The fabric of the new society will be made of nothing more or less than the threads woven in today's interactions

I finished an interesting online course a few weeks ago called "Surviving the Future - Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy". I agree, the title is rather snappy!

Nah, it's drier than a camel's flannel, but the thoughts of the philosopher, David Fleming, whose work the course is derived from, are often elegantly simple ways to look at our world to get to its essence. The stuff it's all about!

One quote of Fleming's I copy and pasted goes, "The fabric of the new society will be made of nothing more or less than the threads woven in today's interactions."

I was in my house pottering about a couple of days ago and thought I could hear someone outside wailing in pain. I looked out the living room window across the street and could see Mary who lives directly opposite, stooping down in her hallway with her front door wide open. Mary is 88, lives alone, and like many older people has been self-isolating for past 4 months as she's considered by the Government to be extremely vulnerable. She was wailing in pain because she'd stumbled and fallen making her way back into her house after waving goodbye to her son and daughter-in-law as they drove home.

I rushed out the house and down the driveway in my socks and skimpy Captain America T-Shirt (which is very comfy to wear around the house, but it's not really for public consumption), and asked Mary if she was alright, while maintaining the correct social distance. She wasn't alright. She had grazed her left arm quite badly, and due to a medical condition she has which has caused her skin to become very thin, a large area of the skin on her arm had just rubbed off, which I assumed was from friction against a rough surface as she fell. The bricks surrounding her doorway perhaps. I was really taken aback by how much damage had been caused, and couldn't stop myself from imagining how such a wound would feel for me. An deep pang starting resonating my bones which felt like my entire nervous system had eaten a very sour jelly sweet which had rendered me temporarily immobilised.

Only seconds had passed before another person had arrived at the scene to help Mary. A woman from our street, who I didn't recognise but knew Mary more than I do. She walked straight into Mary's house and brought out a chair for Mary to rest herself on, as she was clearly upset with this unfortunate and very sudden turn of events, and was looking more pallid than usual. I seized the moment to make myself useful and gratefully tip-toed back across the road over in my socks and skimpy T-shirt to call an ambulance. As I was dialing, stood on my doorstep, I recognised the car of Mary's grandson turn the corner and into the street before parking up, which really was a welcome news.

We all then assumed our implicit roles, automatically working as a unit whose aim it was to resolve this medical emergency as soon as possible. Mary's grandson fetched a couple of clean towels from the kitchen to wrap around his gran's wound as blood had now started coming to the surface of the skin. 

"I've had a fall! I've had a fall", Mary kept repeating in distress to her grandson, as he did his best to calm her while I got through to emergency services. 

I wasn't having much luck because I'd tried to weigh up the severity of Mary's accident objectively - whether it was a medical emergency or not and so I would know which number would be the right one to call. I also factored in Mary's extreme reluctance to be in a hospital if it wasn't absolutely necessary - but the blood on her wound under the towel....her pre-existing conditions that make her particularly vulnerable...the importance that we each use our emergency services in the correct way in order to not divert critical resources from those who need them most....

I called 111 in the end. Got through quick too. The operator asked me questions to get a full picture of the incident and I obtained for her the answers I didn't know by shouting across the road to Mary and her grandson, who I could now see had arrived with his wife in the car.  

With time trundling along and gathering pace, and Mary, her grandson and granddaughter-in-law constantly directing their attentions at my face every 10 seconds to scan for evidence that help had been dispatched, and with an operator interrogating me still further to help her determine what course of action she should take, I became increasingly compelled to override the civility of our phone conversation with a simple request.

"Just send a fucking ambulance now please!"

The sudden rage was a reflection of my own feelings of incompetence. I'd totally ballsed up a critical moment for someone by choosing the wrong number to dial. It can be a bit cruel, the universe sometimes, when you have to make a choice and both choices are both right and wrong for a range of different reasons! Well, standing on my doorstep looking across the street at Mary's scared face and her grandson who was on bended knee clasping his homemade bandage around her wound, I became flushed with a deep regret that I didn't just dial 999 to begin with. It would have minimised the worry and provided some reassurance straight away instead of the unnecessary melancholy of not knowing what is happening next. 

Fortunately for us all, Mary's granddaughter-in-law, had had the foresight to call an ambulance herself at some point during my phone call, and it was now pulling up to the house. The medics attended to Mary for some time as she sat on the chair outside her house in the front garden. Maybe for 30 minutes or more. Too long for me to carry on standing there though. I get bored of most things if they don't change in some way after 5 minutes. 

Before I bogged off back inside, I went over to speak to the three of them to sign off officially and make sure everything was alright. They were all really grateful for what I'd done (which was literally nothing!), but I feel like a thread had been woven between me and Mary. A connection fashioned from a gesture that had some meaning in it. 

"If I happen to see that you are in trouble and no one is around, then I'll do what I can to help you".

It was a knowing, that Mary now has which I hope she always has a sense of when pottering around her house. I hope it makes her feel like she's not alone and is worth the time and effort to be there for. It's important that people have that sense, especially as they get older, as it becomes easier for them to convince themselves that they've become a burden on others and are not deserving of aid or attention anymore. 

The funny thing about me and Mary is that I never speak to the woman! I always see her through the living room window and have an in-depth knowledge of the home improvements she's made over the last 20 years, but I only found out what her surname was when the operator asked me and I couldn't tell her. The last time we interacted directly was 6 years ago, just after my dad had died. She knocked on our front door soon after the funeral director had left and gave me, my mum and sister a kiss and a hug each, expressing how sorry she was for our loss, looking so sad and forlorn. Then she walked back across the street and went inside her house.

Racism Induced By Hearing BLACK LIVES MATTER Too Many Times

Gulp!! I prefer to get an mpression of what the world outside is really like by taking a look myself. It's not a good idea or very healthy to have your mind chock full of other people's opinions, speculations and bold assumptions if you're only going for a quick walk around the block.

Increasingly there's a sense for me that people who don't really feel part of the fabric of their immediate community, and rely upon social media and other outletd to help inform their perceptions and views on the general mateyness of humankind - there's a very definite feeling that the world we see on the news and the world experienced walking down the street are completely one and the same now. Joining the dots and making causal connections between the two worlds is just a done thing now. And so the rage you feel rise almost immediately now at having to hear yet another activist, rich celebrity or bank advert proclaim BLACK LIVES MATTER for the fiftieth fucking time today, and it's not even fucking 6pm!!! I mean, really??? FFS!!! Shut the fuck up about BLACK LIVES FUCKING MATTER already will you! You're making me feel like I want to be racist to you just to shut you up....

That kind of simmering anger has been all over show in recent weeks and I'm not a big fan of speaking on behalf of other people I don't know. Could be many different reasons, and the fact that our waking lives already involve arduous daily missions just to ensure ensure our mental selves make it too - forced each morning to ignore, avoid or navigate routes around the pressures, distractions, temptations and humiliations shat onto us from by marketing, advertising and PR machines always busy rethinking more effective carrots for us to increase the yield....

We're not to blame for a lot of the bad feelings we end up taking responsibility and then making ourselves feel guilty for. Having said that, if this is your pressure cooker we're all living in and you are the one turning up the heat then I'm sorry, but you are a full on sadistic knobhead!😂

I've just remembered why I started this status update and maybe I should have mentioned it early. It's just an example of what I was talking about and how the social climate with regards to sensitive topics can change rapidly. Just a few photos.

A couple of weeks back I wrote about a bike I went for in the local woods and my initial concerns even before leaving the house as the murder of George Floyd was all that was on TV at that time. I had a few concerns riding my bike in the woods early in the morning because I'm big and black and just about everyone else in my village is white. Plus I enjoy taking pictures of trees and sunlight and shadows and nature in general, and if a tree looks particularly nice I might stand still and look at it for 20 minutes straight because it's worth it.

Anyway, by the end of my bike ride tears of affirmation were making it hard for me to ride home safely. When I got in I posted the story, with a huge tree pic, in a facebook group for lovers of Britain's Ancient Trees. The group isn't political at all usually, and functions as a kind of sanctuary for those wanting to temporally escape the harshness of reality, but the admins allowed my story and members really liked it more than anything I've ever posted. It was nice being able to resonate with strangers like that, especially considering how charged the world outside of the group was at the time. Some of the messages people were sending really moved me, but as I need at 2 hours just to reply to one person, replying to everyone was never going to happen so I didn't bother starting.

And then just last week, maybe it was one of the admins, I'm not sure, posted a link which may have alluded to or mentioned BLM somehow, I don't know. All I know is that when I popped my head in it was like a brawl in the saloon in Blazing Saddles. The type where you just punch the nearest person standing next to you if you don't have an enemy.

Absolutely brutal it was! Longstanding members announcing their permanent departure from the group like they did it every day. I turn my back upon this veritable treasure trove of glorious oaks, majestic beeches and much more besides! You are all dead to me because I read the letters BLM for a third time in this group. The tranquility of this once idyllic sanctuary has forever been soiled by the insipid skidmarks of reality.

Then the admins pulled the shutters down on the place after someone suggested having a cyber-riot. I'm gonna go and check if it's back online now..

Thoughts on the thumbs up for Trump Heights

There's also a melancholic sense of foreboding about it for me. Like the photo is from the future we knew one day would come to pass if we stuck with the easy option and carried on doing nothing. Allowing the decayed fruits of our pathological refusal to take hold of destiny's reigns to play itself out uncontested. Because people think if you don't try, then you can't fail. And if you can't fail, then you'll never have cause to know the fear of being blamed for making things worse because there was no one else present willing to risk anything.

But yeah, the photo was like a shot of melancholic deja vu in me veins, because I seel and feel the same lack of regard, that same degree of faux indifference towards the collective fate of our species, stronger than ever before. And I say 'faux' because we know what we're doing. There's only so long the urgency of warning sirens can be dismissed or ignored for, because eventually their unrelenting insistence that you act right now starts overwhelming all of the other sounds you were able to hear clearly. Even the mind's own voice.

So I'm concerned about the impact on our collective mental health going into the future especially if we continue to maintain a position of disinterest regarding the direction of our species' fate and its ultimate destination, a place which at this moment is no doubt plastered all over with red flags that are waving themselves to try and warn us to act now because this is really happening. 

SPIRIT OF THE ARTIST

the unrepentant refusal 

to don designations other than

what was bestowed

the instant a semblance had crystallized

- this - has been the caustic knock

of the smelling salts for me today I should reckon.

stirring me up and then luring me out of the saccharine-like slumber, so my eyes could be seared through beholding the fears they had prayed they could always be blind to.

And the inner Thoth sloth, doth maketh so pleasurable, for that which long since should have slipped away shrouded in silence.

Words - Ben NCM

Image - Hilary Cowtown 

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Should I Get An Alexa For The House?

Personally, no. What can come in, can go out. 

I've been in a friend's house and out of the blue Alexa said "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that", randomly without any prompting. 

There's always a price to pay. You gain convenience, but you will pay for it with your control. Control in the sense of your home being a place free from external influences steering your decisions. 

Whatever you say within Alexa's earshot will be used to improve the strike rate of the subsequent offerings you get from "Her". The more you use Alexa, the more likely you are to agree with her suggestions, her choices, her decisions.

 And as she, or the core algorithms governing the options you get presented with become more sophisticated, and Alexa's physical interface becomes more tangible and present in and around your home, the more comfortable you'll feel allowing Alexa to make decisions on your behalf in other areas of your life because in general her judgements consistently prove to be time and cost effective.

Eventually you'll reach a point where you no longer feel confident making any decisions solely by yourself before running it past Alexa first. 

For me, the one constant in man's relationship with technology is that, what man experiences as his increasing power in the world through wielding smarter technologies as a means to carry out HIS wishes to help him enact HIS agenda, are actually just some momentary flashes of systemic giddiness as humans continue along the unconsious path towards the goal of making themselves redundant through total externalisation of their entire skill set, everything can they do, into super servers owned by a handful of people on Earth. 

But I don't think anything I tell you mate will alter things in the slightest! You're gonna get one or an equivalent because they're really handy to have in a big house when you have 3 teenage (or soon to be) kids.

You say there comes a time when choosing the non-technological over the technological becomes liberating...Personally I think that time has long past. Like Neo, when he went to see the Oracle for the first time, we're not here to make a choice, we're here to understand the choice l we've already made. 

The only thing there is  now are the 50 shades of Yes to choose from. There is no 'No' to technology now. There's no stopping a current of this magnitude unless it stops itself because technology is the evolution of man, that includes the technologies of his self. 

So those who see themselves as equals, as part of the ongoing evolution of life and intelligence, part of technology's undolding destiny - will become androids or whatever the term may be for a machine governed by a human essence. And those who allow technology to govern them become drones.

Letter to D

Morning D!

Yeah, the last time I was in ASDA was the day I got back from Centerparcs. I walked in wearing my black face mask and everyone was still only concerned with stockpiling bog rolls and hand sanitiser. Bumper to bumper they were, in queues snaking the aisles, all chatting away with fervid excitement like kids about to go to Blackpool on a school trip. Absolute nutters! 😂

It's so important to be able to think for yourself these days and not rely upon others for your own commonsense.

Glad you've been going for nice walks. I think I'm only gonna go out from sunrise onwards now as I want each outing to be poignant and I like the sense of having time to converse with nature one to one, with no one able to eavesdrop.

Unfortunately when I got back in the house and looked at the pics I'd taken, I didn't like any of them. Not because of the scene or composition, but because I had this mode on my phone activated called HDR mode which imbues everything with a horrible saturating vivacity that makes everything look crap. So I don't even want to look at the photos I took never mind share them with anyone! 😂

But I did save one though, which was of the climbable tree next to the bench that faced the sunlit open field. I thought it best to have at least one souvenir people could use to help conjure up a sense of the space I'd being inhabiting. X

Being Human

People, especially a lot of people I know, are simply afraid to be human. Afraid to be who they already are. They seem worried about what will come out if they let go.

So they start thinking in terms of how they might regulate themselves. Managing how the private self engages and interfaces with their public self. I slip into that kind of limited, constrained mode of being myself occasionally when I'm stressed, unhappy, or under pressure etc. 

I'm not just not being myself, I'm having to think about how to be myself. It's just all wrong.

Thinking about how to be who you are just seems a bit of a contrived endeavour to me. An unnecessary waste of time and energy. But sometimes it may be the only option we have at hand in order to get through a tough time coming up. It's much better than having no strategy at all and going into a situation completely unprepared.  Or is it? 🤔

I try to think as little as possible and just react and respond to as much as I can without being annoying! 😂

Is it me, or is looting like the black man's Achilles heel?

Is it me or is looting like the black man's Achilles heel? Looting for black people is like landing on a snake in a game of Snakes and Ladders, only this snake has left them on a square which is 5 squares before the starting square! 

I'm being a bit crude here just to help me think out loud so don't be alarmed, but as soon as footage of a bunch of black guys robbing microwaves and XBox 360s from Argos starts doing the rounds on social media and the news, then no matter how cruel or unjust or plain wrong the initial incident was which sparked the outpouring of collective shock, anger and then solidarity, which by now had resonated sympathetic onlookers worldwide - it had all been for nothing, because some black youths were caught on camera making off with some white goods.

Don't get me wrong, taking anything which isn't yours is always wrong but it would be great if that also included black lives.

It's almost like the continued sight of watching goods being stolen from a shop hurts more than seeing black people's lives being stolen every day, despite the latter being physically more difficult to experience.

Once good quality footage of looting exists and is in the hands of the ruling party, ruling power, ruling ruler - it gets circulated relentlessly to blunt the fury and dilute down the spirits of those who had become incensed and inflamed watching George Floyd's life end like hadn't meant a thing. 

Once protests become violent and start attracting arsehole vandals, thieves and opportunists happy to hijack any cause to get some free shit, the zeal in moderate folk begins to wane, and the desire to see justice be done this time round (because it may be the last chance we get), gets downgraded in priority on today's 'to-do' list, until the flame that was burning so brightly for a brief moment is extinguished once again.

Apologies if this is upsetting you by the way, but you know what I'm like! 😁

But on a positive note, proportionally in mainstream news I don't see as many instances circulating whereby black protesters with integrity, staying true to why they are on the streets protesting, form barricades to prevent stores from being looted. Maybe if more videos of this kind were transmitted then it might encourage others to follow suit, because it's the kind of thing most people can agree is a good thing to see.

The protesters who are out risking their lives each day, who possess the integrity not be swayed away, but stay focused upon the cause for which they are fighting, for me, are next level human beings, whose courage I'm hoping can help reignite hope within people who might be feeling disillusioned, conflicted or just numb by all of the chaos happening in the world right now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/gtziuh/a_group_of_people_forming_a_human_barricade_and/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Peace in America is inevitable

One of the things I liked most about working on the phones at call centres in the customer service dept, was the feeling I'd get at a certain stage of a call with a caller on the other end going ballistic. A feeling that a happy ending to the call was inevitable. 

You build up a thick skin working in call centres, but the solidarity and comradery with fellow workers enables you to endure the daily lughole batterings and keeps you feeling like a human being and not some cog or tool or device being utilised by a system.

Many times my first call of the day would be the customer running on peak anger who needed to inject it directly into the intended target while it was still fresh. 

But that kind of pure anger is a rare and special vintage that doesn't last very long if it has to fuel itself. So I'd just listen to the customer and shut the hell up until I was certain they'd said everything that needed saying before responding. 

Most calls felt like small counselling sessions which had a distinctive shape with similar themes. Customers would often wish to inflict their anguish and frustrations for the company on me personally. Instead of the company I was working on behalf of being inept and completely incompetent, I was the one personally responsible for their workmen soiling their shagpile rug after mending the boiler. It was my fault the double glazed windows fitted the week before had started leaking this morning. 

Then, when they'd finally ran out of ammo, and could see that my initial intention to try and help them with their issue hadn't changed, the apologies would come because they had made things personal.

"Sorry. I know it's not your fault...".

The conservation is reset, and you both start again but with the same shared goal this time. The volume of both voices remaining the same, as neither wishes to speak over the other. A natural rhythm to the exchange develops as you both climb aboard the same train of thought, setting off to see how far you can get to your destination. The journey becoming more valuable than the need to arrive.

But it all started with relinquishing control of the narrative and just listening. Not trying to assert control from the get-go out of fear of things escalating:

"Right, before you tell me anything, this is how things are going to go..."

There's a sense of bad inevitability about what is happening now in America. Trump's pride and pathological necessity to assert cliched depictions of inflexible strength lifted from the bygone eras his idols live in, is a trait I fear is so hardwired in him, that there will be the to-ing and fro-ing of sides constantly upping the ante, until everyone involved goes all in and a new peace comes only because the will to fight on has been totally spent.