That Old Tune

Quickly, then: when I was 12 I was diagnosed with a genius IQ. 14, I began to get depression. I grew to connect the two, and from 15 to 17 I would self-harm by bashing the back of my head against walls, etc. If I did it long enough I would get a sensation like pieces of my skull were rearranging themselves, and it soothed me. I didn't eat properly from 14 to 18. I took a certain amount of drugs, and would often go without sleep. Between my little suicide attempts I was essentially trying to turn myself insane, or stupid. At 19 I smashed my forehead open, was taken to hospital and there is a very visible scar to this day.

I've talked about self-hatred A LOT during my blogging years. I've spent years trying to escape myself, one way or another. I hate my body. I hate my mind. What does that mean, and why should I care, considering I hate myself? Well it is the false ideal part of me that hates the vulnerable part, the part which hurts. I can never forgive myself for doing what I did to myself. I don't think I damaged myself any more than the physical scar (and mentally and physically the bigger effects were refusing to self-educate or exercise) but I'll always know, I could have been more intelligent just as I could have been better-looking.

I can't make films because even if I achieve a certain success I'll know I could have been better, which is even sadder. I can't let myself be happy because I can't forgive myself for my own self-hatred. I can't love others normally, because I hate myself too much. Tomorrow was going to be perhaps the day when things went further with A. The thing about self-harm is that there's always a moment of choice. If I tell her that she can't come over tomorrow, I may not even see her again. When I smashed open my head, I knew that I was going to do damage myself for life. I could have not done it. I imagined the possibilities. Suicidal thoughts are much the same.

In one branch, I have a long and happy relationship with A. But that's not the branch that the masochist takes. Masochist isn't quite right, since they get pleasure from pain, whereas I derive a grim sense of justice. I've been trying to change myself in the past year, and A was a part of that, but really I'm just running away. I am starting to see that I was right to live as I did, in a repetitive blur where I had two friends and did nothing, and watched life go by, not feeling anything, never achieving. The only way to stop self-destruction is to fold into myself, and wait for life to pass as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Suicide is selfish. The more I expand, the more my behaviour impacts on others. I can't hurt A by using her to hurt myself. London was a good idea, but I still had some notion of being someone, or just having a normal year with a job, a girl, and some friends. Despair is melodramatic in such a situation. I'll become less than myself, so that I can never see the damage I have done. There's a lot of very smart guys living in their mothers' basements for something like this reason. I'll never dance with a girl. I'll never throw a party. I'll no longer take drugs, or walk around at night, or eat unhealthily.

I won't try and like myself, because I only like myself when I'm hurting, and perhaps that begins the cycle. I'll just be. Sometimes that's what you can afford. Time at 22 to look at what you are. You never had youth. You had love, from family and close friends, but you never belonged to someone. You don't look at yourself in the mirror when you leave in the mornings. Your hand is covered in scabs from a job you shouldn't be doing. You bought a packet of condoms today just to see what being that person felt like. You find friendships complex. You can't work consistently on anything that shows potential. Live in your little flat, be polite and keep your head down. A suicide of the senses. Death-in-life hurts no-one else. Leave people like A alone.

There's this woman who works with us called Lisa. She has a gentle Jamaican voice and intelligent eyes. She also wears a lot of make-up, and this to go to work in a factory.

Jo said to me today, "You work hard, I give you that woman" and the others laughed their heads off. Yesterday, Mohammed said to me, "Jo gave me Lisa, I said take her back".

Lisa: graceful, amusing, kind, ugly. She gets along well with them, not knowing that she's the butt of their jokes. They even flirt with her carelessly. Perhaps that's why she tries so hard.

This post is expressing the tragedy of ugly women. There is less of an equivalent with men, since women are naturally not as drawn to looks - among other reasons.

What angers me most of all is when I see the sort of woman who has every other gift acting demurely before a crude, stupid person, because she knows that she is ugly.

I find it sad that ugly women are usually friendly. It sometimes feels as if they have no other choice. I wish that society could see real ugliness: something that lies not in a nose but a glance.

But who am I kidding? I'd never go out with Lisa. This despite the fact that ugliness is the only flaw I don't possess, and perhaps the only one she does. I'm no better than the rest.

Witty ugly women often have a lot of male friends, of course. Sometimes they'll find an ugly partner, and as with my friend L he'll treat her badly because she won't leave him.

I swear to you now that I look at ugly women and see the face of the God I once believed in. I see them aged and ringless, carrying their shopping, and I hope, I just hope, that there's a heaven.

Badverts

I hate adverts that make no sense whatsoever. A model walks through a luxurious apartment shot in monochrome and slow motion - basically it's like a shitty pop video from the 80s, and you're expecting Kate Bush to jump out at any minute. Anyway there are all these curtains billowing out and brushing against her skin, she gives an elegant twirl and it says, "GODIVA CHOCOLATES". And you're like, what the fuck has that got to do with chocolate? The only way it would make sense is if it was advertising curtains. Even then it would hardly be a good sell because apparently if you leave a window open the room turns into a gauze obstacle course. She may be pretty, but she certainly can't install curtains. The fact that I have seen the same premise advertising cars and perfumes over the years makes me suspicious that they have the idea first and then sell it to the highest bidding company.

Here is a random perfume advert to show you what I mean:



OK, so Kate Moss is standing naked in a field when it is clearly no weather for that sort of thing. Ignoring the risk of lightning, she starts brushing various plants against her skin. For no obvious reason she pricks herself on a rose. Finally we learn that the explanation for her insane behaviour is that she wants us to buy her new perfume. For those of you who say I'm taking this too literally, where's the metaphor? This perfume can make an average piece of wheat turn into a rose like Kate? The truth is even more insulting. In advertising-think the nakedness is PROVOCATIVE, the clouds say DANGEROUS, the rose is STYLISH, the setting is NATURAL and the sucking blood off finger is SEXY. The meta-meanings are layered according to market appeal in a surreal manner we are sadly accustomed to: the next time you see a billboard with a naked woman on a horse and writing essentially saying "BUY OUR SHOES" just remember how fucking absurd it all is.

The Job

So I went out and got a job in a "laundry" - well, it says it's a laundry, but really it's a sort of Dickensian workhouse, where one expects to see small children in rags running between machines. They put me on a steaming machine, and the supervisor said, "this is a dangerous machine, so watch these two carefully". As soon as he left one of the guys turned to me and said he had to be off. So I was left with a guy who speaks with a heavily-accented stutter, who I couldn't hear over the steam. The idea of the machine is that you both hold a sheet over a steaming hot surface, and if you hold the sheets the right way you don't burn yourself.

I asked the guy, "have you ever burned yourself?" and he shook his head. Anyway he seemed to get progressively more angry every time I burned myself, which involved dropping the sheet each time. I kept on wondering what the hell was wrong with me. I slaved away for the next five hours, essentially trying not to cry. Of course the more I burned myself, the harder it became. Anyway it came to the end of our shift, and the supervisor at this point decided to offer me gloves. At which the guy I do my shifts with, Adje, said that if I used gloves they'd melt and stick to my skin. Apparently I was lucky: if I'd worn looser clothing the hot steam can rush up your shirt and singe your nipples.

With the amount of pain I'm constantly in - it takes time for your hands to toughen up to the constant level of heat (as opposed to sudden blasts that remove the skin) they might as well say, "here is a cheese grater, apply it liberally to your buttocks". I probably should have quit immediately - there's a reason why I'm the only white guy on a machine - but I am determined not to be another middle class ex-student sponging off the government and thinking the only acceptable job is bar-work. I think they expected me not to return, but the next day they all warmed to me and Adje became sympathetic and showed me all the scars he'd got from "laundry". (Never burned yourself, like fuck.)

So the first thing I want to talk to you about is this state of mind that you get into as a labourer. They pay me minimum wage for five hours without a break, six days a week. Then afterwards I stay on for unpaid "training" on the various machines, which I think is their way of dodging the minimum wage laws. So while I don't self-identify as a workman - as a son of intellectuals I am a sort of tourist in such a world - I am starting to tap into this strange oblivion of the senses, where time seems to melt and days and nights are fractured into shifts and sleeping time. You literally do "live for the weekend" - or Sunday in my case - and you discover that the less you think, the faster your week goes by.

The second thing I want to talk about is the class element. We cater to 5 star hotels, which means that we do rich people's bedding and clothing. We see the blood and sex stains on sheets that withstand the most rigorous cleaning. We do tennis t-shirts, designer jeans, items that the person pays us £6 each to do, which is more than we get for an hour of extremely hard work. A press operator named Caesar did my Sudoku puzzle on hard in seconds. Meanwhile, my friend R is going to get a summer job in his millionaire dad's company and earn thousands in what is essentially pocket money. I feel at the exact point where rich meets poor, and the world of opportunity meets the world where people make the most of seven days' holiday a year.

Don't think of this as a sort of angst tourism on my part - I respect the people I work with too much for that. Neither do I need the money. I don't really drink, and am resolutely unfashionable: the dole would suit me fine. I'm doing this for A, whom I am taking to the opera on Monday, something that I saved for over a couple of weeks by walking everywhere until I genuinely had blisters on blisters. But most of all I need this for myself. I don't feel useless. The delirium of thoughtlessness suits me, and fills my days. My social life has improved considerably, by the way - all I needed was PG Tips. English people apparently find it impossible to resist coming over for tea. It still requires work - it's not like I put the kettle on and wait for people to appear - but between the preparation for my next film, a quiet social life and the excitement of trying not to burn my hand off, I find myself reasonably happy.

How Do You Make Friends?

So I've decided to be contrary and begin with the revelation, instead of end with it. The revelation is: I am not okay, but that's okay.

I've spent the whole of my adult life thinking I was a depressive. This meant that although I've never had a girlfriend, I felt lucky to have a few friends. Being told that I had a chemical imbalance suddenly meant that it was fine doing nothing with my life, which seemed a constant flow between meds and no meds, summer emptiness and winter depression. I was trapped somehow between my internal landscape and the outside world where people had jobs and went to parties.

Whenever I got too miserable, I often went here, the blogosphere, and people comforted me and told me it was alright. It's difficult not to feel resentful for those nice, bland words. I use niceness in its most bitter sense, in that secretly selfish manner where it feels good to be pleasant to people but not to stick your neck out for them. No-one ever took me by the shoulders and said, "Sammy, what the fuck are you doing?". And I was lazy. I was so lazy and self-hating, and I took a sort of pleasure in watching things slide.

I worked out today that with the amount of practice I've put into my writing, I'd be a grade 5 on the French Horn. That's not even high-school band standard. My writing is far out in front of everything else, including my directing. And here I am, like so many of my generation, trying to strike it out in the world with our pathetic little dreams, and nothing like as much talent. So things aren't okay, but not because of a chemical imbalance: being an idiot isn't a disorder.

I kind of always accepted the fact I always had no social life when I was a depressive and thus a loner - not realising that socialising is something you have to work at like everything else. Plus I saw myself as taking the "talents" route in life - you know, like Nobel Prize winners who spend years alone. But in fact I can't lie, at present I'm both less talented and adjusted than my peers.

I get why I find it difficult to make friends. My main problem is that I have trouble showing weakness enough to somehow communicate that I enjoy people's company. A lot of my fellow arseholes also clearly have trouble with this. I can really like someone and still act like I've got somewhere else to be at that very second. It's like a cordial chat in a shop queue, except I'm in my own fucking garden.

If it was just a personality thing then this would be easy, but the problem is that the less friends you have, the harder they are to make. Balanced people are attracted to similar types, so that a sort of social strata is created with people who can throw a party just like that and people who have to make do with a few friends they don't necessarily get along with. I was used to that in school: a lot of my friends were clearly itching to be in the popular crowd, and some made it.

Okay, so you're in my situation. You're 22 years old, slightly boring, slightly controversial and with intellectual pretensions - thus unsuited to any party. You have one friend who lives in London, and a few more distant friends. Your hobbies and music tastes - e.g. chess and blues - are generally terrible for meeting people your own age. Oh, and anyone you make friends with will have to come to terms with a personality that if it was pleasant could be described as eccentric*.

So how the fuck do you make friends? I've forgotten. All of my friends have chosen me, somehow. Do I just go into a crowded place and gun for the person who looks as lost as I do? I have literally resorted to trying to make friends with girls over dating sites - but I've realised that no-one really goes on dating sites to make new friends, and the "looking for friends" bit is a sort of get-out clause in case they don't like the guy that much. What to do, Blogspot?

* = This isn't a self-hating entry. I'm just speaking the truth. I'm a highly intelligent, genuinely good person capable of beauty, as well as an egomaniac, misanthrope and dilettante. If you think that's a pleasant combination, I'd like some of what you've been drinking. Oh, and we should totally meet up ...

I'm thinking of trying to get into one of those secret societies that may be trying to take over the world, like the Freemasons. Mainly, it is true, to fuck with the conspiracy theorists I know. Also, it would be nice to have a chunk of Canada if they manage it (I'll move the assholes out first). Some people think my friend T is crazy for wanting to take over the world, but anyone who doesn't secretly want to be ruler of the earth is a liar. At the very least I reckon I'd get some free shit. If they don't let me in then I'll pretend I'm a Freemason anyway - what are they gonna do, they're a fucking secret society. I'm pretty sure all of the homoerotic rites are fiction anyway. Pretty sure.

Chess players are divided roughly between the tacticians, such as Tal, and the strategists, like Karpov. A tactician essentially lives in the present, looking for complications in a position he arrives at fairly intuitively. A strategist manipulates the flow of the game while looking at the bigger picture, seeking often to smother his opponent. A great tactician can win when he has sacrificed his queen and rooks, whereas a great strategist can win a game through the placement of a single pawn. It is essentially brilliance versus subtlety, the possibilities of a moment versus a vision of the future.

Writers are much the same. A prose stylist like Joyce has the sharp weapons of description and epigram at his disposal, whereas the story-teller like James has both plotting and psychology. Of course in chess one must have a strategic understanding to extract the potential of a situation, just as one must have a tactical understanding in order to implement one's long-term plans. I argue that writers and chess-players may be divided along the same lines. The experience of reading a chess game or a novel by a tactician exists in the thrill of a moment, in which the whole thing threatens to fall apart: whereas with the strategist one is most impressed by the harmony, which builds to an often predictable but satisfying conclusion.

I am by nature a tactician. I have little patience for the long haul, and it is my love of problem solving that makes me look at things in microcosm - I value pure chess above the perfect game, and beautiful words above flawless novels. The vast majority of writers and chess players will always be story-tellers, because stylists like Kerouac and Nezhmetdinov are in need of constant inspiration, and it is true that one's powers fade faster. My play, like my writing, has often been criticised as "unsound", mostly by the type of person who is certain that one should never use the same adjective twice, or allow a doubled pawn.

I haven't yet found the conviction to allow my talents to blossom, instead often compromising my natural abilities to accommodate others' advice. A tactician who wastes moves shoring up his defence simply becomes a blunt instrument -- so, too, has my attempt to project a plot over my words often led me into the realms of cliche. I must be allowed to fail in experiments, in a fashion frankly more embarrassing than if I were to take the well-trodden routes of safety and common sense. I will certainly always be an amateur chess player, and probably an amateur writer too, but my complex relationship with both activities has always been supported by my conviction that both have much to teach me about life.