Greetings, bonjour, what’s happening?
Welcome to Lager Time, legions of lager-lites, grab your tins, your bottles and your pints. This here is a little blog and newsletter which I write, record and produce, via Substack - where I share bits and bobs that I’ve been writing – be it poems, stories, music and more recently thought-sort-of-essay attempts type thing.
I didn’t get round to recording this episode until today – which is Monday 22nd. Idealy it would have been out the Friday before but I was all over the gaff last week and barely at home. I was up in York with some of my Beats & Elements spars, Conrad Murray and Gambit Ace’ delivering rap workshops. Also, Thursday, I was back up in Bedford – delivering a Beatbox workshop to a load of music teachers, whilst simultaneously trying to explain what, how, and why we do those sessions – large up Sonny Black and Luma Sounds – soon to be running the game up there, mate. All that and of course, my regular weekly sessions with Dream Arts in London – we’re busy preparing to take a work-in-progress of our latest show, Love Scripted down to Devon in a few weeks for a performance.
Large-up everyone that caught last week’s episode – a little bit tongue-in-cheek but I’ve been meaning to talk more about Millwall for a long time, so it was a good start. It was through doing that, that I got in touch with Nick Hart from the Achtung Millwall podcast (which I’ve been listening to for a long time) he gave it a listen and wound-up inviting me on Sunday’s episode to a talk about Millwall’s woeful performance against QPR; a game which I was at. However, despite the miserable result, I had a lovely day-out, with my two older brothers Dan and Nat, plus extended family legends, Dom, Andy and Dave. Some laughs were had, lots of lager consumed and a decent curry somewhere near the Goldhawk Road. I’ll put a link to the Millwall podcast, somewhere in the description.
So onto this week’s episode; where I’ve written a little thing based on a quote from Book 2 of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations - it’s called On Moaning, Self-Loathing and Pointing the Finger. Hope you enjoy
In the meantime, if you’d like to support my work the best thing you can probably do is introduce it to someone who you think might like it. Alternatively you can make a donation on KO-FI, or BUY-MY-BOOK – The Suburban – there’s only a few copies left of this, or the book of plays I co-wrote – Hip Hop Theatre Anthology or just stream my music or watch the videos or whatever; you know the coo.
That’s it for the update, hope you enjoy the piece.
Have a banging weekend.
Peas and taters
Paul
BUY-ME-A-LAGER
THE SUBURBAN BOOK
My 1st book collection of stories and poems
Beats & Elements: A Hip Hop Theatre Trilogy
2 plays I co-wrote plus Denmarked by Conrad Murray
https://paulcree.co.uk/shop/beats-and-elements-a-hip-hop-theatre-trilogy
ON MOANING, SELF-LOATHING AND POITING THE FINGER
‘Every hour of the day give vigorous attention, as a Roman and as a man, to the performance of the task in hand with precise analysis, with unaffected dignity, with human sympathy, with dispassionate justice – and to vacating your mind from all its other thoughts. And you will achieve this vacation if you perform each action as if it were the last of your life: freed, that is, from all lack of aim, from all passion-led deviation from the ordinance of reason, from pretence, from love of self, from dissatisfaction with what fate has dealt you. You see how few things a man needs to master for the settled flow of a god-fearing life. The gods themselves ask nothing more of one who keeps these observations.’
BOOK 2 – 5
Over the last year, one thing I’ve been doing is trying to observe some of my own negative behavioural patterns to figure out where I’m going wrong, and why it is I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve realised that lots of these patterns go as far back as I can remember. No exciting revelations as such, at some point I guess a lot of us go through this probing process, looking for that moment when you were seven, and really, you just wanted the strawberry ice-lolly, not the orange flavour?! And it’s burned you up ever since.
Seriously, though, life’s given me enough kicks up the arse over the last two or so years, to finally get the message, that whatever I was doing; weren’t the one, mate. I also turned 40 last year; getting on a bit over here. It’s about time I livened-up and had a bit of a mental clear-out; there’s some high-earning dead-wood in the squad that’s holding up the progress.
When I read the above quote, I immediately had a bunch of flash-backs. Pretty much all of them involved me in varying degrees of stress, thinking intensely about the situation I was in at the time, whatever it was: school, jobs that I was doing, my financial situation, my relationships or lack of, dicey-street situations, or something broader, like politics, or existential like where are we all heading??? and what am I doing with this precious little open-mic spot of a life we get?? Sweet FA was more or less always the answer. Things could’ve been sweet but I still would’ve complained.
If I dwell a little deeper on it, I probably saw myself as immobile somehow, a situation I couldn’t get out of, like life had dealt-out the cub-camp broth for dinner and there was no other option; despite the wild Rambo style fantasies of busting-out in a blaze of glory of whatever scenario I was in: knocking-out the boss, saving the village, winning-over the heroine, gaining the award and then writing it all into a book which gets turned into an epic masterpiece of a film; but probably starring some Orange lolly like James Corden.
The companions to the stress was always the self-loathing, then of course, the blame. Blaming someone, or something, for my despair and thus cultivating, growing and mutating a victim narrative that always had me at the centre, as both victim and hero; the worst kind of hero. The kind of hero that wouldn’t save you from the burning building, even though it’s within my super-powers; because: capitalism, or America, Catholic guilt, The Tories, private-schools, schools, teachers, anxiety, The Premier League, commercial radio, undiagnosed something or other, James Corden etc etc *delete as appropriate*. Thing is, if you had asked me then, or ask me now, exactly what it was in those situations that I was so stressed about; I wouldn’t be able to pin-point anything beyond the bluster. So what was it all about then? And does that even matter?
There were times when I think I really was struggling, certainly financially, but other issues too; not sleeping properly, multiple adrenalin dumps throughout the day at the most innocuous things, all of which I understood even less than I do now. Bottom-line is, I weren’t helping myself by constantly wishing the grass to be cup-final green on the other side, whilst on my side, I was busy unconsciously amassing a landfill of waste, that slowly became a Castle Grey-Skull, constructed using mostly resentment. Toxic is a word that gets thrown around far too much these days, but that kind of thinking really is, and if you don’t think it is just yet, keep doing it and it will be.
I could spend a very long time lost in these mind-swamps, concocting fantasies, while building up a head full of steam, imagining gloriously chinning some prick I disliked at the Christmas party, or bringing myself to tears over some made-up tragedy, or romantically wooing an attractive female; all of this, crucially, whilst I was meant to be doing something important: like learning stuff in the classroom, pushing trollies around the car park, soldering components, inputting numbers into a spreadsheet, putting items back on shelves in their correct place, chasing customers who were late paying their loans back. I made mistakes. Tons of them, I wrote a whole show about it. Seemed like the more I got in trouble, though, the more I’d retreat inside that mind-swamp and batten down the hatches.
Occasionally, I’d snap out of these fogs, see friends getting on and doing well with their lives, or look around the work-place and notice people just cracking-in on with their jobs, dare-I say it, happily. And I’d be thinking; ‘How are they doing it when we’re all being ripped off, they don’t get it??!! They’re sucking our souls and converting into £50 notes’ Exactly who they was, I could never answer that one either.
‘Every hour of the day give vigorous attention, as a Roman and as a man, to the performance of the task in hand with precise analysis, with unaffected dignity, with human sympathy, with dispassionate justice – and to vacating your mind from all its other thoughts.’
If I go back to school for a moment, there is a distinct memory I have of year 11, which was my last year at school. It’s one of the only good memories that I can readily recall, when I was successfully doing something that I was meant to be doing. It was a mock GCSE exam for Design Technology. I did virtually nothing in that DT class for two years, aside from dicking-about. Sitting that mock exam, I may as well have been interpreting Mandarin for an astro-physicist. Unsurprisingly, when it came to the actual exam in the summer, a letter got sent home to mum and dad a few weeks before saying I’d been officially withdrawn. I was mildly embarrassed but I think I was beyond-caring at the point, and it was my birthday that day anyway, me the boys had plans on getting tanked-up in the park next-door; so it was a touch as the exam was the last one of the day.
But back to that mock exam. I can remember going into it, like most exams, more or less resigned to having little to no clue as to what I was doing; of course, this exam was no different. But I gave it a go anyway, like I always did, probably out of some sense of guilt or duty. There was a question that asked me to accurately draw a flattened cube, a net, I think it was called. I remember looking at it, reading the question a few times, looking at the picture, thinking about it, picking up the ruler on my desk, then all of a sudden BOSH, this little mini-eureka moment happened and I understood exactly what I had to do, and I was able to visualise this flat-box in my head and I cracked-on with it. It was a strange alien-feeling, perhaps it was confidence. And it felt good. I actually enjoyed doing that exam and time just seemed to fly. Those feelings were few and far between back then. I guess the point here is, I just focused on what I needed too and wasn’t thinking about anything else; and for about fifteen minutes, life became a little more bearable, even pleasurable.
Of course, upon applying yourself to a given task, it doesn’t always go that swimmingly but so long as you’re focused on the thing at hand, at least you don’t have all the head-noise putting you into a
state of stress. I hate to think how much time I’ve wasted, stewing on things unnecessarily, making myself even more pissed-off, upset, frustrated or anxious than I needed to be. Sometimes, I think that I’m addicted to thinking myself into these heightened states; or at the very least, habitualised into doing it, if that’s even a word. And after a lifetime of doing it, at some point, you’re probably going to start believing your own bull-shit, whilst becoming pretty miserable to be around. No wonder I didn’t have much joy attracting females in my early twenties; I was no James Corden.
For some people, like me, merely focusing on the thing you’re doing, is easier said than done and probably explains why I used to get so frustrated at the types of people that preach about these abstract wishy-washy things like yoga, mindfulness and self-care, as if it’s all as simple as lighting some scented candles, banging-out some whale music and whispering some whimsical phrase over and over and BOSH; you’re at peace. For some of us, it takes a lot more than that, but something as simple as having a ball at your feet and doing some keep-ups, over and over, or really concentrating on the washing-up, or better still, as hard as it is sometimes, simply focusing on the task you’re meant to be doing whilst at work, or school, or whatever. Doing that goes at least someway to quietening down the chaos, and at the end of it, you realise that there’s not a great deal of difference between the strawberry and orange flavours anyway, it’s all just sugar and e-numbers, and then we all die. And James Corden’s probably alright after all… well.
On Moaning, Self-loathing and Pointing the Finger