Part Whatever...If You Go Down In The Woods Today, REMAIN INDOORS!

It's eerie in the sunlight. Normally the blue sky is your friend. Now it's just a bit pale, like a rubbish kids drink (the one's your friend used to make who was too stingy with the fucking cordial). The sun in the sky looking down and making you warm and feeling good. The celestial Green Cross Code Man. Now that light has to filter through the invisible threat that's weaving itself around us slowly, but, more importantly, certainly. Fighting through a viral jungle with a shit machete.

I went for a walk. Of course I did. I have to breathe don't I?

There seemed to be more people around, as if it was a weekend or a holiday. It's all about how things seem now; the real world versus the terrifying reality of the news world. But that's probably my perception. Warped as it is. Perhaps it is a holiday. A chance to enjoy the fresh air, while you still can. Fortunately it's possible to get out and be able to avoid people. This may come in handy in the days ahead. Like the book of revelations; a highway code for the apocalyptically fundamental

The dichotomy is weird: the news and social media are an invitation to a nervous breakdown. The worst case scenario is constantly paraded like an endless catwalk of ill fashion. Sickly models are dressed up in lurid possible worlds of increasing terror. Supermodel meets supernature. Worlds all sharing a common threat: the incompetence of an elite with no answer to this crisis. It is a language they cannot speak and could never learn. It would be like trying to teach a dog Latin. Or like Caesar learning to speak dog.

Ave, it barked.

People are still going to the shops. The shops seem to still be functioning, but then they have to be. What on earth will happen otherwise; do we start chasing the sheep with blowpipes and bic razors? Chewing the cud while desperately waiting for blackberry season?

I did see a lady with her kids. Her cargo of probably genuinely necessary toilet roll(s) looked very conspicuous. Perhaps that too is just my perception. There doesn't seem to be any point to panic buying when there's so much uncertainty and who can afford our months' worth? I haven't got a freezer big enough - no, wait, that's for the beef, not for my arse. Oh dear. I'm coming apart at the seams.

I don't think I'll be the only one. I just received an email from a comrade; he's in the high risk group three times over! What a time to be alive, and will there be much time left to be alive? Suddenly a thirst for knowledge is a curse. I could quench it with the mythical waters of Lethe. Or just wait for Starbucks to do it as a latte.

When the doors are shut and the viral air raid sirens in government compel us to our mortgage cocoons, someone should set up a pirate radio network (or social media channel as this isn't the sixties anymore). We could all sit in our antibody bunkers listening to the COVIDEEJAY giving us the lowdown on the best looting hotspots, weather reports including clouds of infection, spinning the latest 'beats' (hopefully your heartbeat). He or she could tell us the latest fashion for evening wear in the lounge, and a quiz show to help us remember what flowers looked like.

Part Three: Scenes From a Virus

It's a peculiar thing to walk around knowing that somewhere, out in the environment and wholly invisible, are floating proteins angry that you're alive.

The idea that nature wants you to suffer is...alarming. Some people, in a marketplace far away, twisted the world. Tore at the fabric of nature to allow something to get through. Now we're unwelcome guests in a genetic house. We better learn to behave ourselves. Take our shoes off at the door.

This is a reality we can't turn back from. The genie is out of the bottle and no genius is in charge.

Everyday the people in power fade a little more. At some point I fully expect them to just bolt halfway through a press conference.

"Look! An eagle!"

And then he just runs. Heads to the car. Heads to the coast, takes off all his clothes and runs into the sea to be consumed by dead grey waves. Blissful dissolution in Brexit waters as ego and body return to what pass for clean water. The primal circle is complete. Dinosaurs and evolution happily forgotten; written off as a bad idea or like a tax deductible. Like the petrol they will one day become. He is human petrol now.

Boris just stares at us with his tired dead eyes. He wishes he was somewhere else. We all do.

But there is nowhere else because this fucking disease seems to have travelled further around the world than it has any right to in lieu of a blue passport. Brexiteers ought to be annoyed but instead they are dazzled at the performative chaos melting around them. Like a Dali clock dripping over the White Cliffs of Dover.

Instead they are moaning on Twitter about how - somehow - it's still Jeremy Corbyn's fault. If only Dianne Abbot could count. If only Dawn Butler would stop embarrassing racists. If only a man who didn't get voted in three months ago somehow didn't have the power he doesn't have to influence decisions made by a man who did and does.

Imagine if he were in charge, they say, just imagine how bad it would be. I know right! People might be tested, the NHS might have funding, hope! We could buy toilet roll in peace. Andrex for all comrade!

Oh dear. It's all too much. I'm looking online at expensive butchers to see if they can locally deliver food in lieu of the regular supermarkets. Even at the he best of times they aren't reliable. You order minced beef and they bring you Arctic Roll instead. Well it's all food innit - and it's one of your five a day right?

It's come to this my friends. Housebound for four months if the government gets their way. I get to sit and watch summer and the virus roll by. Like the biblical epic by Cecil B Demille. The one with Charlton Heston (which? He's in ALL of them). Moses (that's the fella). Where everyone's sat in the house protected with Lamb's blood while the angel of death goes around killing the firstborn of Egypt. Happy days. No passover here; just a balding crank with a Mekon head whispering into the ear of a man too lazy to use the power he always wanted responsibly.

Not sure how it ends though, if it ever did.

Interlude (or, Comfortably Numb?)

This is not the future.

I'd like a refund.

Yes I'll hold.

Yes, I will accept store credit.

The future I dreamed of as a kid was illustrated in plastic books that talked about sailing to Barnards star on a ship powered by nuclear fusion. A world of people sailing to work in jetpacks. Solar powered cities. Send me back to sleep Buck Rogers!

I looked up at the moon and saw the distance between it and me as a potential. A current of energy with which to could charge my imagination. Now that same moon, surrounded by a curtain of star spangled night, is cold as the wind and now unfriendly. I don't want to go out now. The moon's looking at me funny.

Then came Cyberpunk. People living in computers knew our secrets and would reach out to sell us insurance and offer us the credit to do so. If we didn't, anonymous people would share our data with the wardens of nascent social media. A place where we could connect with strangers that became a prison where we were held hostage by our own indiscretions, office party embarrassments, or credit card details.

Something very dark has taken root in our soul. Fattened on credit and junk mail invitations to a purgatory of debt. Dante's mortgaged inferno. We broke the world and we didn't know it.

Now we can expect government assistance, while it deigns to reign in capital for a time, to keep the Netflix connection going. Let us binge watch ourselves into acute respiratory collapse.

Periodically the Amazon driver will appear. Santa Claus for the Resident Evil generation; the postman from Chernobyl. With careful hands he will surgically insert the entertainment package I've ordered to keep myself from going crazy through the door. It may be infected. I may never know until I know. This is our world now. Boxed in by necessity, passing plates under the door. Daring to cook in a dangerous kitchen.

A prison of our own making.

Capital cannot be reigned in forever. Like an angry dog the master invites its bite, reminding him who's really in charge. It's all over Rover. Fiduciary Fido. Outside the virus fights the climate in a bloodsport of our own making. If only we could televise it.

I tell myself this is not the future. Hopefully it will be the past and in a few months, when America is suitably leashed to the whim of cognitively diminished calcified plutocrats, men, for it is always men, of limited vision, we will look back and laugh. Ha ha! But the humour will haunt us and our chests still ache. Oh how they ache.

The virus, like the Spotify ads I am forced to listen to as I write to keep myself from hearing the silence of this stolen tomorrow, will never be gone. The future is an infection. We have polluted ourselves and will never be clean. The very sky hates us. We have poisoned the earth. Sow the wind, they say. Reap the whirlwind. A steel breeze of depleted nutrients and toxic protein. I still argue with the recyling bin as it spills over onto the floor; I curse modernity.

Maybe the moon is all we have left, just waiting for me to plug in. A phone call to the universe. Hey aliens! Come and invade! This virus might let you live this time! Nope, I'm calling the cops, someone's trying to commit genocide. I think it's the Prime Minister! Yes, I can recognise that voice. Some maniac blathering on about wiff waff.

More of A Comfortable Seat At The World's End

Someone linked this on another site, in another life. It's oriented toward the US but since the virus doesn't care about borders and ethnicity (which is all I want to share with it) I figure it would be useful here.

My biggest concern about all this isn't so much catching it, though I certainly hope I don't (other than to get over it - assuming you do). It's the subsequent societal collapse: getting food. Panic buying isn't helping either and my freezer is unfortunately tiny!

When I was a child I remember looking up at the moon from the back garden. I remember it because Jean Michel Jarre's haunting synth bleepiness, Oxygene, was playing. Ever since that tune and the memory have become inextricably intertwined. I thought, then, by this time, the galactic space year of 2020, we'd be there. 2020 was such a distant, almost mystical, number. The future for sure: jetpacks, moon travel, solar power, abundance, hope.

Now look at us. Laid low by our own inability to see past markets and profits. The planet is on fire, the climate is fucked, and the only thing threatening to put it out might wipe out half our families! Politicians are testing positive. You know it's bad when they try to reassure us "I'm feeling fine!". If this was like the disaster movie that would be an inevitable precursor to their death! Jesus, it's come to this: we're living the Andromeda Strain.

Capitalists and capitalism has no answer to this. These problems cannot be traded on stock exchanges. They are only manufactured by them. We've allowed greed to breed reticence that can cost lives. Trump wavers because he wants some chum of his in Big Pharma to make the private healthcare antivirus, so he can profit from investing in it. Nero speculated while Rome burned.

And we're watching all this happen on social media. Like a video game. In fact there is a virus video game. It's called Plague Inc. Your avatar could easily be Trump Strain D, SARS faketanovirus or CoronaTory Wiff Waff 19. Your goal is to cause the world to sneeze itself to death. Big win, ten million points.

Fortunately there are people who care. A little too far from me, but so far the number of known infections is zero (likely above). Check this out, it may help.

Lsatly, since this blog is largely me whining about the DWP, I shall whine about the DWP. We still don't see clear unequivocal guidance. All it takes is the following: "everyone on benefits, over the next X months, gets their benefits paid. You don't need to turn up. You won't be asked to. Look after yourself. Treat yourself to something nice" (that last bit is admittedly optional)."

Why can't they do that? Simple: because capitalism breeds the belief that people be scroungers yo. Even in the midst of a viral outbreak, a pandemic, the worst health crisis for a generation ("a must see movie!"), they cannot let themselves evolve a better, more compassionate - life saving - ideology.

We will see how far this takes us. I suspect, dare I say hope, that, if anything good can ceom from this fundamental, indeed existential, chaos, we might see revolution. People can't take this. Not if these strained ramblings are indicator.

Till next time, sneeze safely and be well.

A Comfortable Seat at the World's End... Part One

To the good people who read this (and you must be good if you're reading this of course :D) - and to the creepy Russian bots that seem to comprise a portion of my analytics - please stay safe.

I've seen my mental health take a drop what with everything in the world. We humans weren't built for this, a pervasive stress. It's not good for the soul. It erodses; wears you down. I catch myself losing patience, getting frustrated, shouting at clouds (not literally but the weather is exasperating). You see yourself in the moment - and even having that awareness is a luxury, some don't - and you start thinking "my god!"

This isn't good. The world is on fire. These weather patterns aren't the norm. It leaves you out of sorts. If winter was properly winter, snow, chilly, cosy (even), I could cope with it. We're programmed for that; to respond to the ebb and flow of time and tide. Things like seasons. But not only are we completely out of balance with that in the modern world, but we've twisted the world itself. Now the seasons are out of sorts. Winter seems to start and end later. This isn't right. A month and a half of storms; freezing gales and thundering icicle rain isn't normal. It's not good for the land, it can't be good for nature. Now to add to that a man made (after a fashion, man's carelessness) has led to an outbreak that's now a pandemic. My first ever! I feel so...blessed?

They say that healthy folk (like me I hope) are no more going to suffer than regular flu and we don't worry about that quite so severely, and for good reason. But 17000 died of seasonal flu last year! I don't want either! But it's there: the fear. You can't avoid it. The media is everywhere now. It's right next to this screen, on another tab, waiting to be unleashed when I next press the button. I hide it like an index. A contents page of man made misery. Our government seems indecisive incompetent or just plain uncaring. Will we all end up sick?

Getting food is my biggest worry. How are the poor to manage? supermarket deliveries are, IME, notoriously unreliable and you have to pay a hefty delivery charge. "Sorry we didn't have any chicken soup, we gave you dogfood instead". What if you live alone? Who will care for you? The epitaph of modern life.

Those are my concerns; strictly born of the modern world. A place I am finding myself increasingly at odds with. I can't handle it. It asks too much of me in ways that bend and break. I am twisted through torsions of complexity that seem to exist for their own sake.

It doesn't have to be this way. We have made it thus. Our very system is being tested. What happens if it fails? When there is no more money to prop it up? In the wake of a pandemic, politicians care more that stock markets fail. Billionaires and millionaires throw their perfumed sanitised hands in the air, from within their privilege bunkers. They are probably gambling and preying on the outcomes of this situation. Delaying the creation of vaccines so that they can get there first. Human life is an investment portfolio, now stained with the sputum of its own sickness.

Turn back spaceman, the earth is not fit for human consumption!

Foodbanks are a sign of Tory Success

This might not be popular. I will endeavour to explain the, slightly clickbaity, title.

You see it's no coincidence that some of the worst people in the country (Jacob Rees Mogg for example) think well of foodbanks. They conform to his neo Victorian ideal that charity should reign o'er all of us, and that taxation is a burden.

Because of course society is full of good people like him who fall over themselves to put their hand in their pocket for those less fortunate than to be born into privilege and wind up running an investment fund.

You could reasonably argue that, if he did care, he would just pay his taxes. That way society can provide services.

Better yet why do we tolerate a society that allows a privileged elite the luxury of being in the position to profit in the first place? Why sustain the system that creates the need for foodbanks at all?

Foodbanks are a Tory success because they prey on the goodwill of decent people. Folks, and fortunately there are stil some out there, don't want to see the less fortunate starve because of a capitalist system that maintains haves vs have nots. A growing cohort that can, all too readily, fall into penury.

Tories champion them as a sign of a caring society. Which they are. But the problem is that it allows them to abrogate their responsibility to that society. As capitalists they support, if not directly, profit from theose people. They just don't care enough to put into place systems to ensure that those same people, when they invariably fall on the hard times capitalism creates, don't starve in the gutter.

With a reserve army of labour those people are then surplus to requirements. Tories don't care. But they do get to champion the 'good works' of those that do, even if those caring come from the same impoverished section of society (which is why the quality of foodbank donations are substandard). Thy do this because it conforms to their sense of social justice. A twisted libertarian outlook that at once congratulates self sufficiency while making it increasing tough for people to be self sufficient - how do you enjoy independence when you are in the gutter?

It's ideological nonsense. Better to have a completely free society where the naturally occurring resources can be harvested and shared directly. Not for profit, but because people need them. They can use them to feed and clothe. They can come together to use them for the social good, to build a better future through research and culture.

I don't need Tory condescension and its warped notion of the social good. I need access to the things that they stole; the land and its resources. Too long have these rapacious elites monopolised them, all for profit. All to sell to each other in an endless game of pass the parcel which makes them increasingly more money until the music stops and the next crash happens.

Get rid of the lot of them. They are the parasites. Not us. We don't need them. That's the irony of their system. If we can feed ourselves and look after each other then they are irrelevant beyond desperately holding onto power. Using their state deputised thugs to beat us to death when we resist.

Finally, and just to clarify, with regard to food quality. I've seen what people donate. It's just rubbish. Blue stripe beans, cornflakes, cheap white bread, even bags of sugar. People deserve quality food. Health shouldn't be a luxury. I'm sure many donate more and most do so with genuine intentions, but this is not good enough.

Another Work Focused Interview

Happy New Year, things will get worse. Hooray!

I hate the way this system leaves you so powerless, but what can be worse is how it makes you feel responsible for things that are unreasonable. Or for situations out of your control.

So i have another Work Focused Interview at the Jobcentre. They want me in next week at a place the uses don't go at a time of their choosing. It's bad enough having to sit through the WCA, but these are just a total waste of time. Not one of them I've ever had has been productive, it's just a jobcentre adviser droning on and propagandising. They have nothing to offer, but you can't tell them that.

What really frustrates me is that, as the scrounging peon, I have no worth in this relationship. I don't get a say in how this is conducted. They book the time, they book the venue. If I'm lucky (and hopefully I will be) I can persuade them to interview me over the phone - which you'd think would be better for them as it saves them refunding travel expenses for instance. I'm willing to compromise, I'de even meet them locally if, for example, interviews were conducted at the local surgery (as an example, that's a whole other can of worms). But I can't make that compromise because of the way the system works and how capitalism defines the relationship between pauper and state. You do what they say or you are a feckless layabout doubtless loafing - because of course if you weren't you'd willingly attend, right?

In short, fuck capitalism fuck the state and fuck the tories.

I really should be posting something more substantial in the wake of this new era of Tory terror we'll be living through, but dealing with the DWP drains my focus.