Review: The Fuckit List by John Niven

 

        Just like Charlie Brooker’s Wipe, John Niven’s books have, for the past few years, been an annual highlight for me, an antidote to the ever-increasing global insanity, that sort of comic relief moment your cracking mind is crying for. In an age where satire has been decried as dead and absurdity reigns as normal, Niven still manages to send it up like a rocket of cranking cackling madness while all other satirists just throw up their hands in defeat. If anything, Niven is probably the only one with a sufficient level of guts and spunk to give it a treatment that is adequate.

In the not very distant future of 2026, Trump has finished his second term of presidency, now safely installed his daughter as his successor, abortion is illegal, gun control is almost non-existent and America is even more grotesque as it already is – and I say that a few days after Bleachgate.

         In all this, Frank, a retired small-town newspaper editor, has just received the grave news that he has terminal cancer. While he is no angel himself, his life has been a series of tragedies and losses: a string of failed marriages, his third wife and son lost in a school shooting, his daughter to a backroom abortion. So Frank, who’s got nothing to lose and plenty of bones to pick, sets out across an America that is even more dystopian (but sadly not unrealistic) than we already know it. In Walter White manner, he manages to evade FBI investigations… but an overzealous sheriff with a personal agenda and crooked methods (who reminds me a bit of a nasty cross of Boss Hogg and Buford T Justice) is hot on his heels.

      True to himself, John Niven doesn’t hold back. He carries the fury, frustration and disbelief of a generation and channels it into a rough justice that is entirely therapeutic. The unsavoury, nay revolting characters Frank dispatches deserve everything they’ve got coming, and his ultimate goal is, denied or not, a fantasy of many.

Hell, I’ve been long past the guilty giggles -  now the belly laughs and triumph he elicits, enriched by a vulnerable  humanity amidst  the brutality and obscenity , are as satisfactory as a Sunday carvery.

Review: The Reddening - Adam Nevill

I’ve been hankering for Adam Nevill’s latest book ever since I’ve known about its upcoming release. Where his previous novels and short stories have been genuinely creepy enough to somehow and progressively alter my brain chemistry and give me a few greys and plenty of nightmares, The Reddening, aptly hitting the shelves on Halloween 2019, continues to hack into that amygdala-warping notch with fiendish precision.

Adam Nevill doesn’t let up. Having made gorgeous Devon with its rugged coasts and picturesque countryside his home, he is now determined to ruin it for the rest of us. His evocative descriptions of the ancient landscapes are stunning, but they’re none of the Rosamunde Pilcher quaintness. Nevill’s nature is fierce and unforgiving if crossed, more dread- than awe-inspiring. The characters, distracted by their own trauma and lulled by the false security of modernity, follow a trail of mysterious deaths and the suicide of a young man who disappeared after recording some hair-raising sounds in one of Devon’s ancient cliff caves, the excavation grounds of some truly terrifying remains and artefacts. And what at first seems a mere unpleasant encounter with insular, hostile country folk, and suspicions of a large scale drug operation, soon becomes the entry point to something vastly older and all-pervasive, an entanglement with an ancient pagan cult and prehistoric powers that prove inescapable.

Nevill, as ever, masterfully crosses the boundary from ordinary scares to cosmic terror. Apparitions of the Red Folk, descriptions of being lost in the pitch dark of the nightly sea and isolated trails build up to a crescendo of nigh incomprehensible nightmarish visions conjured up in pagan rituals that tears the grounds of safe reality from under the characters’ and readers’ feet, which left me gasping and swearing like a trooper over and over again.

The Reddening is Nevill’s Devon Wickerman, and under his spell you might well, like me, shrivel into Edward Woodward hollering a heartfelt, yet impotent “Jesus. Jesus Christ!”

For a sample, click here. 

Review: Under a Watchful Eye - Adam Nevill

 Adam Nevill is unpredictable. Unpredictable but never boring. He plays ball in all horror subgenres, and he plays it hard, merciless and oh so delightfully fucked up. And his prose is so stylish he makes the likes of James Herbert look positively infantile.

I’ve read Under a Watchful Eye twice (so far), simply because the horror in it is in places of such an uncanny, eerie dreamlike quality that stays with you less in what you saw but more how it made you feel, the way you wake from a nightmare, shaken and scattered by it all day but only able to remember snippets - probably just the tip of the iceberg wreaking havoc in your subconscious now. Which makes the book utterly re-readable, leaving you to discover new bits each time you touch base with it again.

You wouldn’t think a picturesque Devon seaside town would give you the heebie-jeebies as much as a dilapidated house rented out by apsycho live-in landlord in a poor part of Birmingham. But fear not – when successful writer Seb spots an oddly floating figure staring at him from a distance, one that looks unpleasantly familiar to someone he had escaped decades ago, the sunny beachfront soon turns into a creepy negative like the intro from Tales from the Darkside.

The figure keeps popping up in his path, out of thin air and coming closer and closer, just to disappear again, making Seb question his sanity. Until it appears in his drive, the disturbing figure of his uni housemate Ewan, a man so filthy and unkempt, Nevill’s description practically makes you gag, with no redeeming features whatsoever. He’s far from a hobo with a heart of gold – he displays delusions of grandeur and psychopathic traits and plants himself into Seb’s classy house like a human tick. You might wonder why Seb just doesn’t chuck him out – but once you’re exposed to the threat and mind-twisting manipulation he endures (paired, perhaps, with crippling Britishness) you feel as trapped as him. 

And not just that. With Ewan, things appear in the house. Things from another Arthur-Machenesque plane that followed him there and start stalking Seb, as well. Things so unspeakably horrible, images Nevill plants into your head like demonic seeds that will sickeningly blossom before your inner eye just as you turn off the lights. Lost creatures, barely human, in a nightmarish fog. Condemned spirits and souls lost in a hellish dimension after dabbling in a cult practicing astral projection. A cult that soon starts stalking Seb, as well. And Seb’s life begins to crumble as he desperately tries to find out what Ewan has let loose on him, that he needs to get involved with that cult in order to find a way to free himself of the demonic forces in his life, just to get entangled deeper and deeper, with no hope of any human forces to rescue him.

By the way, those who read Nevill’s privately published short story collection “Some will not sleep” (another absolutely unmissable, by the way) will recognise the characters from an equally fascinating and gag-inducing short story called “Yellow Teeth” – to me, one of the most disturbing one in the lot, and that’s a walk in the park compared to UWE - ; its title featuring as the name of a novel Seb produces in UWE after his harrowing experiences with Ewan and his ghastly entourage.

I swallowed that book in two sittings, leaving my eyes dry and my flesh creeping. The imagery is as haunting as scenes from recent paranormal films: put visions of Silent Hill together with the various Furthers and Upside Downs, flavoured with the spirit of Arthur Machen and Aleister Crowley, you’re getting there. Nevill induces that cosmic terror in you that he’s become famous for. That sense of spiralling out of control, with no reprieve and escape. Seb’s terror will infect your own bones and not let go. Word of advice: plan in a few recovery periods with Disney films to get through this experience with your sanity intact.

Highly recommended, easily the best horror of this year.

Some will not sleep by Adam Nevill - review

A humble claim, I do declare. Because if my experience of Adam Nevill tales is anything to go by, rest  will be but a sweet and distant memory to you while your scared, dead tired body twitches with sleep-deprived hypersensitivity at every shadow and sound around you, your eyes bulge and strain in the dark and your terror prickles under your skin like electricity once you have tucked into this exquisite collection of horror appetizers.

Grotesque, eerie, nightmarish, cosmically terrifying… work your way through all the synonyms of the genre and it will just about cover what is on offer here. Some of the tales will remind you of his novels, but not in a rehashed way, but the way you’d greet old friends… friends who thought it funny to give you prank calls at 3am in a distorted voice, knowing you had just watched The Ring for the first time, friends who crawled down the stairs with their hair hung in their faces after you came home from the cinema to watch the Grudge, making gurgly noises at you. Friends you fondly recall, but frankly, at the time, you wanted to punch them in the face.

Ah, the joy of being scared out of your pants. Join our Dinner Party of Doom, and our butler Adam Nevill will be serving you these fine literary hors d’oeurvres with a cold, wicked, dead-eyed smile.

Some will not sleep by Adam Nevill - review

A humble claim, I do declare. Because if my experience of Adam Nevill tales is anything to go by, rest  will be but a sweet and distant memory to you while your scared, dead tired body twitches with sleep-deprived hypersensitivity at every shadow and sound around you, your eyes bulge and strain in the dark and your terror prickles under your skin like electricity once you have tucked into this exquisite collection of horror appetizers.

Grotesque, eerie, nightmarish, cosmically terrifying… work your way through all the synonyms of the genre and it will just about cover what is on offer here. Some of the tales will remind you of his novels, but not in a rehashed way, but the way you’d greet old friends… friends who thought it funny to give you prank calls at 3am in a distorted voice, knowing you had just watched The Ring for the first time, friends who crawled down the stairs with their hair hung in their faces after you came home from the cinema to watch the Grudge, making gurgly noises at you. Friends you fondly recall, but frankly, at the time, you wanted to punch them in the face.

Ah, the joy of being scared out of your pants. Join our Dinner Party of Doom, and our butler Adam Nevill will be serving you these fine literary hors d’oeurvres with a cold, wicked, dead-eyed smile.

What's a lost child under the reign of King Death?

I’ve been a fan of Adam Nevill’s tales since Apartment 16 made me too chicken to switch off the lights at night. Since The Ritual made me obsessed with Scandinavian folklore and my Germanic  heritage demons that still haunted my mother (there’s a tale there). Since Banquet for the Damned created a discordant homage of twisted love to the dark beauty of St Andrews and the unfathomable horrors of a Lovecraftian mind. Since the cracked hands of my inner evil porcelain doll clapped enthustiastically to the Victorian horrors unfolding in House of Small Shadows.

So far Nevill has ticked all the boxes of my favourite kinds of fears.  It’s like he is an evil wizard pulling all my bad dreams out of my head like a rope of threadbare, rotten knotted handkerchiefs, twirling my demons like Mickey in a Fantasia directed by James Wan or John Carpenter. Only horror fans might appreciate that particular addictive (if not slightly masochistic) joy.

The paranormal is Nevill’s specialty, and I imagine it will always feature to some degree in his tales of doom. But there is a new side to him, which I can only describe as a modern Dickens. Last year, with the publication of No One Gets Out Alive, Nevill dealt with a modern horror that has touched too many of us: unaffordable housing and unstable jobs, leaving us in a poverty so grinding that we are at the mercy of rogue landlords. Nevill might have exaggerated it somewhat (although I have met people like Knacker McGuire, which makes this book all the more terrifying) – but there is illustration in exaggeration, and Nevill’s recent books have become sharp magnifying glasses pointed at contemporary societal ills, not instilling an indescribable horror but stirring up the familiar already there. He’s done poverty, the housing crisis and unregulated rental markets.

His latest, literally, goes more global. It’s not post-apocalyptic, it’s bang in the middle of it. Lost Girl is not just what some called a version of Liam Neeson’s Taken – though if you prefer to read it that way, you certainly can; it makes a damn fine thriller. But there’s more to it than just the Leeson meme we’ve all seen. Set in the near future, in a world that is increasingly crumbling under the effects of climate change in which man has gone past the point of no return – ecological disasters, food shortages and water rationing and the resulting mass migrations to escape their doom to not much more habitable areas – in a Great Britain that is collapsing under the strain of an apocalyptically hot summer, killing pensioners off like flies,  an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, where only the rich can afford to get decent food and protection from an insane organised crime wave so infiltrated in society that the police is as effective as a cocktail umbrella in a super hurricane of lawlessness…  a global horror, a likely horror, a horror bound to happen if one just spins the yarn further from now, a horror along the lines of Soylent Green and The Death of Grass, just more brutal and more likely, where “year after year, decade after decade, always worsening, always leaving things changed after each crisis. The past is unrecoverable. Extinction is incremental. There is no science fiction. Advanced physics, inter-galactic travel, gadgets? An epic fantasy, the lot of it. There is only horror ahead of us now."

In this setting of despair, a family move to Devon from Birmingham to escape the constant flooding, to a quiet, still somewhat idyllic place where self-sufficiency protects them from the worst of the food shortages. And it is just then when they feel marginally safe, that their beautiful little daughter gets snatched out of their front garden in a moment of carelessness, and disappears.

Lost Girl must have been incredibly uncomfortable to write – I had to think of Stephen King’s discomfort with Pet Sematary.  While there are autobiographical elements (a family moving from Birmingham to Devon with their little daughter), the thought of getting your toddler daughter kidnapped from right under your care is every parent’s nightmare. Add to that happening in a world where you can’t expect help from anyone, the law is impotent, a half-hearted investigation is abandoned due to lack of manpower, and the forces you are up against are gigantic. It’s an exploration of the agonies of a father trying to find his child, not knowing whether she is alive or dead, or what horrors might have happened to her. It’s about the lengths he goes to, at the peril of everything he has and is, to save her.

What makes this tale so much better than bland old Taken is how deeply you get submerged into the father’s mind agonising to the brink of insanity with the grief, loss, worry and uncertainty over his daughter’s fate, and the horrific fantasies tormenting him. What adds to the intensity is that he remains unnamed, known only as “the father” through the entire book, making him akin to an archetype that anyone can identify with, where names don’t distract from the state of his soul. It gives it the eerie effect that made McCarthy’s The Road such a haunting read.

The father is not blessed with the skills and coldness of an ex-CIA man; obsessive research and the help of an anonymous agent aids him in tracking down the captors, but often he is tormented by his humanity cracking under the necessity of barbarity to elicit answers from the most callous and vicious agents of his daughter’s disappearance, people so immersed in a world of corruption and violence that the father’s attempts to be threatening at first seem laughable to them. The dilemma the father faces is that in order to save his daughter from the monsters, he has to become one himself. He has to risk losing his ability to be a good father and his own sense of self just to get his child back.

The twist at the end I really did not see coming.  I will not give much more away other than that is left open  like a wound in which an infinitesimally small glimmer of hope  is the only balm on offer – but in times of doom one is grateful to at least have that.

Lost Girl is a relentless study of grief, loss, not just of a loved one but of humanity in crisis. Nevill skilfully puts it in a setting that makes this tale both larger than life and just a mere anecdote in the sea of peril slowly swallowing our planet, a brief zooming in on an individual fate in a flood of many, a new take on awe-inspiring horror.

The almost prophetic descriptions of a vast refugee crisis (considering Nevill wrote this book before the current problems hit the papers) was almost spooky in its timeliness. And the vivid details of his story-weaving sucks you right out of this world into the one he is master of.

As with all of his books, I advise that you read it at your own risk. But at the same time, you will be glad you did. 

Sexy time with Chicken

Because fucken Facebook is quicker to remove a cat video with a song in it than it is to remove hate- and violence-inciting, racist and extremist groups, I shall upload this incredibly sexy video of Chicken making sweet love to my duvet here and just link to it. 

Thanks, Jamie!

Edinburgh Free Fringe Review: Is he a bit Simon Jay?

Is he a bit Simon Jay is no spring chicken at Great Britain’s fair fringes. It has had previous performances in London, Brighton, Bath, Reading, Oxford and Milton Keynes. And now it’s moved up to bonnie Scotland, like a particularly weird-but-pleasant tingle.

This year’s Edinburgh Free Fringe venue is the Bohemian playground of the Counting House, home of 2013’s marvellous Austentatious. And similar to Austentatious’ downright bonkers improv Austen plays, during the various times I have seen Is he a bit, it has changed, adapted and matured.

Character comedies might be anything but few and far between at the Fringe, and needless to say, I cannot claim to have seen more but a fraction, but this was definitely one of the shows worth coming up for. It’s hard to describe this one: perhaps a wild cocktail of The League of Gentlemen meets Coronation Street on acid, spiced with a pinch of Stephen Fry.

Is he a bit Simon Jay (the character not to be confused with his “puppeteer”, the performer Simon Jay) is the tale of a man of curious biological condition – presented by a floppy claw hand sewn into a jacket draped over a chair, at his own autopsy by Dr Richard Wise, who begins to unravel the mystery of Simon Jay like a morbid Derek Acorah.

Simon Jay’s life spools backwards, revealing his story through the many characters that knew him, loved, hated or love-hated him.  There is his embittered soon-to-be ex-wife Belle, his mouthy chain-smoking tough-love jailbird mother, like a car crash from an EastEnders geriatric gang war, cockney geezer Pete from the Pub (my personal favourite) riddled by his grief for his alien-probed wife Mavis and conspiracy paranoia that caused him to take a gun to his wardrobe, pathological liar creator-of-facts Lee Buxton from the Job Centre, his employer Barry from the sewers, a copper, a priest, a deranged-randy creature called Uncle Terry that somehow strangely rings familiar to most, his tragically deceased sister and even an endearingly stammering Prince Bertie having to deal with a family crisis.

All in all there are 22 characters beautifully distinguished by acting, voices and accents, which culminate in a bizarre, frantic wedding scene in which Simon (the actor) switches between them with a fluid ease, a frantic-comic energy and the humble help of a scarf, which left the audience laughing helplessly. Some might mistake the moments of stabbing satire for crude humour, but it made this here viewer cackle.

Delightful also were the cleverly improvised responses to the noise from the venues next door, providing extra giggles for the audience when it could have easily thrown the performance. Mr Jay knows his role(s) inside out, and he easily charms the pants off his audience.

Is he a bit Simon Jay? is a type of comedy bordering on the surreal that could equally bemuse and bewilder as cause wild hysterics, with an amount of cultural references that tickle older viewers but might easily be lost on the young. Mind, its brief references to sexual deviancy makes it a 14+, anyway. Still, there is plenty of hilarity in it to make it thoroughly enjoyable for a variety of audiences... given that they are willing to let themselves into an experience entirely different from the myriad of bog-standard stand-up the Fringe offers.  Upon first watching it, it evoked a similar reaction in me as my first encounter with The Mighty Boosh did. But the initial “What the fuck am I watching” barrier needs to be broken for full enjoyment and the bonkers embraced in a bear hug, and once achieved, it becomes a thorough delight. 

On Friends, Depression and Futility

I am writing this as a particularly awful episode of depression is petering out. Slowly. My guts are still in a knot, my limbs like lead, I have lost a kilo in less than two days, but my mind at least isn’t in as much of a fog of agony and despair anymore. For now. I can't promise this won't be confusing and contradictory and downright messy and insane because my mind isn't working very well at the moment.

I’m really only feeling safe on here, partly because I am less likely to be heard, partly because probably the people who read it are only people who care. But I could be wrong even about that. That’s a fun fact about depression. It makes you question the most fundamental securities of yourself. Which I have never had much to speak of, anyways.

It’s not that these securities return. It’s just when the depression recedes – more a dirty oil slick than a wave of water, viscously retreating, rather leaving traces, than washing off clean – these insecurities are less painful, less prominent. I am a little bit more able to fool myself convincingly, I am a tad more able to live with the uncertainty, or ignore it. Pretend I’m fine to not scare or bore people off with my tedious mood swings. They come out of the blue; I can be fine one minute, and the next minute I’m on the floor, screaming, because someone has torn the shades off my eyes and I finally see things as they are.

And I can see how frustrating it must be for others to constantly have to reassure me, to not get through to me, to have to deal with the same shit over and over again.  I’m not the only one in my circle of friends with depression; I know what it’s like to feel helpless and paralysed because all you want is to give them advice, a tool, something to make those feelings go away, but nothing seems to work, there is nothing you can do to fix it. You can’t grasp why they feel a certain way, why they have those awful thoughts about themselves, because you love them and all you see is a wonderful human being... surely it should be obvious to them, too? It is unbearable to watch them suffer, and you feel angry at yourself for being unable to help and, foolishly, angry at them for giving you such a futile task. And then guilty for feeling angry. But that still doesn’t mean you don’t want to help them;  that still doesn’t mean you wish they hadn’t asked you for help.

And knowing about what it's like from the carer's perspective, I should know better when I’m down. But once I am there, I don’t feel like I’m lovable enough to be worth the trouble.

It is odd; somehow you’re not equipped for the job when you know nothing about depression, but when you do, when you suffer from it, which enables you to empathise, you’re weak and prone to get dragged into it, like two drowning people trying to save each other.

Last night it was almost too much. After crying for hours, my mind went cold, somehow, calm and sober (hah) and I went through my options. I considered for a moment to hand myself in, get myself “sectioned”, as they say. But the long term implications of that were too terrifying. What it would mean for my future, my ability to take care of myself even after I was “released”. My employability. Going “inside” would take away the last bits of life that I still enjoyed. Going in would mean losing my liberty, my rights to decide for myself. Is there anything worse? Even at my worst the only comfort I have is that I have the liberty to decide what’s best for myself, despite what the law says. How much liberty do you have strapped to a hospital bed? How much worse is it to still feel the same way, but unable to do anything about it, and even if it is just that final step?

A couple of years ago, when work stress brought me to the brink of a breakdown, I went to see my GP for help. I tried to describe to her what I felt, but I had phrased it badly; instead of saying that I have powerful intrusive thoughts of wanting to kill myself, thoughts that felt like entities that were covering my “true” mind like a blanket, suffocating, arresting, but still controllable and separate from me, I called them “voices”. I didn’t mean audible hallucinations, but boy, did my doc perk up. “You hear voices?” she asked, worried, and I quickly corrected that. Bless her, she was lovely and supportive, but in the end, she is a doctor with duties. And she told me that if she thought I was a danger to myself, she’d have to report it. I still feel a hot surge of adrenaline, of true terror, just remembering this.

So I ditched the idea of getting myself sectioned pretty quickly.

Instead,  I made plans to end it. I tried to figure out where the best spot would be to hang myself effectively from without suffocating slowly. When you’re in a particularly deep pocket of depression, you almost think about suicide methods as a sort of reward – which one would “feel” best, if that makes sense. I don’t know where it comes from, whether it stems from self-loathing, and wanting to inflict pain upon oneself. It’s not that I would want the most painful one. It’s not “want”, like you’d choose a peach off a supermarket shelf. It’s an urge. An ache. I ached for the most...forceful, final one. The one you would do the same way you’d angrily kick a wall, to tell whoever to fuck off. As if death itself isn’t forceful and final enough, the method needs to release the anger, too. Or be an extra kick in the face of the person you hate so much - you. So it’s always been hanging or guns to me (availability not considered). But then you need to balance it against which one would leave the smallest “aftermath”.

I wondered, after reading books about crime scene cleaning, what would be the cleanest and most effective way, least troublesome for T. to  clean up, or whether I should do it in the house or go off somewhere else. You know, if you sit in the bath and slit your wrists, it all sort of just drains away. Easy. I’d have to pack up my shit first, though.

And then I thought about how T. would have to tell my Dad. And how he would have to find a German speaker to write that email for him, or make that phone call.

And this is where it normally stops, my not wanting to put Dad through it. But this time I was cold, and I wanted to be scared about that, but the only thing that scared me was that I wasn't. Is that a sentence? Does that make sense?

And I would feel bad now, but I am still not in my right mind to truly regret it.

Last night I just wanted the slightest sign that somehow I was still loved enough to stick around. I know that sounds pathetic and like a massive pity party. But the thing with depression is that, once in its grip, you cannot feel or absorb love. You cannot imagine why anyone would love you; even if they do, it’s not real to you. Other people almost become an illusion. It’s not meant to demean them, it’s just how it is. And yet you need them to kick you awake, to become louder and more real than that hurricane of gloom in your head. When you’re overcome by that dark wave, your knowledge, your memories, your emotional assertiveness have as much weight and substance as spiderwebs. It takes NOTHING to shred them. This is why people keep crying for help even though they “should know better”, even though they have been reassured a million times before.

Which is why I feel so bad when I finally come out of it and see what I did to others. When they grow back into solid beings, and I see myself as a fool to not have taken or appreciated their affection, or ever even doubted it.

When the wave hits, my first instinct is to go on social media and cry for help. Because my friends are there. The problem is, everyone else is, too. And something like this will inevitably come across as attention-seeking. And then I am disgusted with myself for even thinking of going there. 

Of course you may argue, I could just call a friend. And I know many have offered. But again, as soon as I do that, isolate one particular person, I am giving them a burden they may not want, or it might be a bad time for it, but it’s not exactly something they can or would want to ignore. It’s like I am obliging them... and I am terrified they will resent me for it. Or become distant. Or leave. But I hate being like that. I HATE being needy. I know how it drives people away, frustrates, annoys, and it’s that hate that fuels the depression and self-loathing even more.

Putting it on here feels like I’m putting it out there without “recruiting” someone to help me. It’s all on a voluntary basis. People can pretend they have never seen it. And that's ok. And even if they've seen it, they can stay anonymous. I don't want anyone to feel obliged to help or love me. I'd rather have nothing; it would be an insult.

Then there is the other problem of “crying wolf”.

Now here’s another home truth about depression. No matter how often you cry out, and feel better the next morning, it is never is “crying wolf”. Depression isn’t a solid state of existence, it comes in waves. And coming out of each wave without having drowned is just another time you have survived. And just because it passes doesn’t mean it feels less acute the next time around. And each time it happens, it feels all over again like it will never end. It does because it feels like you have seen things as they really are. And no matter whether you manage to get a grip on the despair, that reality won’t change, so it makes no difference. What creates the agony is not the emotion itself, it’s that you’re convinced you see unalterable reality, something outside yourself you can’t change, no matter how you feel about it. Depression ceases to be a feeling, rather, it becomes a reality. I may feel better the next day, but I know that’s just because I managed to delude myself. And when I'm truly better, I forget that I delude myself. Which is nice. I don't mind that.

Yes, I may come out the other end. And whether I delude myself into happiness or non-depressiveness, I’d rather have the illusion of happiness, and I hang on to it as long as I can. But every time I come out the other end ALONE, the less I will be armed the next time around.

Another thing with depression is that, even though you might become more and more familiar with its pattern and should theoretically be “armed and ready”,  it wears down your resistance at the same rate. It’s like rust that weakens your mental structure and stability.

There is something about crying out when you’re in the deepest pit. The closest I can come to that is that film, The Ring, when they think they have broken the curse, only to realise that it will continue. Because all that girl wants is to be heard. She doesn’t want to inflict pain. She just wants to be understood. She wants to be FULLY understood. Because in utter joy and utter agony, you’re totally alone, and it’s that what’s so terrifying about it.

 And writing this, I come to a realisation. That’s what I wanted. That’s why I write this. That’s why I cry out even though I know it is pointless, I can never communicate what’s going on inside me fully, until someone understands how I feel, but again, that’s exactly what I DON'T want.

When I’m down in the hole, I just want to be taken seriously. I am not a drama queen, or an attention seeker, or a wuss, or having a self-pity party. I don’t CHOOSE to go down there. I don’t LIKE being this way. I’m in genuine pain that I cannot relieve myself.

Maybe this urge is just an echo of the time when I was told over and over again to just pull myself together, when being upset or distressed in the face of violence and abuse I was told to not be a drama queen. When being crippled with depression, I was just considered a Zicke. When being terrified of going back to school because of the amount of bullying I got from students and teachers, I was just told to not make a big deal of it. Like it was my fault to be upset. It’s my default reaction now, to worry that I will be brushed off and not considered worth the time and help. Intellectually I know I am... but the rest of me doesn't.

Of course I want to stop reacting this way. But I don’t know how. It's like trying to stop your hand from flinching from a hot surface.

I can only ask, forgive me for sometimes being needy or difficult.
Yet it makes me angry because I shouldn't have to apologise for that.

I have no final sentence, or clean paragraph, to tie the loose ends of this post. I'm just throwing it out there. Dealing with depression is an open-ended battle, with no answers, with eternal repetition of the same shit, that it seems futile for all involved. Anyone know any answers, I'm all ears.

Review: Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes

Oh the joy when I heard this gem had finally been translated into English! A bestselling phenomenon in mein Fazerland since its publication in 2012, it had tickled my curiosity since I first heard about it, and  delighted me when it was gifted to me by the ‘rents last Christmas.

Look Who's Back is a novel about Adolf Hitler waking up in a 2011 Berlin car park, rescued by a newsagent who thinks him a hilarious and scarily convincing impersonator and promptly introduces him to some media fellers who in turn jump on the chance to line their pockets and boost the ratings by giving him some air time. 

The bewildered Fuehrer, meanwhile, has to adjust to modern society, its gadgets, people, multiculturalism and social media addiction,  and slowly planning, naively, clumsily, but with chilly calculation, his return to power, thus delivering a commentary on modern Germany that is equally frightening and hysterical. Let’s just say, when I read the German original, it was like hearing Adolf speak. I dunno if Vermes studied the speech patterns of Hitler before he started writing, but he did a wonderful job rendering his persona in his book. And the translation, although it inevitably lost the classic Berlin dialect spoken by some of the characters, managed to get incredibly close to the original.

It’s obviously funny seeing Hitler in his 1940s mindset interact with the contemporary age, similar to seeing Socrates and Billy the Kid stumble their way through 1980s mall strip California in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, but at the same time it scathingly satirises an increasingly dumbed-down, historically uninformed or indifferent multi-media generation that is too distracted by Reality TV, sensationalist headlines and Facebook Likes to see the danger the “born again” Fuehrer really poses.

Needless to say, there is a debate whether it is acceptable to make Hitler a subject of comedy. But it’s been done before countless times, with “The Producers”, with “The Dictator”, some more gratuitous, some with enough satire in it to render it more “acceptable”. If anything, “new” about it is only that the Germans are increasingly seen to have a sense of humour about their own history. Not in a belittling or insensitive manner, mind. Hitler and the Holocaust continue to remain a serious subject over there, deeply embedded in the German mentality and Constitution. But the – in my book – ridiculous and unhelpful self-flagellation by people who were barely the glint in daddy’s eye in 1945, undermining any approach of the subject in a grown-up way, is finally starting to cease; Hitler as a subject of comedy becoming less and less restricted to the terrain of risqué Stewart Lee-type German comedians, and is particularly well-balanced in this novel.

Comedy will always remain in the grey areas of acceptability, and perhaps that’s exactly what keeps us on our toes and debating; to speak the truth like a jester, in joke form to escape medieval beheadings or modern censorship. Take from this book what you will. I for one both enjoyed  and pondered it. Thoroughly. 

Preaching to Self

Please include attribution to http://mindvalleyacademy.com with this graphic.

Review: Douglas Coupland's "Worst.Person.Ever"

I really really cannot decide whether I like this book or not. First I heard about it when John Niven put a foul quote of it on Twitter, and I was excited! Niven’s made me love the puerile hilarious antihero. It was just a bit odd coming from Coupland... the thoughtful, deep, “what’s it all mean and why are we here” author I had ranked up there with Hermann Hesse, the man who’s induced epiphanies in me with Generation X, Life after God and Girlfriend in a Coma.

It didn’t help that I read this right after Niven’s Straight White Male, and it felt like Coupland had looked over his shoulder and decided he wanted to write something like that himself ("I can do funny! Look! Look!") and just did not manage to be as funny as that. But Coupland’s my hero, so I put it down, read a few different books to cleanse my literary palate off the Niven taste and then gave it another shot.

And yes, I enjoyed it quite a bit more. It’s much more along the lines of JPod and All Families are Psychotic, just a lot more foulmouthed, (perhaps a bit too) full of creatively disgusting phrases which would be funnier if the book hadn’t been drenched in it – it just felt a wee bit like Coupland, like a dorky school boy trying to fit in with the bad guys, tried too hard. The bit that really annoyed me the most was the first chapter: the love-hate banter/battle of the words between the protagonist and his vile ex-wife is just a bit too full of pretentious witticisms, though that might just be characterisation and satire of the TV industry. Once I moved past that, the book, with some concessions, was actually quite enjoyable. 

Mind, I never warmed to Raymond Gunt (though that name – genius?) in the way I love-hated Stelfox in Niven’s Kill your Friends. Making an antihero likeable despite his awfulness is a hard trick to pull off. But Gunt wasn’t even that terrible, despite his raging racism, sexism, homophobia and gleeful dislike and disrespect of everyone but him. He was just a bit of a d**k who had it coming to him, a cringey wannabe, failing at everything to the delight of the reader (cold pity is not sympathy!) while Neal, a homeless guy he enslaves as his personal assistant, is the one bagging the first class flights/ladies/food/champagne chats with Cameron Diaz. Love Neal! Neal is a legend, and the true hero of the story, a loyal, happy-go-lucky friend Gunt really doesn’t deserve.

So they take a trip to a remote island to do camera work for a reality TV show, and it all becomes a massive trip into Absurdistan. If you enjoy insane absurdity, like them accidentally starting nuclear war and Gunt escaping homeland security by means of a macadamia nut, and you’re willing to look past a few irritations, then you will quite love this. I know it’s meant to be satire, but it’s all a bit too grotesque to work that way... rather just enjoy it for its plain insanity. It’s not subtle, it’s downright juvenile in places, but it holds quite a few laughs. I looked up by the end of it and thought “WTF did I just read?”, but not without a crooked grin.

If this is your first Coupland  – please don’t give up on him. Read his older stuff to get a real feel for him, because this is by far not representative of what he is capable of.

Review: Adam Nevill's House of Small Shadows

There are some books you read because you’re intrigued what happens next. Books you might only read once, and which you give up on reading when a cruel, party-pooping soul gives away the ending.

And then there are books you read because they are like a gorgeous meal. Just because you enjoyed them once doesn’t mean you’ll never eat them again. No, you’re coming back to it like a shark that smelled blood. You enjoy the beauty of the language, you love the characters, you want to relive the atmosphere and setting, the story.

Well, in the horror genre wanting to relive things might be a bit strange... but then, there is a wee bit of a masochist in anyone who enjoys a good creepy tale. I dunno why I do it to myself, because Adam Nevill – like Stephen King put it once – doesn’t just press your creep-out buttons, he hits them with a hammer. And he does so gleefully in his new book, House of Small Shadows.

The story already begins with an uneasy sense of foreboding...the odd isolated setting and description of the introductory scene feel like they might well be happening in an unsettled dream of the protagonist – a young woman, herself with a somewhat spooky mysterious past, is fragile and susceptible to strong emotions from the start. And the twinge of dread hinted at in the beginning will build and build into full-blown terror.

The descriptions are lyrical, beautiful, but in their vividness manage to trap the mind and draw them into a world it will struggle to free itself from, and, absurdly perhaps, will crave more of. The horror characters, marvellously larger than life, without ever slipping into clichés.

I won’t give away any of the story; I won’t deprive you of the deliciousness of discovering it yourself. But be warned.

This is a book written for those of us who are still afraid of the dark and the nameless living shadows it holds, who are gripped by the visceral and unexplained, who are haunted by images we can’t explain why they disturb us... they do it on a level that will make us small children again, with no words to explain the fear. It’s a book for those who love folklore, the nostalgia of beautifully made things from over a century ago, and who cannot help even loving the barely perceptible taste of rottenness of it once properly savoured. As you would admire a beautiful old doll, but at the same time never infest your house with its creepy porcelain features.

House of Small Shadows is a truly gothic tale, containing all the wonderful elements that recently have been revived in  good horror features.  Haunted, mysterious mansions. Antique dolls. Taxidermy. Abandoned villages with hints of the Wickerman-esque. A mad Miss Havisham type woman, a truly terrifying hag, who seems as much conjurer and victim of the scare fest going on in the house. A mentally unstable young woman thrown into this maelstrom. Flashes of children – are they ghosts, flashbacks, hallucinations? We cannot know. It is a spiralling nightmare of ever-increasing Victorian grotesque, stirring a progressively unstable reality and the haunting dreams and flashbacks of protagonist Catherine into a terrifying concoction able to push her, and with her, the reader, over the edge.

Nevill might not have done himself a favour by writing about creepy dolls – a lot of people flinch away from that subject like from a fat, hairy spider. But I knows youse got guts! And I, for once, squealed with joy. Creepy dolls are just PERFECT!

Needless to say, on plenty an evening home alone, in my creaky attic room, I was on the verge of regretting it, having to put the book aside in shock, for a quick breather and an expletive bursting from my lips like a corrupted spring bud, then sobbing to myself “why am I doing this?”.

I tell you why. Because Adam Nevill is literary crack. He knows how to get you, and he knows how to keep you. While you’re being watched by a thousand glassy eyes.

And you’ll come out a stronger person for it. Trust me. >;D

And Cracked it is - Review

Cracked. That’s the only possible way I can describe this book. Oh it made me angry. Livid. And I could only dream about ever being able to write as good and fitting a review as Andrew Solomon did in his essay “Smug about Suffering”, which I really recommend – beg, beseech, implore –  you to google and absorb. But I’ve got enough fury in me to add my own nickel of doom. I can only offer a few points because I could happily turn this into a dissertation, but I shall spare you.

The good bit, short and sweet: Yes, it was very readable, and as far as I can see, it has had great reviews (though I cannot possibly fathom why). And I am the first to agree that there might be occasions when people get overmedicated unnecessarily, and that it is a golden goose for the pharmacy industry. But something being profitable doesn’t necessarily equal sinister intentions.

The bad bits (and I hope you’ve got a few minutes, because there are lots): This has got to be one of the most one-sided, self-aggrandising, misinformed and irresponsibly polemic books recently written on the subject.

Another reviewer pointed out that a book written against the use of psychopharmaca and advocating an increased use of psychotherapy comes, I guess, at no big surprise from a psychotherapist. Talk about the sweet irony of applying Davies’ conspiracy theory of the pharmacy industry back onto himself. It works both ways, Mr Davies.

The one thing I agree with Davies on is that medication on its own often only masks the problem, and does not cure it – but no one has ever claimed it does. Though funny enough, that’s exactly the absurd accusation Davies hurls at psychiatry at various points in the book. Psychiatry is still in its baby shoes, the brain and mental illnesses largely not understood, but that does not mean we shouldn’t use the little knowledge we have to help ease mental suffering.

Demonising and attempting to discredit something which has saved the lives of so many of us in favour of something most of us only have limited to no access to is downright sinister.

Fact is, the therapy a lot of us need, CBT or whatever other kind Davies (rightly) makes his case for, we cannot access at all, because most of us cannot pay the outrageous fees in the private sector, or we have to join huge queues on waiting lists that often last a year or longer – and some of us haven’t got the strength to wait that long. The six free NHS sessions we are entitled to are done by counsellors, not trained psychotherapists, and due to government cuts, there are less and less mental health centres around, with staff in there hopelessly overwhelmed and under-trained.

The practical truth of the matter is, most of us have to do with pills. I should know. I’ve been on medication for nearly a decade, and several attempts to come off them failed. (Not because there was a problem with addiction, as Davies is quick to claim - it was simply that my old condition resurfaced and regained the upper hand.) Maybe if Davies is willing to come off his smug high horse and open a NHS mental health facility that provides care to those of us who cannot afford the insane fees he probably charges, he can talk again. But he probably won’t, and that makes him just another cafe activist.

In Davies’ view, psychiatry has become so reliant on and biased towards drugs that it perpetuates a treatment model in which therapy has been moved onto the back burner and people instead are stuffed with pills as a cop-out solution. Part of me wants to agree with that, but then he fires off the most outrageous claims and solutions. He quotes psychiatrist Duncan Double’s suggestion that “the only thing that is going to change things is if people literally stop going”. What does that mean? People stop taking meds out of protest?? The grassroots movement Davies dreams of would result in mass deaths, most likely by suicide. Baby and bathwater springs to mind.

Davies makes it appear that all antidepressants have terrible side effects and work not much better than a respective placebo. That is pretty much saying that mental illnesses treated with medication can just be “thought” away at random, again implying the old stigmatising thought that we need to “just get over ourselves”. Which is a terrible thought coming from a psychotherapist, and a Social Darwinist one to boot.

There might be truth in these side effects and not knowing whether meds will work. Well, sadly, in case of mental illness, you don’t get to choose the perfect option – because it doesn’t exist. Fighting mental illness is often choosing the lesser of the evils, weighing the drawbacks and benefits of both medications and the actual illness. For me, a few weeks of nausea and dizziness was but a small price to pay if it meant ending the agonies of permanent terror and black clouds of despair, numbness and emptiness. Finding the right medication, and the right dose, is often a matter of experimenting. I had side effects, but they went away once I got used to the meds. I have tried meds that didn’t work for me, and switched to others that do. Mind, I accept that some aren’t as lucky as I. But the pros and cons of medication is not something you can apply as a blanket statement over the whole of psychiatry. It’s down to working with individuals.

Then there is Davies' outrageous claim about psychoactive drugs altering personalities. If you want to read the other side, read Kramer’s Listening to Prozac. And then let’s delve into personality theory and what constitutes that concept. Frankly, in my view it’s b****t. Most people I know who are on psychoactive drugs feel like they’re back to their old selves, they’ve got their life back, their own persona managed to get the upper hand over the vines of mental illness that choked it. Including yours truly.

Only once did I have a friend who told me she didn’t like the change in me. “I was not who I was before”, she complained (though she had only ever known me as depressed), making the assumption that that ill person was me, thus equating my illness with my personality. The thought that a friend of mine wished me to suffer so she didn’t have to deal with a (positive!) change in me was too much – and needless to say, I have safely removed that so-called friend from my life.

At times Davies goes as far as dismissing the agony some people suffer as nonexistent in terms of illness or dysfunction, arguing that life contains suffering and it is important to deal with it, claiming medication stops us from doing just that. This goosestepping kind of cruelty makes me sick. Yes, there is suffering, and yes, we need to deal with it. But there is the type of suffering everyone experiences due to circumstances, and then there is the pointless pain in mental illness, which does not need an external cause, or takes a minimal external cause and blows it out of proportion.

Another of Davies’ crazy arguments is that religion used to act as a tool to cope with life, and its increasing disappearance is partly responsible for the increase in mental illness. Well, I used to live and work in a religious community – and I have seen just as many cases of people suffering from mental illness in that sector as I have in the secular one. The only difference was that often their anxieties and despair took on a religious flavour, if not got exacerbated by it. Take OCD and depression and add to that the literal fear of hell and damnation, plus perhaps a delightful community that blames your mental illness on your lack of faith and perhaps on demon possession, and you’re in for a fun ride. I was just lucky enough to have a pastor who could see the difference between spiritual and mental health problems and advised me to seek medical help.

But it’s not just Davies’ ridiculous arguments that drive me up the wall. It’s also how he deals with his opposition. A fine (and much infuriating) example of how he tries to discredit them is seen in his interview with Professor Sue Bailey, president of the Royal College of Psychiatry, who talks sense, compassion and common sense, who sees it as her first duty to help suffering patients and not engage in the one-sided intellectual masturbation Davies seems to be so fond of. He describes her as some sort of ball-breaking harpy, as “impatient” and “irritable”, while he depicts himself as “gently pointing things out”, a humbly “mumbling”, “ear-rubbing” nervous grassroots fella taking deep breaths to not be run over by her. Oh poor martyr. He claims to struggle to understand what she is saying, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together can make sense of  “we should focus on the reality of what we can do as doctors, rather than having erudite discussions about the various situations of what DSM should have done.” Davies doesn’t seem to comprehend that this type of Michael Moore-ish writing only serves to discredit himself.

I could go on and on, but I shall stop here. Suffice to say, yes there are people for whom psychoactive drugs have done more harm than good. They have come off them and chose not to go there again. But that’s fine. Each person is different, and each person needs to make their own choice about it. But dismissing the entire thing is dangerous, cruel and downright murderous – to quote Andrew Solomon’s critique of this book, “Davies’s book will likely influence at least a few people away from treatment that could save them. Some of these people may commit suicide and others will live in dire pain. His arrogant, ill-informed attempt to discredit psychiatry leaves him with blood on his hands.”

If you want a really well-rounded, good book to read on depression, anxiety and mental health in general, read Solomon’s “NoondayDemon”. Now that man knows what he is talking about!

Meanwhile, Davies should give up his profession and try his hand at something he is really good at – the fearmongering, mass-duping, misinforming mutant of pseudo-journalism they serve at The Daily Mail.

Nocturnal insanity

July 30th, 2004

The little girl was dead, but it was no one’s fault. But who would believe us?
We shoved her in the closet, just in time, because Jim and the others were coming up.
But we hadn’t been thorough enough.
Jim walked in and saw the little hand sticking out from under the blanket.
“Is that a little girl?” he shouted, terrified.
“No!”, we replied and tried to make him leave the room. “It’s a wax figure!”
Eventually we managed to get him out… and then stared at each other, out of breath.
“What are we gonna do?” said one boy. “They’re gonna find us out!”
“We have to get rid of the body!”, I said.
“But where?”, he said. “They’re gonna find her, and then it will look like murder because we tried to get rid of her.”
“Yeah, who is gonna believe us that she died by accident”, I replied sarcastically.
I looked around the room and then looked into the closet. The trapdoor was only halfway covered, by clothes and toys.
“That’s it!”, I said.
“They’re gonna find her!”
“Not if they are not looking for her. Here.”, I said. “Help me!”
The girl had been in our closet for days. Her cold skin was damp and felt like jelly. I dared not uncover her body… the smell would be unbearable.
The boy opened the trapdoor. The blackness in there, the catacombs, the canalisation, the pit was impenetrable. It was old and had not been in use for decades. I would have been surprised if anyone knew it existed.
“You sure?”, he asked.
“Why would anyone go in there?”
The boy stayed silent and without a further word helped me shove the body across the rim.
The corpse of the little girl plunged into darkness. Far down we heard it hitting the floor like a sack. The boy turned away, his face looking green.
The other kid came closer and peered into the black hole. “I can’t see her!”
“Good!”, I said. “Don’t lean over too far!”
The kid stretched its neck, and that’s when it lost its toy fish Nemo. I would have laughed at the pun, if the consequences hadn’t been so harsh. The kid would scream and cry and get all kinds of people up here, pointing them to the hiding place. When it comes to losing toys, kids lose all sense of caution. They don’t give a shit if we go to jail for life, as long as they get fuckin Nemo back.
And hadn’t I predicted it, the kid’s lips began to quiver dangerously. “Nemo!”, it whined.
“It’s ok”, I said. Then I turned to the others. “One of us has to go get him.”
“I am not going down there!”, said big sister.
Tommy looked away, his face white, avoiding eye contact.
The kid looked from one to the other, in anxious anticipation. Its whimpering turned into genuine tears. If we didn’t do something soon, it would be screaming its lungs out.
Before I could say anything else, the boy stepped forward. “I’ll go in.”
None of us protested. He was doing all of us a favour.
The boy slid across the rim and lowered himself down there, until he reached the ladder. We stepped forward and watched him lower himself into the darkness, step by clanging step. He didn’t look very good.
Eventually he was gone, and we heard him rustle in the depths.
We could smell the girl from up here. Down there, the stench must have been unbearable.
We heard the boy retch and cry “Oh my god…”, then a sound of him throwing up. Then, exhausted: “I got him!”
The kid’s eyes beamed with joy.
“You better appreciate that damn fish!”, I said. “He literally went to hell to get it!”
The kid nodded obediently.
We heard the boy climb back up, and eventually his head appeared through the trap door. His hair was covered in dirt. As he climbed out, we saw stuff sticking to his shirt and pants… and he smelled of her. He smelled of decay.
He handed the fish to the kid without a word. The kid hugged Nemo in exulted happiness.
There was nothing to be said. The boy’s face was grey. He never spoke again. He walked past us and whatever bond had existed between us, it was gone from that day.
We closed the trap door, and began to cover the closet door. The kid carefully placed a blanket over it.
“Not like that!”, I said. “That looks like you’re trying to hide something. Throw stuff in casually, like that!” I chucked some clothes and toys in, which fell randomly about, covering the trapdoor. The kid joined me.
When we were done, I went to sit in a corner, and that is when I faced myself. I had methodically and cynically removed the body of an innocent child to save my own ass. I was terrified, in shock… but mostly about myself.
I wanted to wake up.

Review: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming

You can called it lucky or cursed – I have always had really intense dreams. Dreams so vivid they often form half of my reality, their experience so strong they would affect me in my waking life. There is the old joke about a girl waking up and punching her clueless boyfriend because he cheated on her in her dream. Yeah. Not that I have ever done that, but that intense.

 I’ve had dreams that haunted me for days after waking up, and dreams making me feel unspeakably happy, more than anything ever had in “real life”.

I had serial dreams about a stalking monster as a toddler, and about the Faceless ones, and about that woman that looked like my mother from behind but was a cruel, deformed creature once she turned around to respond to my calls. Freud, Jung, and any dream analyst on this planet would have a field day using me as a guinea pig. Archetypes, classic and more postmodern symbolism, it’s all there.

There was a brief time in my life so traumatic that I didn’t seem to dream at all. And although I know it was just my mind trying to protect me from things I couldn’t handle, it was an incredibly grey and empty time, too, like a part of me had been amputated. It had, in fact – when dreams comprise a large part of your experience for all of your life, suddenly not dreaming feels like you’ve been lobotomised. Then I went on Prozac, and it was like adding fuel to a nearly extinguished fire... it flared up, the dreams returning, even more powerful.

When your life is dominated by dreams, you inevitably search to make sense of them, like you would of any experience. To your brain, it doesn’t matter whether you’re asleep or not: whatever you experience has the same value to your emotional makeup. What you’ve felt is what you’ve felt, no matter when and how. Reality becomes relative in emotion, maybe that is why people often don’t dream or can’t remember their dreams after a traumatic event. And why PTSD is so sinister and self-perpetuating, because the flashbacks and nightmares distress you the same way over and over again.

 So inevitably, you try to get a sense of control over dreams. Especially when your dreams are so horrific that you just want to wake up. Or when they’re so beautiful you don't want them to stop. It might be a fool’s business, attempting that, to some at least. But I had heard of lucid dreaming before, and I might have had a couple of experiences before, which were wonderful, but they were erratic. I needed some guidance.

A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming turned out to be a gem.

Just at the first browse, it is simply beautiful. Wonderfully designed and filled with gorgeous illustrations, it is an inspiring feast for the imagination. But it’s not just eye candy.

It takes you back to the very basics, exploring the history of dreams and lucid dreaming, and how dreams played a huge role in many previous and continuing cultures, essentially showing that the Western view of dismissing them as brain gibberish is a minority, reflecting an impoverished mind... something I have long agreed with. It wipes the plate clean to enable you to start exploring your dreams with a fresh, open mind, teaching you the basics of remembering them, remembering them for longer, outwitting that twilight zone after waking in which a dream often becomes frazzled and diffused, and drifts into forgetfulness within minutes.

It explains the structure of REM sleep to help you ‘find’ the moment in which lucid dreaming is most likely, teaching you mind techniques to help you trigger a lucid dream, delivers tips on how to keep a dream journal, what to make of your dreams and how to develop a conscious relationship with them, of a heightened sensitivity that will ultimately help you reach awareness within your dream, as well as the increasing ability to direct your dreams.

I have yet to have a lucid dream. But I have only started practising, and it takes time to train your mind and awareness to the point that you will have a lucid dream. What I have noticed, however, that since employing the techniques offered in the book, the more elusive dreams have become clearer and easier to remember, more cohesive no matter how random they are. And they have started making more sense, in terms of what they tell me about my state of mind. I’ve started to write them down, and it’s wonderful – tales of an exploration of another, parallel world in which the senseless makes sense. That alone totally makes this book worthwhile.

Review: "Lost and"

“Lost and”  by Jeff Griffin at first wasn't what I expected at all. I was awaiting some sort of desert/urban decay photography book, images to drool over while I wished myself away there. Instead, what I opened was one of the most unusual photo projects I have ever seen. It reminded me a bit of Courtney Love’s “Dirty Blonde” or the Kurt Cobain journals, except here you had no celebrity. It reminded me of my own old shoebox in which I kept random scribbles, notes secretly exchanged in class with a friend, poetry written badly but from the heart, silly snapshots, old diaries with now cringeworthy entries but written honestly and heartfelt at the time. There was also a hint of similarity to the Postsecret project, but it felt - because it is - raw, because it was not produced with a passive, independent audience in mind.

One thing that struck my eye about it was that Griffin did what I'd love to do but cannot due to geographical distance: disappearing in the Mojave desert for quiet reflection. God I long for the truly silenced and left-alone!  No way of finding that in overpopulated Europe!

And then he - damn him!, shouts the green-eyed monster - combined it with another of my beloved pastimes: exploring abandoned, decaying settlements, delving into the back story of each place, picking up artifacts, wondering about the lives of their previous owners who seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth - leaving each place haunted, imprinted by it.

Too much have the rich and famous, the educated, the expensively and extensively trained shaped what we see as culture, ignoring the narratives produced by the average Joe with clumsy but genuine hands, in unglamorous places. But here are the lost and abandoned photographs, snippets of letters, memos, notes, drawings, even poems, by normal people, as the artist found them: dirty, torn, lost in various abandoned places in the Nevada and California desert. They show the mundane, naive, unpolished, which makes them all the more enchanting, making you wonder about the back stories of each item - somehow little shreds and snippets, and random little photographs say more about a person and their life than a carefully written diary or an artfully curated photo book. They weren't meant to be seen by the world and thus are more honest and real artifacts of culture than what we’re usually being presented.Skill is not necessarily an indicator of art, at least not to me; art derives from the genuinely felt and expressed, reflecting a slice of someone’s unique reality or imagination - which is a reality in itself. An original and wonderful book! 

Review: Straight White Male - John Niven

I’ve been making ridiculous teenage fan girl squeal jumps when I heard that a new Niven was out soon. In my book, ‘Kill your Friends’ had outwitted Ellis’ ‘American Psycho’ by miles, and ‘The Second Coming’ was equally so hilarious and profound I’d happily replace bibles with it in hotel drawers. I had given them as gifts to quite a few friends who also couldn’t stop raving about them.

‘Straight White Male’ did not disappoint. Niven did again what he does best, and then some!

It’s an incredible piece of satire, this time about the Hollywood film industry, with a protagonist easily as vile as ‘Kill your Friends’’ Stelfox, packed with scenes so bizarre, grotesque and yet so bed-wettingly funny I spent the first half of it cackling madly on my attic sofa like a modern Bertha Mason. The poetry-reading scene? Jesus Christ, no more. No more! (One was also incredibly satisfied by Niven’s dig at the mentality at English universities, where a sense of intellectual snobbery on one side is permanently at war with a cut-throat business sense on the other, sacrificing the priority of education.)

But it moves on from there, because Kennedy Marr isn’t just a puppet there for your amusement. Niven created a full-on flesh-and-blood, multilayered, breathing and growing character with depth to his soul that he himself needs to uncover in equally funny and agonising steps, sucked in by his contempt and debauchery, only to find himself struggling to dig his way out of the mire of consequences and heartbreak. Marr is as much the study of a sociopath as he is a modern-day Scrooge or a contemporary George Bailey from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. But fear not: It never becomes soppy.

‘Straight White Male’ is a novel that has ripped right through me. I cannot wait for its release so I can pelt the public with it.

Time

A friend of mine has something that can almost be described as a clock phobia. He can't stand ticking clocks. I personally find them calming, reminding me of my grandmother's house and the first time I saw a cuckoo clock - a magical novelty for someone used to 1970s DDR design. A 5-year-old me sat in my brother's friend's house, determined to wait until that little bird would come out of that loudly ticking clock again - until my brother told me that would be an hour, and an hour in a 5-year-old's life is a hell of a long time.
My friend, however, just dreads this audible reminder of time ticking away. And nowadays I don't even need a cuckoo clock, or any clock for that matter, to rub my face in that.
What happened to the summers that seemed to last for years?
What happened to the time when the wait for Christmas seemed like an agonising eternity instead of the mad rush it is today?
How come I seem to waste my entire day on trivial unimportant matters instead of doing what I really want to do, and how come my to do list never gets shorter?
I was 25 just recently, now I'm 34, and it spooks me, because I don't know how I got here, my body and life raced away with me while I am still stuck in a mental teenage limbo. It's unsettling to feel your life running out and your body disintegrating around you when you feel you should still be reading your school books. Maybe that is why women (and men) lie about their age. It's not vanity. It's self-denial. It's being unwilling to submit to the pressures and expectations that comes with increasing age, when they have barely caught up with their early 20s yet.

Apparently it's because a day in relation to the life you have lived already is much longer when you've only lived four years, but much shorter when you've lived 30.
For me, it's also the sense of time running out. That may sound crazy, but the past ten years have gone by so fast it makes my head spin. And I have been warned, it's only gonna go faster.
So I am anticipating that whatever time is ahead of me, as much (or as little) as it may be, will pass in a heart beat.
The thing is, we never know how much time we've got left. I've had that reminder a few times, and it made me quite paranoid. I've lived fairly unsettled for some time now, and many friends I've had from all the different places have come and gone - something which has never got easier for me. I've been told it's natural and I should accept it, but I can't - it hurts too much. You could say, I'm almost always in a panic to spend as much quality time with everyone as I can, because I never know how long it will last, how long I will be able to be around them, and whether I will lose them to distance, forgetfulness, or worse.
I will never have as much felt time again as I had when I was 20. Then you think you have an eternity ahead of you, and it leaves you relaxed enough to be able to focus - nowadays I just seem to run at top speed just to keep up, and never quite managing to, trying to get everything done at once, my concentration frayed into a blur.

How can you trick your brain out of this? Maybe it's to really make yourself believe you are 2o, to reach that feeling of eternity ahead of you.

Simon: "I had a dream about nuclear apocalypse. It was animated!"

Me: "You haven't even seen Barefoot Gen yet."

Simon: "I know!"

Me: "My work here is done!"

Simon: "I was all running around in those burnt circles where the bomb had dropped."

Me: "There'd be more than just a burnt circle. Or less. Depends on how you look at it."

Simon: "And it was all grey."

Me: "Like an East German tower block."

Simon: "Or a Kraftwerk album."

I get up and make us coffee. In the background I hear Noel Coward starting to sing "Don't let's be beastly to the Germans" from Simon's laptop. 

Typical morning at the Jays then.