, these forgotten people. To make them kind of flair with life again. That is art's job. Or at least part of it."

"If you can attach narratives to places. Then, you are kind of overwriting the reality. Because when we think about Victorian London we're not actually thinking about Victorian London are we? We're thinking about Dickens. It's sort of because Dickens managed to overwrite the reality of his day in a way that gave it meaning but was recognisably accurate to the reader's of the time where they thought yeah this is our world."

"When Margaret Thatcher bravely degraded the country from 1979/1980 on she first had to degrade the idea of the country. There was lots of ways in which we thought of ourselves before the Thatcher years that at the end of them not it was something different. Unions meant something different by the end of the Thatcher years and all sorts of things. The landscape of our thinking had greatly deteriorated and that was matched in the deterioration of the physical world. Because if the idea of something doesn't matter then the thing itself doesn't really matter that much does it?"

"I was just thinking this is probably a very literal version of it. The change in some place like Leicester when they found that perhaps in that carpark there was Richard the III. And suddenly it doesn't just change that bit of the carpark. I mean I really noticed it, it might have been psychosomatic but I've played there many times and wandered around the streets and there was this sense had a horse ridden through there, was a king standing over there. Who were the people crawling through suddenly there were more ghosts there. [...] Suddenly the stories have reignited this is not just a hopeless place and over there is the Marks and Spencers, and the Lidl's and all of those things it is a place that is the magic of a story in the bricks again."

"We need more ghosts. I don't know what all the exorcists are thinking. [...] I mean like one of the things with Richard the III turning under a carpark in Leicester was who knows what's under all the other carparks. It no only does a lot for Leicester it does a lot for carparks doesn't it? I'm all for that. I've had a soft spot for carparks since I once went on a walk with some other occult minded types and we were looking at all of Aleister Crowley's addresses in London which has recently been the subject of an amazing book by I think Phil Baker. [...] Nearly every bus shelter that Aleister Crowley ever loited in is still there whereas if you were to do similar walk looking for places associated with say Austin Osman Spare it's all sorts of Aldi carparks so yeah. These forgotten little stretches of our urban wasteland who knows what might be buried under there."

I think so that's why I liked Patrick Wolf's music a lot as a teenager but I can't get the same thing out of it that now that I did back then (also he's released new music for the first time in like a decade recently I think and I've not checked it out yet.) Not for a specific location either just the UK. I feel like Ethel Cain does that for people who grew up in a Southern Baptist culture in the US. (That's why I compared them before lol not because they are otherwise all that musically or aesthetically similar.) I can't think of anyone in the UK really like that now that I'm aware of in music but location is often more central to writing novels than songs tbh, and I'm not discovering new UK acts that much these days (plus most people are based online now, and other factors.)

[Heelsbythebridge]

I feel ok when I'm drunk or asleep, but I can't be drunk or asleep ALL the time. I need to be sober at least 10 or so hours of the day and those are some soul crushing hours.

[Heelsbythebridge]

I don't want to try anymore but there isn't an easy way out. Puritanical society. Barbiturates are illegal, firearms are illegal. What are we supposed to do?

[Otherside]

So, return to the office is back in the news, as always, so, I am just going to say it.

I don't want to return to the office full time. I don't care about your opinion on last night's episode of Happy Valley. I am here to work, so that I can buy food and pay the bills. Yes, I'm probably antisocial. I find the office loud and irritating at times. Its absolutley bloody freezing in the morning and I don't enjoy the commute in the cold and wet, nor do I enjoy the rail journey and I never will. I don't get the argument that I'm "ruining local economoes" by not returning, because I'm not spending money at Pret or on rail ticket, and instead, at smaller local businesses for coffee, groceries and lunch. Which are booming because people are now here during the day.

I will do my joh, which with the odd exception, I do just fine from work and nobody has any complaints that I am not doing it. And yes, I'd happily leave and take a pay cut at another job thay allowed me to remain remote or hybrid.

[Heelsbythebridge]

I feel a bit better today than I did last week, on the same amount of sleep. I guess that last glass of wine has an effect.

[Heelsbythebridge]

I need an exit button on life. There's nowhere safe to turn besides substances and sleep and even those aren't a guarantee