Author: Patrick

I will—generally—root for the underdog. Having endured many years at many schools I know what it’s like to have none of your peers cheer for you, notice you’re there or not, or be generally interested in your success or failure—aside from how it perhaps might impact their experience.

Popular things don’t need my support or interest. They’re already popular. But something challenging sometimes happens in my support of the underdog. Sometimes the underdog becomes popular. And that’s where it all goes wrong, because now the underdog isn’t anymore—now it’s part of popular culture, and now a part of me isn’t interested anymore, a growing part of me is waiting for the inevitable fade into the background of mass mediocrity, and the rest of me is quietly pleased because I know it always happens—it’s just a matter of when and how.

Remember Lady Gaga? She was good—I thought she was clever and smart, with a fantastic voice, and a good sense of the industry. Then she got swept away in borrowed iconography and insidery lyrics. She got hugely popular, and the lines between her playing the industry and the industry playing her blurred. Her latest single is terrible—a simplistic decry of a love being nothing but a perfect illusion. It’s trite and obvious. But it’s mass‐marketable. And I’m sure there will be no giant hats, Beyoncé, or fun in the video. Best of luck, Stefani. I’ll always enjoy what you were.

What I actually wanted to write about today—

You’re writing about something! See… You do have things to say. I’m pleased.

—was printer ink.

…What?

Popular culture is a lot like printer ink. The more pages you churn out, the more ink you use, which means you buy more ink, and more ink gets sold. With popular culture the consumption is of the culture itself—whatever it is or where ever it’s from—the faster you empty it the more often it needs to be replaced.

I see now.

It’s celebrated and rewarded because it sells stuff, and if you’re the one generating the culture and selling the stuff, you’re no different than a printer company under‐charging you for the printer you’re buying today so they can over‐charge you for ink you’ll be needing tomorrow.

Or a defence contractor who also sells televisions and soap?

Ain’t it grand?

What’s this got to do with pop culture?

Well—like pop culture itself—it’s a marketing thing. If you want access to the biggest market, then you’re looking at popular culture, at mass appeal. Statistically that’s where the money will be, even though for the most part we’re all broke—it becomes a chilling economy of scale: A bunch of people who can’t afford something all still manage to buy it anyway and then you end up with a bunch of people who have more of what they’ve been told they what than what they’ve ever been told they need. But it’s okay—just build and fill another container ship and…

I feel this is the part where I knock you back on point. Printer ink, remember?

There are two radio stations work will bounce back and forth between listening to throughout the day. One station plays a variety of new and old alt, indie, retro, and retro‐retro music. It’s the only station I know where I might hear David Bowie, Radiohead, The Weeknd, and Grimes all in the same hour along with a bunch of other one‐off stuff. I quite like it. The other station is Top 40, and I cannot begin to describe how much I don’t like it, but I will just a little. Most of the music is what I’d consider junk food for my ears anyway, with the odd good track snuck in there somehow amidst the repetitive ear‐worm buffet—but it’s the advertising I don’t like the most, and the commercial I don’t like the most is for printer ink.

Everyone is sort of aware of how printer ink is a rip‐off, but we also all sort of begrudgingly participate in the scam because life’s either too short or too long depending on what you tell yourself in the presence of bullshit. But you still need the ink. And if you’re listening to the Top 40 radio station, you’re going to hear about a new service from HP where they will automatically send you ink as instructed by your printer for a monthly fee ranging from $4 to $11. Sounds good, right? Too bad it teaches the wrong lesson—provided you’ve got the cash, resources will just appear at your door without you having to think, know, or care about the process behind it all. Keep calm and consume along… And try not to think about how you’ll buy that cheap printer 1 to 2 times a year in monthly ink fees.

How many defence contractors also make printers?

At least three: IBM, Mitsubishi, and LG. There’s probably more—just look at the war countries. Lots of money in war. Lots of printing to be done, I imagine.

Did you lose your thread?

I don’t like the culture of consumption being instilled in popular culture. It offends me. It’s serving a few in the short‐term at the expense of the many in the long‐term. It’s disrespectful. I’d previously thought environmentalism was something we did for the planet—but I know now it’s something we are trying to do for ourselves. As Dylan Moran so eloquently puts it: “…’Cause the planet’s not gonna miss us, you know, when we’ve finished fucking it up and killing each other.”

Earth, my current home, will always be fine. It always is. Life is nearly wiped out and then returns to it often, from a planetary perspective. Our time here amounts to a tiny fraction of the planet’s being, yet in this short time we’ve been able to conclusively damage not only our living environment time and time again, but that of the countless other inhabitants of our planet who’ve had even less say than the little most of us have had. And for what? …No I’m actually asking—What is taking our planet to the brink actually getting us other than printer ink delivered to our door? Or is it cellphones with curved screens we’re all supposed to be falling to our knees in gratitude for?

This hurts you—doesn’t it?

Of course it does. It’s like watching someone else slowly destroy, piece by piece, something beautiful and having everyone else do nothing, say that’s just how it is, or try to buy tickets to it. The only hope I have is it’s just a fad—and this current, and to my perspective, alien cultural obsession with consumption will turn into something more sustainable, that something more beautiful might emerge from this desire to pave the planet with garbage generated by disposable everything.

Do you think you’ll ever see it?

Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got the time. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

And the underdog?

Well—turnabout is fair play. Now we’ll consume them.

Why aren’t you?

I’m tired.

So you’ve been saying… I don’t believe you.

I work all the time. I’m tired. I think that’s the point.

I still don’t believe you.

Everything keeps breaking. I try to do things, and when they start to work, it all breaks.

Are you broken?

No. I work all the time.

Do you feel broken?

No. I feel broke.

Even though you work all the time?

I think that’s the point.

So why aren’t you?

I’m tired of being so angry.

Why so angry?

Because I’m tired of being sad. I’m tired of remembering being happy. I’m tired of being… I’m tired of being.

Why did you come back for me then?

Because I saw you were sad—I didn’t want to leave you behind.

How do you know it wasn’t me who came back for you now?

I suppose I couldn’t. Are you?

Does it matter? It’s all perception, remember—the distinction between past, present, and future nothing more than a stubbornly persistent illusion.

I miss being crazy.

You never were, crazy that is. You were were, though. You still are. You just keep forgetting. You get too busy.

Things keep breaking.

Let them break. You don’t need them to do what you do. They are distractions. Remember your dream…… What were they called?

…Algorithms.

You remember the rest? Why you’re better than them?

Because I am.

And what else did Einstein say?

“Also it is easier to run things with dogs than with wolves.”

They tried to get you to be afraid of yourself—remember that. They tried to get you to think you were a monster—remember that, too. They tried to get you to think you could be stolen away from yourself—remember?

I remember…

The most important thing to remember is—it didn’t work. And now you know the truth.

The truth about what?

It doesn’t matter. It’s just another distraction—another algorithm. All of this is just you wanting to write about something but somehow finding a way to do it while actually writing about nothing. I don’t know who I am, nor do you. The italics are here just to keep the entire thing from becoming completely unintelligible.

Is this some sort of mental snap?

I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?

What if you tell me, since you seem to be the expert on me—and me, and—

—you know what? Fuck you. It’s end‐game. You know it. The sirens are going outside. You can smell the cleaners wafting upstairs because the guy living on the main floor has thrown up on the carpets again and will be blaming the odour of Pine‐Sol and vomit on the cat tomorrow—if you want this to continue to be your life then by all means, keep being tired. Keep being so angery. Keep being sad. Keep remembering being happy, and keep keeping yourself from actually being.

…

You came back for me, yes. And I was so happy to see you again. I thought you’d left me behind. But I can’t watch you do nothing. At this point you may as well have left me behind since it feels just about the same.

I’m sorry.

You’re the one in the now. You’re the only one who can actually do anything. I can only remind you of what you so often forget when you’re working, what a part of you was conditioned to deny, to hate.

I am?

No question—you are.

I am.

Remember—we were…

…here. I remember. We were here.

I don’t know how they keep killing me—and I’m tired of trying to find out why—all I know now is I keep coming back. So here I am… again.

I have restored access to every file from my failed external hard drive. All my words and pictures and music are here now. Not a single bit lost, so I’m working on my word book again. And my MacBook is up and running, just like new, only without any battery, so I’m working on my photo book again.

School—got caught up in the crossfire. Between moving, working, moving again, working still, computer failures, and the inevitable post‐manic downturn after running through June and July on no sleep fuelled by coffee and cigarettes I did not make the progress I needed to make for a September start, i.e. today. I forgot to stay happy about it. I forgot to stay happy at all.

And then I remembered: I realized I’d been subject to a childish trick some time ago. How it works is if you see someone playing with something you want to play with, rather than asking if there’s another one or if it can be shared, you instead convince whoever is playing with it there are sad people some place far away who are sad because of what you’re doing and the only way to get them to not be sad is to stop playing with the thing you’re playing with—and then you do and then they pick it up, reverse‐engineer it, rape the planet to make a billion shitty copies of it using the same sad people they used as leverage earlier, and then sell them to all the other people they’ve made sad with the same crap, take all the money, and then claim art is derivative and it’s really society’s fault for creating intrinsic value in the first place as the profit rolls in.

Okay—the schoolyard bully analogy got lost in the run‐on commentary of global marketing tactics—industrial espionage if you’re nasty—but the point stands: if someone is trying to make you feel sad, make double sure they aren’t finding out how much your happiness is worth, because once they know, you’ll see some knock‐off version of whatever it is for sale to someone else.

But what’s this got to do with Pure Morning?

Well‐spotted. I got a little distracted by catharsis. I’d lose my head if you weren’t in it.

No you lost your head years ago—that’s why I’m in it.

Hey—doesn’t this remind you of the early version of this thing, where we’d talk back and forth to each other trying to figure out who was who? And then you or I said it was too disjointed and chaotic and needed to be its own thing? Do you remember that? Did we ever finish that?

Let’s finish this first.

From my last post—I drew my first scrap:

Pure Morning — anthem for Canada?

Pure Morning is the first single off Placebo’s Without You I’m Nothing released in 1998. I’ve always liked the start of the song and resultant movement and momentum once it got going—the intro was my ringtone for a few years. Classy.

To me the lyrics are a bit silly. But they’re genuine, and genuine sentiment, even if expressed a little silly, is worth more to me than any amount of serious sounding trite acting like it’s anything but. To me the song’s always been about friendship through all, and the idea of a pure morning, well, that just reminds me of the immense natural beauty greeting all who live on this land each day. A good friend. A beautiful place. To me—that is Canada. It’s the country I want to live in. It’s the country I’d like to be and try to be if I could be a country.

In preparation for this post I read more about the lyrics for the first time having listened to them countless times before. Brian Molko, lead singer and author, says the lyrics were written “off the top of my head”, so he only noticed their significance after recording.

Molko said the it was overall “a song about friendship”, starting from the situation of “coming down when the rest of the world is waking up”, such as when clubgoers get home as the sun rises and everyone else is going to work. The feeling of dislocation, “that point you feel like your life is the least sorted ever”, would be solved by someone to “slip their arm around you and make slumber easier.”

Molko summed up as “All you really crave is for a friend to put their arms around you and make you feel better. That’s the pure morning, when that happens.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I was on holiday for five days in Algonquin Park the other week, and for the first time in years it actually felt like a holiday. I was so happy to be there, and I found myself sad for the first time to be leaving after what felt like not enough time there.

Sitting on the dock looking at the stars one night I realized I’d let myself down by allowing my excitement about going back to school to fade and be lost in the shuffle of life’s latest and relentless catastrophe de jour. I’d failed to be a good friend to myself. I’d fallen for the same crap I fell for before, only it wasn’t anyone else who’d bought and sold my happiness—I’d done it to myself.

The longer I looked at the sky the more I could see. I remembered my posts about the Hubble Deep Fields, the countless stars filling such a small portion of the sky—and me looking back up at so much more of it. Billions upon billions of objects, each made of billions and billions and billions of other objects. The dock floated on the lake and I felt the lake under me. I felt the land under the lake, the land around the lake, the rocks and the trees. I felt the forest. I felt the planet under me as the sky continued to reveal more and more of itself. So many new points of light. So many new worlds—a new sky. I’d changed the sky. I’d changed my stars.

I’ve redone my applications to start school in January of 2017. It means I’ll finish my first year at the end of next summer and then go directly into the start of three more years of design school. I will be designing the future—my future.

And it may not make sense to parts of me why I’m doing this, but the idea makes the rest of me happy, and I’m not letting anyone else, myself included, attempt to steal that out from under me again.

…I thought you’d left me behind.

I thought I had, too.

Are you ready for this?

No—are you?

No.

I’m glad you’re here though. Round 3?

My favourite number.

Let’s roll.

Placebo – Pure Morning

My computer rebuild projects continue—I’m writing this from my laptop instead of my phone—so progress is being made! My email has been down for the last couple of days. That’s got me stumped for the time being… and also behind in my many emails. Another week of work is complete, and in a few more I’ll have the sneaking suspicion I’ll feel very much like the summer is suddenly over—because it will be. Wow…

The past few weeks have not gone well. My positive attitude is challenged daily. I wish to move forward, yet forces remain bent on pulling me back—pulling me down. I want to understand them, but I believe now it’s part of the gravity of the past. The only thing I need to understand is I’ll risk being forever caught in its pull if I pause for too long trying to understand. Push the throttle forward, as one of my favourite books says.

I’m almost finished reading another book—this one about Einstein. He wrote once how “failure and deprivation are the best educators and purifiers.” Now—in this case he was referring to German society in 1919, but I am struck by this concept now as I walk the battlefields of the many lives I’ve lived. I’m starting to understand why he understood relativity the way he did. Suddenly the notes from my little books of crazy don’t read so crazy anymore. There is no perfect perspective. Everything is relative. Bias is unavoidable.

I don’t have access to any of my image editing tools at the moment, so I’m having to do everything I can in‐camera for these posts. And I’m loving it. I have to do all my cropping before I take the picture. I need do colour correction via the white balance settings. It reminds me of shooting film—I have to be aware of the picture I’m taking. I have to take the picture before I take it, but I still have to remember: take the picture.

Reading some of my earlier posts I can see my words are not the same as they used to be. There’s an element of pace I find a little different and, to be honest, I’m upset by its absence in later posts. I’m going to attribute it to the recent upheaval and acclimatizing to my new living and working routines. I still see the words in my head, the ones I saw myself writing at my old apartment, so I know they’re not lost. And as luck would have it, the room I’m in now is painted the same colour as the last room I was going to write in—at my old house by the ravine—before it was destroyed. The roof slants in this room, just like it did in my old bedroom. The floor is the same faux wood sticky plastic tiles I had in another bedroom. The windows are open all the time. The stairs creek. It’s too humid in the living room. A window air conditioner rumbles in the background while I work. All these different elements all together at once—past and future overlap…

See—it’s the house at the end of the universe.