Fuss the Cats, Enjoy Your Ignorance, Cut Your Hair

Hello marmosets,

How are things going in your forward light cone? Fantastically I hope. 

I'm currently sat in a coffee shop eavesdropping on a conversation between two very, very businessy-type people talking about how they taught their staff mindfulness and meditation to get them to work longer hours of overtime for free. Somewhere, Buddha is way pissed.

So. If it’s all right with you, I’ll be accepting your kind patronage this month. I have a rough idea of what I want to make next and it’s still in that stage where it might all be shit, but I’d like to try. 

I hope you liked the last video. I really assumed no one would give much of a damn about that one, and I still don’t understand why it got a better reaction than I expected. Much to my amazement, people appear to kind of dig death in general. Typical humans. 

I popped back to England for a few days to see family and mates and tie a few things up and wowie, the weather always rises to the challenge. Five days of straight rain. Good old UK, never fails to conform to its own stereotype. But coming home is lovely, and I hope you find the same with wherever you grew up. The streets are smaller somehow because you remember walking them as a kid, and now you’re all big and adulty. Your neighbours treat you like an adult too, and that’s very odd for the kid still living in you. And weirder yet, and the weirdest, your parents are your friends now. You don’t fight or bicker anymore really. You have a drink and a laugh with them in the evening like work colleagues. (Your mum still goes into your room when you’re out and steals your dirty laundry to throw in the washing though. This is so cute it’s hard to get annoyed about.) 

There is a large nature reserve and forest near my parents house. I used to run there a lot as a teenager. Running through there again a few days ago, I felt the eerie presence behind of 16-year old me, almost a decade and a half dead, still giving me shit for not being enough of an interesting adult. Are they gone, do you reckon? Kid-you. Younger-you. Parts of them still occupy your head, all their silly fears and wants. He still lives in my head anyway. (He kindly gifted me a nervousness around wasps, a hatred of talking on the phone, and an extremely sweet tooth.) But at some point between then and now, they died and you turned up. There was no specific moment they died, far as I can tell, but their hand certainly isn’t on the wheel now. And in another decade and a half, we’ll be gone of course, replaced by a new version of ourselves – hopefully better, hopefully wiser. It will happen so slowly we don’t notice, and when it’s done it will be such a profound change we won’t even remember how we couldn’t have been this person all along. 

I would like to talk to him, but he's gone. I would tell him to chill the hell out, things are going to be fine, please just fuss the cats, enjoy your ignorance, and cut your hair - my god, cut your fucking hair, you're scaring people.

What would you say to your younger self? 

Excuse me. The coffee is rather strong here apparently. 

Anyway, to those of you living in the UK, sorry everything’s so politically difficult at the moment, but thank you for keeping the countryside and the streets (and the dogs) in excellent condition. (The dogs here really are fantastic.)

Since I’m already having a little self-indulgent episode, I’ll tell you about the new book if you like. It’s coming. I hit wall after wall and gave up several times and got really quite sad about the thing. This has happened enough times I should have just realised that this is a fairly natural part of the ‘process’, if there is one, and if something keeps coming back to pester you, you should bloody well finish it. But that didn’t work.

Instead I was thinking back to Oliver Sacks. If you aren’t aware, he was a doctor who got rather (and rightfully) famous for his books about the strange ways the brain can behave. Maybe you’ve heard of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. It’s very good. 

Anyway, while he was supposed to be finishing a book – I forget which – he claims he kept getting stuck and going a bit loopy and the thing was just dragging on and on. So he decided he would finish the draft in a few weeks or kill himself. Pretty good motivator if one is well-adjusted. 

I didn’t feel like taking such a terminal route with my own stuckness, but since I’ve been fighting this thing for about a year and a half now, decided if I didn’t get the first draft out in three weeks, I’d never try getting it out again. That did the trick. I like the idea behind this book and I want it to work and I want to show it to you, it just kept falling over. Oddly, when you threaten your brain with ultimatums, it starts to behave. Things are going much better these days, and I’m very excited to show you the opening passages when they’re polished. 

Also, I have a load of little idle musings and silly stories I’ve written while travelling over the years. I would quite like to make a site for them, but I’m having trouble coming up with a good URL. If you can think of one, I would be delighted to hear it. 

I’m still catching up with Patreon messages, on here and by email. I’ve replied to the majority of them, but there are still some of you I haven’t, and I can’t apologise enough. I’m a terrible organiser and I should’ve already sorted out a system for getting this done, but I haven’t. I will get back to you, I promise. Again, nothing but a huge apology on my side – grade A idiocy.

It also occurred to me it might be nice to start a book club between the lot of us. I read a fair bit these days, mainly because it’s also quality cat-hugging time, and it can be quite sad to finish something and have no one to chat to about it because no one’s read the thing. Let me know what you think about trying that out, and how to go about it. (I finished Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli recently and fuck me, I can’t recommend it enough.)

Anyway. The upshot then: please hang tight, I will reply to your messages shortly, and I’m so, so sorry again if you’ve been left out. No excuse but stupidity on my side. And more than that, as always, if you liked the last video, or one of the others – obviously you need to drastically improve your taste – but they were only made possible by your patronage. Even if you jump ship now and don’t want to support my excuse for work, I’d just like to say thank you ever so much for supporting it so far. You’ve allowed me to work at – as far as I’m concerned – the best job in the world: making stuff up and writing it down. 

So I’m just very grateful indeed.

I hope your stucknesses are dissolving, I hope everything’s grand on your side, and if it isn’t, I hope it is soon. I'm quite sure it will be.

All the best and much love,

Ex. 

P.S. – Freya was an exceptionally good girl this month, especially while I was away, and I have allowed her a small publicity opportunity in reward. Photo attached.

P.P.S. – I took a train through Austria recently. We stopped briefly at my favourite station in the world. Photo also attached.