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..

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.

We're already living in a Black Mirror reality - How Facebook is polticising friendship itself

I've just logged into facebook. Facebook greeted me, as it normally does. There was a small note at the top of my feed from - 'The Facebook privacy team'. For some reason I thought I would actually bother to read it this time. It felt a little bit like I was the cashier in the supermarket who had been asked how they were and in a protested by not sticking to the script by saying "Fine, thank you".

>You control who can like and comment on your posts
Ben, it looks like someone recently liked your post. We want you to know how to control who can like and comment on your posts

Initially I thought, cool. More control. I don't want any perverts look at my stuff and exciting themselves over it. Shortly after this moment of empowerment had passed, I considered a scenario in which I am in a pub with friends and I want to shout over that I like my friends new style. I open my mouth but find that nothing is coming out because my friend with the new hairstyle has forbid me to express any fondness for it. They now look over to me and we make eye contact. We both know that I've been muted in this social setting. I feel really frustrated and obviously no longer wish to express how much I like my so-called friend's hair. I suddenly feel ostracized by the whole group, perhaps I'm just over reacting? But I do have a horrible deep pang of paranoid fear that even more of the  people I'm presently sat with, that are joking and flashing smiles at me could have actually censored my ability to like their things. find myself sat there in uncomfortable silence, feeling increasingly emasculated as the party vibe din of the pub continues unabated by my realisation,

A new facebook saga in the making


Facebook again creates and hands us a another power which is essentially destabilizing in its nature, and as users are bestowed with this new level of "control", it helps alleviate facebook of blame for any of the dynamic corollaries that subsequently take place.

On the surface it looks like a courteous little reminder of what facebook features are available to you, but it's banal placement and servile language help mask the reality that facebook is gradually becoming a highly politicised space, and they are now moving into the business of politicising friendship itself.

Don't Manage Anger. Eliminate It By Articulating It

I like to explode. You have to explode, but it has to be a controlled explosion. A contained explosion, and the way I contain it is through writing. If my anger can be articulated and its essence be captured in writing then guaranteed I will feel 100% better afterwards.

For some people their container or preferred way of articulating their anger is in music, or going to the gym or sports. Whatever it is, I think that you have to feel like you've let something out of you which is equivalent in magnitude to the anger you were feeling.

The world is more and more filled with stewers, who allow their anger to sit and fester inside. Not healthy whatsoever. They can look forward to an unexpressed life followed by an early grave. Stewers I find tend to use vehicles like sarcasm, parody, irony and satire to assert their frustrations, defending themselves whilst simultaneously attacking the thing which they perceive as a threat.

The problem with using these devices is that they seldom leave people feeling like the anger they were gripped by has been fully released, and so it continues to build up gradually over time, albeit at a slower pace until they too have to explode, often in a more dramatic and damaging fashion.

So my advice to people would be to try and find your container or the activity that best helps you articulate your anger, be it a physical or mental activity. Anger is something which requires eliminating from the body, it doesn't deserve to be managed, just translated into something positive.