A Grand Quiet

It’s not Mothers’ Day over here in the UK, we get that outta the way back in March. It’s always a notable time of year here because all of a sudden all of the podcast hosts turn to hawking flowers and chocolates and I always turn to the calendar paranoid. Hell, at least in the run up they might actually be advertising something that could be useful to somebody.

This is gonna be a very specific tangent but it baffles me how podcast ads are even something that support themselves. Maybe it’s because I don’t really listen to none of the huge NPR type casts no more, but there ain’t a single thing that any of these folks selling that appeals. That’s when they’re selling anything, most of the time they’re pushing the most meaningless of services.

Who in their right mind would pay a fiver a month for razor blades to be shipped out to them every month? Or a fiver for replacement electric toothbrush heads? I mean, come on, at least the cook your own ready meal kits and wine club memberships have an air of luxury about them, somehow they’ve managed to convince us that being barely able to manage your personal hygiene is deserving of its own status symbol.

They all have the same garbage website too. You’d think it were some sorta elaborate prank, somebody setting up these crunchy, sans-serif looking pages by getting some procedural generation bot plug the right words into a template. If I knew more about HTML I might actually throw that together. Literal zero chance of that though. I’d do better putting my efforts towards executing the ultimate downfall of capitalism itself. But you know, by less circuitous methods.

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Moving on from the forms of subscription that I loathe to the forms that I love. Which, not only makes me a hypocrite but also probably a worse person, because I love paying a monthly fee to a corporation so I don’t have to pay artists fairly. This makes me sad. I’ve been feeling more and more recently that the old adage about ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism’ is a cop out. Surely we should be duty bound to try our best to make the right choices rather than pretend everything is futile.

It would be easier to make moral choices were the way my labour be consumed anything near the term. I have been promoted a couple of times at work now, I’m angling on another as the hinge on something prodigious. I hope I’m never gonna feel okay with the fact that each mote of responsibility afforded me is an excuse to labour less. Even enjoying the privilege makes my skin crawl, there’s simply too little work to occupy that time.

Word is going around work that one of the managers at work is going to be leaving soon. They recently left on holiday for three weeks and everything ran far more calmly without them there. That was the perception of things anyway. They blustered into the space on their first day back, generating trouble in their wake and I suppose those at the top asked: if we’d gotten along fine without them, were they really necessary at all?

That seems to have been decisively answered. Hopefully I manage to move on before the whole thing collapses, I just gotta remember not to achieve so much that my labour gets abstracted into oblivion. It ain’t labour after that.

Whatever, I’ve had my own tender steps into economic radicalism on the mind recently. I wanted to talk about that discover weekly playlist that Spotify generates for you. This week has been the first time that I’ve been able to listen to it straight, it’s a banger. Two hours long and I’ve gotten through it like four hours this week. I’ve always been bad at making mixtapes, I were never the type to have the knowledge to dive deep in the first place.

I still remember with startling clarity the first time I found my way through a DJ Shadow set, that clarity and invention was insane as someone who had only really had experience of shitty local club DJs. And I made my cracks about bad algorithms earlier, there ain’t nothing in this playlist that surprises, but it it recklessly efficient at finding my core and penetrating it.

I have long since abandoned the fact that I might hide anything from facebook, google, amazon and whatever other corporate spies hope to make a buck from pretending to understand me. I am wary online, existing there can be made dangerous. But I’ll enjoy the side benefits that come with my compromise.

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A new chapter in the ongoing drama of me and social media. i get the sense that twitter might be fundamentally unhealthy for me. I always tempered my self loathing with distance. if I could be detached then it’s impossible for me to turn my own worst self-destructive impulses on others.

Anyway, I earlier this evening I saw that someone I follow recently got 6000 followers. My first impulse was to abandon them, I wanted them to feel something, wanted them to know that they didn’t deserve what they were celebrating. I don’t know why I thought this really, I like the things they produce, I don’t know how to control the part of me that wants to hurt people.

I don’t know if it would make me more whole to reckon with the impulse, I don’t know if it would make me any happier. I never learned how to hate healthily, now I just have to reckon with the fact that the only person that i can negatively impact is myself.

Fuck.

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That’s me for the week. And frankly most of next week too. Right now my scheduling is shit, hopefully we’re gonna see that come around soon. Or perhaps i’ll always be straddling some awkward space.

Hope you are all well though.

E
xx