Britical :: June

June 29, 2009

The Hippycrits…

Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know - Tao te Ching

Never trust a hippy - Sid Vicious

Maybe I’m really pulling my dick out on this one (as my mate C. would say), but I am willing to bet some of you have noticed the recent fashion for protesting one’s own goodness, godliness, "spirituality", and all things sweetness & light. The beauty of this post is, for purposes of my losing friends and alienating people that aren’t really friends anyway, is that if you’re guilty of this, you’ll be too self-absorbed to realise it’s about you or too self-absorbed to read it in the first place.

"Actually, I’m a very… spiritual person", the hair-tossing celebrity will take care to confide with a straight face to several hundred thousand viewers of ‘Access Hollywood’. If asked about their latest stint in rehab, or the dump truck needed to transport their coke habit, they’ll likely smile and say, "I’ve really….evolved past that now?" More often than not, it will be a celebrity known within the industry for the exacting instructions and ensuing tantrums aimed at the hapless minions in their entourage. In other words, someone with their head several miles up their own arse. Whatever the airy-fairy concept of "spiritual" means to such people, publicly judging yourself to be wonderful - first cousin to declaring, yourself a "very charismatic" or "very sexy person" - is surely not for you to say, is it?

And another thing: is there not something a bit "off", chilling even, about inserting "Peace Out" or "Bliss & Gratitude" or whatever meaningless feel-goodism as your email "signature" by automatically making it so? Not that I don’t revel in the irony. After all, these sentiments, such as they might be (and my argument here being that they ain’t), are surely things to be acted upon, and without fuss, not just spouted about ad nauseum. They can even, horror or horrors, be kept to yourself via that dying talent, private thought (fucking bloggers). Otherwise, ‘Love’, ‘Peace’ and all the other worthy stuff you have no intention of actually making good on, become cheapened, soiled by some advertising scatter shot effect, like the guy in the bar at 3am hitting on anything vaguely female that moves under its own steam.

Now this hippy shit (for want of a better term), with its leather tie-on bracelets, crystals, grubby bits of red string, and Native American gee-gaws, in cahoots with its general feeling of woolly, New Age, West Coast (un)thinking, has trickled down, like so much diarrhoea, to the general populace. It has even reached Australia. And lately, unless you yourself subscribe to it very vocally, you will be judged "Negative" or "Judgemental" (yes, these people excel in unintentional irony. Bless.).

So I myself shall then judge the negative effects of the self-help industry, one of whose most irksome spawn is ‘The Secret’. In case you’ve been blissfully unaware, this is a scary and unstoppable juggernaut of books, movies and other derivative products made up of Positive Thinking gone completely rogue; i.e. simple optimism and hope recycled and re-engineered using spurious notions nicked from some bastard spawn of pretend quantum theory & Eastern Religion. Its heyday was a couple of years ago, but its legacy lives on in people insisting you need only "manifest your desire" to get the things you want - usually, I have noticed, things involving bigger cars, bigger houses, and a bigger bank balance. And so, if you fail to achieve these things via such childish magical thinking, there is an implicit and insidious sense of blame. (And God help you if you have cancer…) It is this that I despise most about ‘The Secret’ and its ilk. As that wise Mr. Shakespeare put it: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’

…Speaking of which, in the rest of the world (i.e., not America, darlings) where children may go to bed very hungry, with images, if not of sugar plums, then bowls of rice, dancing in their heads, are we really to believe they are guilty of not "manifesting their desire" properly? "Ah…", the hippies will tell you, too apathetic and busy self-improving themselves to actually do anything about such things, "It’s Karma." Nice, you think. Nice attitude - and you trust that if there were such a thing as Karma, that they might find themselves in their next "incarnation" picking flies from their starving children’s faces in some filthy refugee camp.

The "Self-Help" movement has always been about the self-ish self……the mememmemeME. There’s not much room, amidst all the self-affirmations and navel gazing, for anyone else. White folks rich only in money trot off to the South West or some desert in search of a "shaman" who, with the help of some hallucogenics, is happy to take their money and usher them into some faux-Native American "experience" - minus the smallpox, bullets and general raping & pillaging and shit. (Shame.) They will come back, faces aglow, the way people return from India wittering on about "Dharma", having found "ananda"…bliss among the wretchedly poor and unfortunate.

But the best thing about this faux-Buddhist mass circle jerk is, if you go on about your own Positive, Giving self enough of the time, you really don’t have to worry too much about anyone else at all. On the contrary, you will actually start to believe you’re some free-spirited being of wonder and enlightenment sprinkling happy, happy, joy, joy fairy dust on anyone lucky enough to be around you. The constant self-aggrandisement, whether via smarmy email signatures, misapproriating other cultures’ mystic legends (i.e. supernatural rubbish), Twitter, rainbow bracelets, yoga mats, your Facebook status, or your scraggly bit of red string…is meant to say it all for you. (And does it, how!) In sum, it serves to let you off the hook. With all this sound and fury, even if it signifies nothing very much at all, your underlying self-serving attitude cannot possibly be called out by anyone. So if you’re ever called upon to actually do something for someone else, even someone who may once have helped you, your eyes may glaze over with confusion quicker than you can say ‘Deepak Chopra’.

This is why I am no longer surprised or disappointed when such people back quietly out of the metaphorical room at the merest sense of anything requiring them to walk their talk. Their words, their accoutrements, are in inverse proportion to their actions. Luckily, these things should conveniently signal to you all you need to know beforehand. If you’re smart, you will have learned to rely on the so-called Negative and Judgemental people. It is they who step up to the plate. Talking less but doing more, they will practically knock down your door when you’re even slightly in need and then brush off your thanks, their effort a mere nothing to them. But the protesting too much hippycrits (yeah, I just made that word up)? To a person, methinks not so much. Namaste…ommmmm…..

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June 12, 2009

Just Tell Me.

New York

"When your parent is gone, there is the realization that you are next in line for death."

Nice. I honestly had not thought of that. Cheers, Grief booklet.

It had also never occurred to me that Travel wouldn’t work. In books, romantic heroes and heroines everywhere know to take solace in Travel (perhaps with the caveat they have a base, a Home from which to travel from). So last week I went to Mexico. On a whim. Yep. That’s how I roll, baby.

On the way to the airport I decided didn’t want to go after all.

At the airport, it was the middle of the night, and even though a patient friend was talking me down through the two hour wait, I wanted to bolt. It was like being put on the school bus again. But I thought about all the hassle it would cause for Air Mexicana to find my bag and pull it off the plane when they’d been nice enough to give me an exit row aisle seat.

On the plane, a nice little A 319, there were no sleepy men in sombreros, no goats, and no chickens. Neither was the Taco Bell chihuahua yapping it up in the galley. (How travel expands the mind!) It was the quietest flight I have ever been on - sedate, even.

Despite these disappointments, I felt better once I arrived at Mexico City and took a plane for the mountains - the sorts of mountains, I noticed, as they appeared through the little window, where CNN shows pictures of plane debris scattered about.

At the house, during the week that followed, I knew I was there to Relax. I met quite a few people here and there at lunches and dinners, all good and interesting in their own way. Still, sitting alone and restless outside my casita, I took measure of the banana-less banana trees, the obscenely garish coloured flowers, the maddening flutter and squawk of the birds flying constantly in and out of the windows, the insects (oh, the fucking insects!) - and I looked miserably at the lake, shimmering and empty, far below, and I thought: I wish this was Italy. And that was when it struck me that no, actually, it being Italy wouldn’t help either. Not Italy, not Greenland, not Thailand, not even Christmas Island…none of these places would work. "It’s not you, it’s me", I wanted to say then to this poor place and all its natives, who, naturally, I couldn’t fucking stand either. And as for New York, well, it has now become merely the place that is the least unbearable.

Arriving back here to ignore the aforementioned Grief booklet a friend sent to me, it sits on my desk fairly unexamined, its pristine-ness feeling like a rebuke every time I walk in the room. I’ve skimmed bits, like the damning sentence I quoted above. There are also, I saw, lists. Lists of things you’re "allowed" to feel, not feel, feel a bit, feel "in waves", feel half the time, wonder why you’re not feeling, wonder when you will feel, wonder when you won’t feel, and why…..all this Feeling! It’s exhausting.

I am not myself. I am angry with those who haven’t called or haven’t called enough, irritated with those who call or call too much (whatever that means). I have nothing to say and everything to say, but either way I can’t say it or don’t want to or can’t be bothered. I am ignoring people who mean well, people I am fond of. I have cancelled my way out of so many fun things these past few weeks, but I can’t remember what they are and neither do I care. But I do care that I am Missing Fun Stuff. And that pisses me off, too. But I can’t seem to stop. I want in, I want out, I want it all to go away, I want it all now - Bring it On, take it back. I haven’t looked at the news or a newspaper in five weeks. I’m reluctant to go to one of my favourite escapes, the movies, but don’t know why. I can’t sleep, and I eat only for fuel and because if I don’t my stomach hurts, which (you guessed it) is annoying. I am good only for whining and raging with a dollop of self-pity, as you can see - and I resent myself for it. I can’t stand looking at people in the street; their bodies, their clothes, their noses, the weird and stupid sounds coming out of their mouth holes. I am ready to punch them in the face. I am ready to ask them to help me cross the street because I’m secretly blind. I am ready to ask them for all their air miles I don’t want.

Underground, the screech of the subway now makes me want to out-screech it. I pace the platform, a budding crazy person, my I-Pod playing the same song for weeks now, and unable to hear it for the clatter and noise of the place, switching it off, switching it on, upping the volume and worrying and not worrying about becoming deaf. Sometimes, walking above ground, a zombie numbness descends and I feel my face slacken, and then I might feel hungry. Or not. Otherwise my patience (such as it ever was, yes I know) is non-existent. My tolerance, gone. My concentration, shot. It jumps from here to there, but never to, you know, There. To Her. "That way", mumbled King Lear, "madness lies." But by then he was already mad. This not thinking, not "going there", as the Americans say, is not only "Denial" but also, I have begun to think, a betrayal. Of her. (Such as she was, though she isn’t, though there is no "she" - and I will stop this deconstructionist Roland Barthes-ing right here. Barf.) It’s conceivable that I need to stop with the "Soldier. Spartan. Monster trucks." mantra that sailed me through the funeral and all the rest. Is it time for something else yet? "Conscientious objector. Coward. Bicycle." I just don’t know. It’s like jumping off the high diving board. Maybe, you say, peering uncertainly down at the deep water below and backing up…..maybe….maybe tomorrow? Can’t we just come back tomorrow?

Everything is permitted, says the Grief booklet, like some demented New Age version of Aleister Crowley. It’s all perfectly normal: everything you feel, don’t feel, can’t feel…blah, blah, blah….and on into infinity, resulting in endless option paralysis. Is there really no organized way that this thing is done? No formula? Especially in the 21st century, lacking Rituals, being an atheist, lacking family. Can you not custom build me a little something? A schedule, a To-Do list, even a shitty Power Point presentation - or a teensy-weensy little clue of a map scribbled on the back of a napkin with a blunt pencil…? Can you really and truly not tell me What To Do? Well, a kindly grief counsellor would likely answer, well….there are no right and wrong ways here, you know. Uh-huh. Really? I would say again. And raising my grief-induced gun to the kindly grief counsellor’s greying head, I might ask him, just like in the movies: "How about now?"

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June 1, 2009

About BRITICAL

BRITICAL examines all things People, Places, New York, Dating & more from a perspective that is British, critical and at times, a wee bit brutal…

Pieces here include published writing as well as transcripts/subject matter from appearances as a regular commentator & panelist on Sirius/XM radio. The author has written for Spread ArtCulture, Daydream Magazine, The ICF, and the London Sunday Times, among others.

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