happenchance

You can’t escape it. The recent UK Governmental scandal involving MPs expenses is a political shuttle crash of catastrophic proportions. We’re already several weeks into the story and there’s a lot more to come. It’s safe to say that the media will be combing through the wreckage for months, offering up progressively smaller (yet equally egregious) expenses claims to sustain the anger of the chattering and working classes; until the whole story is supplanted by whatever political upheaval awaits us after the impending general election.

Personally, I’m unhappy that the information is being subjected to the distribution bottle-neck of the media. I think it’s fair to assume that the trickle feed we’re getting from the Daily Telegraph is being cautiously maintained to ensure it equates to as many newspapers (and advertisement slots) as possible, over as long a time line as possible. While the Telegraph broke the story and rightly deserves some kudos for that… that time has passed.

I’d like to see the information released in digital bulk to the public via the web. Let the geeks, freelance statisticians and graph-nerds sift and crowd-source their way through the data while the interest is there. Let them deploy it as an API and display it against MP voting records and other parliamentary data (as seen on TheyWorkForYou.com for example).

It may sound absurd to say it, but the fact that a local MP may have charged his constituents £300 for clock; or that their main home is based in London, while they rent a small flat in their elected community for the occasional visit; is as important to me as their voting record. Why? Because these guys are running the country. Their decisions affect my life and their actions and behaviours as civil servants are indicative of where they stand on the political landscape.

So let’s mix expenses info into the data pile and starting making decisions on who we want to represent us in the Commons. It’s not healthy to draw this out any longer. It’s safe to say that this scandal affects the majority of MPs, from top to bottom, so lets parse the data, sort out the wheat from the chaff and get on with running the country.

… I continually dream of post-apocalyptic futures.

I read quite a lot of books, but they’re mostly non-fictional or reference based. Yet when I do wander (albeit digitally) over to the fiction section of Amazon, I’m continually drawn to tales of roving warrior opportunists and gated communities, forced to re-build their lives in the post-apocalyptic badlands of a war-torn or disease stricken world. I’m tearing through stacks of these books at the moment and to be honest, the whole subject is becoming a bit of a ghoulish obsession.

Now, for those who haven’t yet dipped their toe in this murky, irradiated cesspool of literature, there are several sub-genres of post-apocalyptic fiction. These range wildly from flesh-eating plants to meteor strikes to outbreaks of frenzied zombism. Basically though, it doesn’t matter what caused the apocalypse, as long as it was bloody, brutal and wholly devastating to the majority of the human race.

My particular favourite is the incurable disease sub-genre, where less than 1% of all humanity survives and they have to either a) band together as a community or b) get butchered by the marauding cannibal hordes.

I’m also rather fond of the “let’s lob Nuclear ICBMs at each other until our cities and it’s citizens are dust” stories, the majority of which were written during the Cold War usually in a hokey, 1950s American stylee (Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank).

“If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that’ll bring us together…”

What I find interesting about the post-apocalyptic world is it’s one where anything is possible. It’s a world where a man who was once a tired and grey insurance salesman can be a horse-riding troubadour, travelling from village to village, singing songs and telling tales in exchange for food, shelter and (if he’s lucky) the company of a good woman. On the flipside, that same man could also be the despotic leader of a ruthless, leather-clad army, cutting a swathe of murderous carnage across the ashen landscape of what was once Milton Keynes. What I’m saying is… it’s a world of endless potential.

Now, I’m well aware that any form of apocalyptic event, resulting in the near extinction of the human-race and the utter collapse of society and government, would most likely result in a nightmarish existence for everyone involved. I’d probably be the first to be seen scrabbling shoeless amongst the debris of a semi-vaporised multi-storey car park, eating a raw, twitching pigeon… weeping for the halcyon days of cellophane wrapped bananas and cheese injected pizza crusts. Yet, it still gives me a little zap of excitement to imagine what it would be like to remove all assumptions of what we consider modern living and simply start again.

Sure there’d be problems! I won’t gloss over the potential political hiccups that would undoubtedly arise from something like that (pick your -ism: anarchism, fascism, egoism etc). Or the fact that something as trivial as an ingrown toenail could result in you having to saw your own blackened, gangrenous leg off at the knee.

Sheesh, imagine the grim reality of dentistry in a world without medicine.

Never mind the fact that within 1 or 2 generations, the world would probably be home to a horribly violent, languageless wildfolk… found picking through mountainous piles of trash and rubble, smashing the living day lights out of each other over toothpaste and the everlasting plasto-foods of yesteryear (cheesetrings, dairylee lunchables etc).

Let’s put all that horror aside for a moment though. What I find myself day-dreaming about is how I’d react to such an apocalyptic future. I contemplate how I’d try to protect, sustain and improve myself.

Ultimately, I think about how I’d try to survive.

I’m not entirely sure that I would survive though. Given I couldn’t accurately identify one plant from another or how grossly inept I’d be at the whole hunting/killing/gutting animals thing. I suspect poisoned-by-potato or kicked-to-death-by-goat would be how I’d meet my untimely demise.

I suppose it’s a form of tragic glee. I find reading and day-dreaming about such unfathomable horror (while disturbing) incredibly fascinating.

Not all post-apoco-books are alike though. I thought I’d get the same wicked enjoyment from The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but I was wrong. While I couldn’t put it down, I can never say I enjoyed it in the same way. The problem is, it has no hope. No future. There’s a soul shattering finality in it’s conclusion.  The irreversible end of all life due to an “unnamed yet devastating environmental cataclysm” makes for tough reading! It isn’t a slate which can be wiped clean to start afresh… it’s an epitaph, etched in stone. It’s an incredibly good book, sure. But it won’t bring a smile to your face in the same way The Postman or Day of the Triffids will.

Anyway, here are some of my recommendations. Enjoy the devastation:

• The Postman - David Brin
• On the Beach - Neville Shute
• Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank
• World War Z - Max Brooks
• Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
• The Stand - Stephen King
• When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (free!) - Cory Doctorow

I have a lot of stuff. Life debris. Be it shelves filled with DVDs, CDs, video-games, books and printed papers or boxes of magazines, comics, photos, knick-knacks, tchotchkes, gadgets and widgets; it all adds up to a serious mass of… stuff.

A lot of this stuff is currently in various heaps and stacks around the house, mostly in the spare-room. Some of it is organised, the majority of it is not. Recently, I’ve been considering the upkeep, effort and brainspace required in having all of this stuff in my life and I’ve come to a fairly radical decision as to what I’m going to do about it all.

I’m putting it on a diet. A cut-throat, slim down or die diet.

In reaching that decision, however, I had to do something to myself. I had to fire my inner curator.

As a kid I always imagined, that when I grew up I’d have fastidiously maintained physical libraries of books and music. My shelves of media would be beautifully arranged, by genre, author, artist, year, colour, mood… whatever felt most appropriate or efficient. It would be an arrangement Rob Fleming would be proud of.

Photo by Anyjazz65 - CC: By Attribution License

It all started with music. I was a voracious music buyer. A weekend which didn’t include at least 2-3 hours knee-deep in vinyl and CDs in 2nd hand record stores was a weekend wasted. Europa, Sleeves, Avalanche, Fopp, Missing… these were my churches.

Beside the point

Europa Music still gives me chills whenever I walk past. It is the anti-HMV. It is everything that the music megastores are not: eclectic, friendly, welcoming, dusty, fairly priced, smelly (in a good way) and utterly charming.  I don’t know how many hours of my teenage life I spent in there.

Photo by Cait Barnett - © All rights reserved

Don’t let it’s diminutive size fool you, it has a gigantic 2nd hand vinyl selection, stored in a rickety (but warm) wooden hut in the shop’s ‘back garden’. Only the truly dedicated music-hunters walk straight through the store, out the back door and venture into the hut; where you can be left alone to puruse and play (they have turntables) at your leisure. Without question, one of (if not the) best record shops in Scotland.

Anyway…

Sometime in 2003 (around the arrival of iTunes for Windows) I decided to start ripping my music collection to hard-disk, primarily to make compilation CDs for friends and my car. It was a long process. I had around 500 (CD) albums in my collection and I felt the need to encode them all. I was meticulous in tagging my tracks with the correct metadata. I spent hours chewing over definitive lists of appropriate genres. I took it very seriously.

Within a few months, it had completely changed the way I listened to music. Never before had I experienced my entire music collection on ’shuffle’. It was the ultimate jukebox/radio station, tailored just for me. It was wonderful. It was also the death knell for my CD collection.

There simply wasn’t the need to have my walls lined with CDs any more. Opening a CD case, putting the disc into a player, looking up the sleeve notes for a track, pressing the appropriate number and waiting for the disc to spin up and finally play the song I wanted to hear… it felt archaic. Something I had done, happily, for years, suddenly seemed awkward and tedious.

It was time to face facts, my CD collection was dead-media.

Even several years after admitting this to myself, I still lived the dream. When I moved out of my parents home to share a flat with a friend, I still mounted my CD racks on the wall and filed each album for maximum ‘find-ability’. They did nothing but gather dust.

All that time wasted storing, sorting, filing, dusting, maintaining something I didn’t even use.

It was time to put my CDs on a diet. I discarded all of their bulky cases and filed each disc and appropriate artwork into a CD folder, in no particular order (this was all about reduction, nothing else). This shrunk the mass of my collection from several giant cardboard boxes to two A4 sized folders. I suspect the next stage for them will be the attic, never to be seen again. And at that point I should really just take the lot and dump them in a charity shop. It may come to that.

A few months ago, my DVD collection faced the same threat. This time it was even easier. I realised that I very rarely actually watch any of them any more, so there was no point in going through the encoding process at all (thankfully, as it’s very labour and storage intensive). I reduced a floor to ceiling bookcase full of DVDs to 1 A4 folder.

That’s real dieting.

Realising that I can do this with all of my life-debris feels very liberating. I feel it’s time to apply this principle to everything. My home will no longer be a museum of historical artifacts. I no longer wish to waste my energy on such pointless collections and libraries. I simply don’t have the curatorial time nor skills. Unless it’s truly beautiful, emotionally important to me or fantastically functional (not the same as “that could come in handy one day”), it’s all got to slim down to a manageable mass or it’s gone.

First up: clothes, books & assorted electronica.

For inspiration in this matter I recommend reading The Last Viridian Note by futurist and science fiction author, Bruce Sterling.

Looking back on 2008, the first things I remember are the failures. The big, colossal, world-smashing failures (forgive the air of self-importance, but this is an introspective exercise).

Before we go any further, let’s clarify that I think Failure is important. There are obvious, negative aspects to Failure (loss of self-respect and confidence being the two big players), which I don’t need to go into… but what I like about Failure is it gives you a simple choice: learn or die. Choosing to learn makes you stronger and paradoxically, more elastic to future Failure. That you’re here reading this proves that the human brain is awesome at this and does so quite naturally in it’s own weird and cool way.

My favourite thing about Failure however, is that it can be used as an agent of change… and that makes it a very powerful and very dangerous beast indeed.

I’ve considered writing these failures down for analysis or further contemplation and while I’m not the sort of person to ‘air dirty laundry in public’, there’s another reason I’m not going to do that. Simply, I’ve come to the conclusion that such effort is energy wasted. We have our own natural processes for this job… the self-conscious brain is a powerful tool with it’s own complex (and seemingly independent) question and answer machinery. I’ve asked myself the relevant questions, my brain will, undoubtedly, get back to me on the answers in it’s own time.

In short: Big failures have big mass, big momentum and result in big impacts. They are easily remembered and continually contemplated, so I see no point in documenting them.

I’ve decided to use my Failure to change things about myself, hopefully I’m taking that in a positive, non-destructive direction. Time will tell. Anyway I digress… back to the issue.

Typically, I may have 1 or 2 big failures in a year. Thankfully, they have a natural decay-rate and their energy fades with age, so many of them have slowly slipped from memory. On the flip-side (life has symmetry) I usually have what I would consider ‘big victories’ in the same duration. These also fade.

If I were the sort of person to illustrate these peaks and troughs on some form of graph-based ‘life-timeline’ (sadly I am that person, but lets not go there) it would probably look like a distorted sine-wave. Rising on the victories, falling on the failures. What concerns me is that life isn’t like that at all. That is a bullshit perspective. First of all, I’m missing the plateaus (the a-OK days). More importantly, however, I think I’m witnessing my life at the wrong scale. Between these ‘big’ peaks and troughs there are literally hundreds of tiny fluctuations and that means there are potentially hundreds of little peaks and thus little victories. Miniature ‘wins’. The fleeting moments when you get something just right and give yourself a mental (or physical) high-five.

The problem is, I can’t recall any of them… but they definitely happened. So, this is my plan (and purpose for this online space) for 2009. It’s time to remember the little victories. A positive purpose, I think.

Thinking big is great for the future… when considering the past, however, I’m going to try and think little.