812 Days

It’s hard to believe that this blog was my daily output, my safe space, my place where I would go constantly to release my inner thoughts and share them with the world. It’s hard to believe all of that when it has been 812 days since I last posted.

812 days is a long time, a day is a long time on some occasions. There’s two options I faced when logging back in, I could write down all the main points from the past two years or I could just continue as though nothing had happened and there had been no hiatus.

When I looked through my past posts it became apparent how much things changed. There were posts about TV shows that are no longer here, undefeated fighters who are now defeated, a YouTube channel that fell by the wayside and so much more. I think that’s the wonderful thing about having this page to look back on, it really opens your eyes to how much things are changing even when you don’t realise it.

Two years ago I had just gotten a new job, was single, living in my own wee flat which wasn’t the nicest place and spent much of time gaming and blogging. These days I share a beautiful seaside flat with my amazing other half (she puts up with so much nonsense I’m surprised she’s lasted this long) I’ve left that job for reasons that I cannot disclose and I spend much of my time…gaming and thinking about blogging. So most things have changed if not all.

In August of this year I’m hoping to study Media Analysis, I say hoping because I still have the interview stage to get past which is next Wednesday. I think that finally I can study something that I really want to do and hopefully progress in a career which involves writing and media and just bring together most of the things that I’m passionate about.

On a completely unrelated note, last night I went to see Penn and Teller live and it blew me away. I also met Penn so here’s a cheeky selfie

As for this here blog…

I’m back, and I don’t plan on going away anytime soon.

 

M

Growing up, Yellow, Fatigue and the Stinger….

I grew up, well sort of. I figured that it was time to get what my mother calls a “real job” and from Monday that entails me wearing a shirt and tie, something which I’m really not looking forward to.

I’m not sure what has come over me this year. I think it’s a mix of getting older and realising that there’s only so long you can live off of unstable work and also the fact that I really need more money in my life.

So from Monday, I’m a suit. While that will make my writing lifestyle take more of a backseat, it certainly won’t end it. I’m hoping that if anything it makes it slightly easier. Rather than laboriously working for hours at a time, I’ll take an hour or two here and there and it might not feel quite as intense.

On another, completely unrelated note, today I’m wearing yellow and I hope you all are too.

https://instagram.com/p/0uZifKwVqL/?taken-by=iamthevaleyard
#WearYellowForSeth

I really try and avoid social media trends and everything that goes with them, but the sickness of any child is a horrible thing  that this world dishes out. This isn’t your typical trend either, this isn’t to “raise awareness” or “raise money” or whatever else. This is simply to show support to a small child with no immune system, to put a smile on his face. So even if you have yellow socks, wear them today and join in the love on Twitter and Instagram.

If I can do it with messy hair and an uncombed beard then I’m sure you can all join in too.

If you’ve been following my other blog about my journey to a healthier life then you’ll know that I lost almost 5lbs in two weeks. I was extremely happy with myself. I don’t know how I’ll fair at next weeks weigh in because I’ve been ill for the past few days after catching a bug from my nephew. My exercise routine has been virtually non existent and my appetite pretty much disappeared aside from some chicken cooked in soy sauce and rapeseed oil and brown rice two days ago. If my result next week isn’t as good as it should be then at least I know it was down to illness and not laziness. I did try to get some exercise done but my body was so fatigued and I struggled to breath with my swollen glands and agonising sore throat.

Yesterday I had to go and get a new photo taken for my driving license. I hated it. I hate those photos, you have to just look at the camera, and not use any muscles in your face. It’s like that look that you give someone when they say something that only they find funny.

Finally, it’s WrestleMania weekend. My favourite weekend of the year, being the big geek that I am. Next year I shall be in attendance once again but this year I’m watching from the comfort of my own home. There’s nothing like WrestleMania, whether or not the card itself is good, there’s still such a hype about it that you can’t help but get excited.

Sting has his first ever WWE match this year, and for the 12 year old child in me, that is the most exciting thing ever. Needless to say I will be giddy as hell come Sunday. Whether or not I actually manage to watch the event live is another question. It starts at midnight here and ends at 4am and as I said earlier, I grew up and got a real job and that starts at 9am.

Love, camaraderie, freedom

In my lifetime I have watched hundreds of television shows, I have enjoyed a fair amount and I can count on one hand the amount of television shows that I can say that I “love”. I have never however had a television show that I have felt I can relate to, most of my favourite shows are a bit outlandish and far fetched. There is however one television show that I feel that I can relate to – ‘Sons of Anarchy’

Granted, my life wasn’t as violent or as crime filled but in my teens I made some very heinous choices which affected those around me. For years I was on a path of self destruction, convincing myself that I was on the right path. I brought a gang fight to my parents front door, I was arrested, I caused a lot of misery and truth be told, even for a lot of my adult years some of those patterns stayed in place.

‘Sons of Anarchy’ may not reflect my life as a mirror image but some of the underlying principals of some of the characters just resonate with me. I’ve lost people close to me and then used it as fuel for my anger towards others, I’ve deceived my friends and manipulated people. For a very long time I didn’t care who I hurt, friends, enemies or family. My life was a clusterfuck of bad choice after bad choice for so long that there came a point where enough was enough. I could have carried down that path and ended up in a perpetual solitude handcrafted by my own design but I made the choice to take a different route and thankfully it was the right choice.

I like to believe that I am somewhat emotionless these days. I’m sure that if you were to converse with anyone in my close circle of friends that they will tell you that I tend to never show emotion. However watching ‘Sons of Anarchy’ has reduced me to tears on a number of occasions. The show is hard hitting and it doesn’t slow down to let you recover your emotions. It’s a barrage of kicks to the gut and to me it’s something that I’ve maybe needed.

“Chasing cash we don’t need and spending every dime to stay alive”

If you haven’t watched ‘Sons of Anarchy’ then I would highly recommend it to everyone. Next week is the last ever episode but it’s never too late to jump on the wagon. The first six seasons are on Netflix and Amazon Prime to watch. It’s a show that will tear you apart and put you back together within minutes.

Over seven seasons the show has given some monumental moments. Opie’s death and Tara’s death are two which I think hit every fan just as hard. Bobby’s death was a moment that was unexpected and just left a hole. Without spoiling last nights episode for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, it was possibly one of my favourite episodes and it sends us into the finale ready for closure.

A side note for SoA is the music. Never has a show had such a perfect soundtrack, where every song choice works perfectly with what it is accompanying.

You’ll be hard pushed to find a show quite as compelling. It’ll be hard to say goodbye next week.

 

One of the hardest scenes in SoA to watch.

We made it to one year.

Happy Anniversary to me, well more specifically this blog.

A year ago when I first started this, I wasn’t too sure how it would turn out. This wasn’t my usual template for journeying into the blogsphere. I had always been a person who specialised in music blogs so taking the leap and trying something else was an interesting choice and one which could have landed right on its face. Fortunately it turned out pretty well and a lot of you are still reading, or so my stats say anyway.

I know I don’t post as much as I used to or as much as I should but in the last few months things have just became so busy that trying to find the time to sit down and put words down is hard.

Not once did I truly envision that this blog would make it to be one year old and still be getting hits. That’s a testament not to me but to the patience of you the reader, the people who have waited for the latest post and then made the effort to read it. For that I thank you.

If we make it to a second birthday then I will reward you all with cake.

The ramblings of a sober man

When we’re born into this life it’s a completely different world than the one we leave behind. Ultimately whether we realise it or not the world is changing rapidly every day. I see technology advance so quickly that it’s scary at some points, I watch beautiful pieces of land disappear under masses of concrete and glass and I see a human race who mostly don’t care.

I am by no means an environmentalist, I’m not a member of organisation that sets out to change the world. I am in fact a guy who mainly sits at home, reads comics, watches sci-fi and occasionally steps outside into the vast space that is planet earth. I don’t go all out to make a difference in the world and I don’t think any more or any less of people who do.

Over the years I’ve watched on countless occasions as wars and corporations and industrial effects have savaged lands and pushed the beauty of the landscape to the side. I often think to myself that I was born out of time, that I was never meant to be alive in this day and age and that my mentality would be better suited to the start of the last century. I look at images of streets with horses and carts, where everyone seemed genuinely happy to be there and where men, women and children would pass each other in the street and make eye contact instead of updating their Facebook with “Walking down street, saw minger picking nose, ewww lol”

Truthfully, I think the world we live in has gone to shit and that’s not a naive opinion. This is not my attempt at slating governments or corporations or the people behind technology. I can’t say anything about technology because frankly I would be a hypocrite seeing as I’m currently using a popular piece of machinery to type this very blog entry.

The financial status of the planet is enough for me to sit here and write and write and write about and I could also do the exact same for the crime rates around the globe. I could sit here and tell you that I think within a hundred years we will be run by a totalitarian government and our right to free will completely revoked. I could sit here and tell you that society today has made life virtually impossible for the people down below and that it is causing so many issues that the hierarchy of the world appear to be blind to………..I could tell you all of that but I won’t.

We’re born, we live, we die. That’s the general rule of life and whether we like to admit or not, our existence is pretty meaningless. What are we supposed to do with life? I say we’re supposed to fill it, fill it with joy and hope and love and every other emotion. Fill it with what we enjoy, what we want to do. I say we take life and ride it from start to end and make sure it’s the best journey imaginable. That’s what I say, but sometimes that’s not always possible. Frankly, this day and age make it so hard to truly enjoy it. For me I think I would be walking around in the Victorian times right now, on my way to some rendition of Sherlock Holmes with William Gillette or something along those lines.

I’m not a man of any faith, I don’t know what’s waiting for us all on the other side but I know that we’re supposed to enjoy what we have here. I’m planning on trying my damnedest to do exactly that, whether that involves indulging my mind in 16th, 17th and 18th century literature or reading the latest 2000 AD issue, whether it’s watching Charlie Chaplin classics or the latest episode of Doctor Who, whether it’s taking a stroll up the hills and mountains or the scenic route to the supermarket I think it’s important that we make the most of the life we’ve been given.

I know that this isn’t my normal type of posting but sometimes it’s good to get away from the norm, sometimes in life something will shake you to your core and bring on some sort of epiphany and that’s exactly what’s happened to me. Of all the great writers of history at my disposal, I remembered a sentence that just clicked with me, it wasn’t from Twain or Shakespeare or anyone like that, it was from a TV show.

 

“The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it”

Some reflection and closing thoughts.

After a sleep and some reflection I think I’m more downhearted than I was at 6am. As a country we made our decision, I’ll accept that but it doesn’t mean that I think it’s the right decision.

Throughout this whole process I discovered one thing, and that is that no matter what side of the fence people fell on, whatever their beliefs, everyone had a strong passion for this country.

We can sit here and say that those who voted ‘No’ don’t deserve to call themselves Scottish but that’s not true. They voted no because they felt it was the best thing for our country, the same reason that we voted yes (obviously we were right but we’ll never find out)

Whatever your emotions are today, just remember that we are all Scottish together, no matter how bitter that may sit on some peoples tongues at the moment (mine included).

We rejected independence but we don’t have to stop the fight for change. To all those who voted for the first time, keep voting. Don’t just not vote because you think it won’t make a difference, if as many people turn out to vote as did yesterday then we have a higher chance of being heard. Don’t give up on trying to change things for the better. We’re all crushed, I understand that. I sat earlier and actually thought I was going to burst into tears because this was such an emotional roller-coaster for us all.

One day the Kingdom of Scotland will live again, this just wasn’t our time. We can now either wallow in our own self pity or we can make sure that Westminster follow through on their promises, we can make sure that we make our voices heard. We can stand together, as Scotland, maybe not independent but damn fucking loud.

The anger within

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” –Mark Twain

I have turned into one of “them” and by “them” I mean an angry gamer.

If you read my blog a couple of months ago called “Goodbye old addiction, hello new addiction” then you will know the story of how video games recently came into my life.  At first it was only really Grand Theft Auto but about a month ago I took the dangerous path into the world of Call of Duty.

At first it was just the zombies side of the game, I could handle that. My sister recently got her Xbox Live Account back up and running and so we would hit up a few games each night and shoot some zombies. After a while, I ventured into the realm of the real online multi-player.  You know the one? Where adults are actually children and children try to act as though they are adults.

As the games progressed each day I found myself getting shot A LOT and dying A LOT. It’s all par for the course, I’m a novice. However, it’s only a game and so I didn’t get angry, occasionally I would question how something was possible but never angry.

I don’t do anger, not anymore. After years of anger causing me too many problems I started to channel it in other ways. With this, it was only a game and so anger shouldn’t even exist when I play it.

A few weeks passed and still I got killed a lot. The more I played, the little my skills seemed to progress. I was averaging 6 kills to every 17/18 deaths per match. If I was one of those serious gamer types then I would be an embarrassment to the gaming community. However, I play games for fun, not competition.

Today things changed. I came across what I can only describe as the grand-master of COD. Every time I turned round, he was there. Every time he was there, I was killed. He didn’t seem to want to kill anyone else, he just seemed to follow me around. Me, little old me with no prestige and a gun that isn’t even at its highest potential.

I cracked, I punched the arm of my chair, spat out some vulgarities and switched off the Xbox. I had turned, I had gone over to the dark side. For a moment I was engulfed in red mist, all caused by one game and one player.

Afterwards I sat and was more annoyed with myself for getting angry. A game is a game and it’s meant to be fun.

I shall now go and give myself a good talking to in the mirror.

 

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Ghosts of days gone by…..

Sometimes I do things without any reason and those things baffle me. For example, recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Alter Bridge, a band who, for all intents and purposes, I detested 5 years ago. Recently however I’ve been appreciating their music, now that I think about it, I’ve been changing my tastes in a lot of things recently. I suppose that part of getting older is changing your tastes and preferences. 15 years ago I was making my ears bleed and listening to the likes of Slipknot and Mudvayne, 10 years ago I had moved on to Drowning Pool and Saliva, 5 years ago I was all over Joshua Radin and City and Colour like a rash and today my playlist is about as long as an Adrien Brody Oscar speech.

The mere fact that I just used the Adrien Brody Oscar speech as a comparison to the length of something cements just how fast I’m ageing.

Recently my mortality has been playing on my mind quite a bit.  I don’t mean that in a macabre way but more in a “time has flown so quickly” way. I’m not even sure why but I’ve been sitting watching an old film or a wrestling event on the WWE Network and thinking “I was 12 when this was on” or “I was only 10 when I first saw this” then realising that such a long time has passed and yet it still all seems so fresh in my mind. Then I think that if I fast forward the same amount of time that has passed, I’ll be into my 40’s. I don’t really look forward to my 40’s and especially if it’s going to come as quickly as my late 20’s came.

Life passes far too quickly, I know that everyone says that at some point but until recently I’ve never really paid much attention to it. My daughter turned 5 a couple of weeks ago, I’m just astounded that so much time has passed. I remember sitting in the labour suite in shock and frozen to my seat overcome with emotion, it doesn’t seem like 5 years ago, it feels like 5 days ago.

I remember when I was younger, I always dreamt of the future. I always pondered over what it would be like and I couldn’t wait to get there. Now all those years that I dreamt of have passed. My 16th birthday, passed. My 18th birthday, passed. My 21st birthday, passed. My first holiday without parents, passed. My first relationship, passed (and many more have passed too). Now I don’t look to the future, I have a tendency to look to the past. I know that it’s a bad trait, I really shouldn’t. You can’t move forward if you’re stuck in the past but I think that you get to a certain age and you realise that in a couple of years you will be of the age where you start to guide the next generation. Just now I sit on the cusp of that stage of life. I’m out of the teenage years, I’m out of the early twenties madness and I’m not yet in the “must be sensible” thirties.

I suppose, and I hope I’m not the only person who feels like this, that when you get to this point in life you once again resort to the “Peter Pan” phase. Not wanting to get any older. It’s inevitable but part of you doesn’t want to keep on that ever quickening road to Mid-life.

Perhaps this is why I’ve been listening to a lot of Alter Bridge, as much as I hated them 5 years ago, they remind me of a time when I was slightly younger. I’ve also been listening to Lange quite often (yes I have very eclectic taste) and that takes me back to the summer of “Kevin and Perry Go Large”

Whatever the reason, all I know is that I’m not getting any younger and I also know that there was no real point to this blog entry. There is no special meaning or profound epiphany at the end of it. I’m not even going to go back over it to check for errors because the chances are that I’ll end up deleting the entire thing. I do have a habit of writing blogs and sitting for 30/45 minutes on them and then just deleting them. Maybe that’s why life feels like it’s passing so quickly? I spend so long wasting time and leaving empty handed…………….I change my mind, there was a profound epiphany….

One Less Gruff Billy Goat

The idea of fairy tales is one full of intrigue and mystique, almost all of us will have read a fairy tale at some point in our lives and without question every one of us knows of a fairy tale character. With the smallest amount of legerdemain the entire premise of a story can change, heroes can be either unlikely children or charming princes, villains can be witches or trolls. The possibilities within fairy tales are endless and the message is always one of hope.

The very first fairy tale that I can remember from my childhood was ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’. The premise is that three goats, discovering that where they live no longer has any grass for them to eat, set out to find new pastures so that they can become fat. However, their journey must take them across the river, where dwells a troll under a bridge. The first goat passes over the bridge but gets stopped by the troll who threatens to “gobble him up” (gobble him up is one of those lines that makes me laugh for no apparent reason) however the goat persuades the troll to wait for the second goat because he’s bigger and more of a meal so the troll lets him pass. The second goat comes along and the same thing happens as before and so then the third goat enters. I’ll stop it there, because I think that most people know how ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’ ends, if you don’t then go and Google it.

Of course all fairy tales end with the standard “happily ever after” although recently I read “Arabian Nights” which is a collection of Asian fairy tales and they end with “they all lived happily until there came to them the One Who Destroys All Happiness” which I found odd yet poetic. ‘The One Who Destroys All Happiness’ meaning Death, the Grim Reaper as he’s also known. I was slightly taken aback at first, here were some fairy tales full of hope and suddenly they were cementing the fact that nobody lives “happily ever after” because death catches up to everyone.

The very first fairy tales are attributed to Aesop who lived in Ancient Greece around 620–564 BCE (slightly before our time I imagine). The power of fairy tales is so strong and so resilient that over two thousand years later some of Aesop’s’ tales are still being told to this day. I’m sure you will have heard of at least one of them, the main one that I can think of right now is ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’. That story became so popular that two hundred years after it was written it became one of Zeno’s paradoxes (Google them, extremely interesting and thought provoking, the Arrow paradox is my personal favourite)

The Brothers Grimm famously wrote some of the most celebrated fairy tales in our history. Two German brothers, who were academics and even lexicographers, crafted some of the worlds greatest imaginary and magical characters. Although The Brothers Grimm did centralise their fairy tales on more darker hues they still resonated through the years with so many different people, even psychologist who felt the need to analyse them.

The fairy tale is an escape from reality, like most forms of entertainment. I do believe however that fairy tales give more power to the reader and open the imagination slightly more than any other form of literature and I’m saying that as an avid science-fiction fanatic. Whether it’s something written by Alexander Afanasyev or Hans Christian Andersen, fairy tales have the power to take you to a place where good almost always wins. The fairy tale is a door to the unknown world of endless possibilities where life feels good, Walt Disney realised that and that’s why he cashed in on so many popular fairy tales.

Nowadays people don’t write fairy tales, it’s somewhat a thing of the past which saddens me. My Dad used to make up fairy tales for me each night and they always made me so happy. They were tales of a young boy called Billy who lived in a house with a green roof. Billy went swimming with sharks and had magic powers, he loved ice cream and was my hero. My Dad doesn’t remember how any of those stories went and I was too young to retain the proper memories of them which is a crying shame because I would love to remember them in full.

The power of fairy tales will live on because they should live on. Albert Einstein once famously said “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Can anyone really disprove that? Fairy tales are more than just true and not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. Every fairy tale has meaning and every single one is based on the same idea, the idea that peace and happiness can exist no matter what stands in your way.

“In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.” – Charles Dickens

Back to business…

For just over a month this blog has sat in silence, not a peep, not a hint of anything new. There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being that in my mind I am either in one of two moods. The first one is where I have too much to say and so could write for days on end, compiling novels from my thoughts. The seconds is where I have nothing that I deem interesting to say, no matter how hard I try to string words together they just aren’t interesting enough to write. For the first two weeks of this blog being quiet, I was in the latter mood. I could not think of anything worth writing, and as much as that is one of my two moods, it’s a very rare occurrence. I never find myself struggling to write or indeed come up with ideas for something to write. I have however returned to write down the inner workings of my mind, for you to read, whether you find it enjoyable or not is a different matter.

With Doctor Who off of our television screens, I often find myself at a loss of what to watch. I have my usual light viewing shows such as Arrow, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (which is a new addition) and The Walking Dead. I do find myself lacking that “addictive” viewing that I get during the series’ of Doctor Who, that is until January comes around and the road to Wrestlemania begins. I suppose that my childhood obsession with wrestling will always be with me, I figured that if I reached 25 and was still interested in it then it would be a lifelong thing. I’m well past 25 now and it still excites me, especially between January and April when Wrestlemania rolls around.

Last night I watched “Insane Fight Club” which followed the Glasgow wrestling promotion “Insane Championship Wrestling”. I’ve not been to an ICW show in just over a year and it pains me that I haven’t been but something always comes up and I can’t make it. However last nights show proved what I’ve been saying for years ICW are on their way to the top.

I read yesterday that Kevin Smith is to return to writing comics, this time for a Batman meets Green Hornet 12 issue run. For me, two of my favourite comic book story arcs have been written by Kevin Smith – the Daredevil arc “Guardian Devil” and the Batman limited arc “Cacophony” so hearing that he’s returning to write another arc is exciting.

Speaking of Kevin Smith, today the Jay and Silent Bob UK Tour was announced. I have to say that I’m extremely disappointed that Scotland isn’t on the tour. It’s something that happens regularly with touring acts, they announce a UK tour but leave Scotland out. It gets frustrating after a while and eventually it will get to the point where I stop caring.

This years seems to be passing by far too fast, something that isn’t new. Every year passes fast but as year arrives they seem to disappear quicker than the one previous. It reached a point the other day where I started looking back at previous years and thinking to myself “that was 16 years ago” or “that was 20 years ago, it only feels like 2 years”. It’s scary how quickly time passes, soon it will be gone and I’ll be a decrepit old man roaming around the streets talking to myself about the days when Ipods and Ipads were popular.

On a final note, as most people will know I’m not the mst patient when it comes to waiting for American shows to air over here (I can’t even wait 19 hours for the Walking Dead) so it should come as no surprise that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is always on my Wednesday morning “to do” list. This weeks S.H.I.E.L.D was an excellent episode. I love anything with Asgardians, the trouble these days is that with the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe I was worrying that Thor would be the only one to get any sort of exposure and so it was great to see Lady Sif and Lorelei this week. Lorelei has always fascinated me as a character and seeing her brought to life was brilliant.