I’ve kinda loved being on my own lately. It’s lovely. I have been very sick with this shit, and I’m still not testing negative. I live on my own. I don’t have to dance around anybody else. I wake up when I need to, I go to sleep when I want to. I have it very easy. Some of my friends have been climbing the walls. Tristan tested positive on the same day as me across town, and when I speak to him he’s missing the world. I just finished Christmas Carol where I have to be the heart of the party, so maybe that adds to it. I’ve loved not having to communicate with others. I’ve just had a month of managing rooms full of strangers. Now I have no choice but to be alone. I’m very happy not to have to engage with the world.
Maybe in a normal January I’d already be getting anxious. “Where are my spring shows?” etc. But it’ll all take care of itself. Spring will spring and I will find work or make work. And all will be well. I really feel that.
So right now I’m basically getting a free week, the likes of which I haven’t had for decades. A week where I don’t have to wake up and worry. A week where I have just finished gainful employment so the wolf is a few streets away from the door. I can just look at my home and relax and be warm in the winter. There’s not much happening anyway.
I was just halfway through writing when I ended up having a massive row with a friend on WhatsApp about framing of ideas. This is the downside of the solitariness I’ve been celebrating. The more time we have to only bounce our thinking off the inside of our heads, the more we start to think we’ve got the right thinks and the less compromising we can be when something challenges what we’ve constructed. We were both bastards to each other. Apparently I never apologise. So I’m sorry.
This whole pandemic has broken so much. We all know that the business of government is to manage the masses. I just finished watching The Hunger Games which is a good little allegory for when things go too far. People are being just so unforgiving and unforgivable. “Oh ha ha ha ha ha Novak Djokovic is being returned from Australia and be can’t play tennis.” No. Fuck you just as much as the idiots who are calling you sheeple for being so smug about it. Science is science, but there are lots of people doing lots of things for lots of reasons. It’s never as simple as you want it to be. People are being cruel and simplistic on both sides of a debate that shouldn’t even be a debate. And I really properly see both sides. And I will not wade in, I will not, I will not.
But stories are being built on stories. It’s the old game. Start with a fact. Then extrapolate. If somebody disagrees with the extrapolation, refer back to the fact not the extrapolation. You can build a huge tower out of skin if it’s based on one fact, even one as simple as that the government doesn’t tell us the whole truth, something that I was taught in school and it was called management.
Anyway. I don’t do this here. This is meant to be an escape. I’ll go back to pretending to be a megalomaniac magus if I keep drawing myself into this. It’s the new polarity. It’s horrible. It is absolutely redolent with smug. And there’s nothing I hate more than smug even if I stink of it myself sometimes…
AlBarclay 