SNAFU

So, I walked down the hill to the train station, easily arriving 5 minutes before the train was due to leave, handily arriving just as they announced that my train was cancelled.

As the next train was going to get me into Edinburgh exactly as the play started, this was less than useful, especially as most places won't let you in after the curtain rises.

So I walked back up the hill.

In the rain.

Scotrail hate me, it's the only explanation.

The Future

I thought back to 1978... If I had been so obsessed with the future, why hadn't I planned it better?
Why hadn't I started saving money?

Why hadn't I planned my finances and my college career?

Answer: Because I didn't think there was any need to.

Somewhere the seed of fatalism had been planted in my young mind.
The Future wasn't something I would have to plan or build or work for. I believed the Future was going to be created for me by benevolent corporations...

All I had to do was stay alive long enough to inhabit it.

At the appointed time, They would "lift the curtains" and invite us all into the Future that they had made ready for us. We'd all be welcome; the Future, by its very nature, was cheerful and inclusive.
In the meantime, while they were getting it all ready, the corporations would allow us to experience the Future in short, controlled bursts, such as the World's Fair Expo, or Disney World's Tommorowland....

It simply never occurred to me that I would be denied anything I wanted or needed....

Sure, it was all funny in retrospect, and I felt a gratifying sense of liberation in uprooting these delusions from my mind...
None of which changed the fact that I was broke...

The Guy I Almost Was

Da Music

I'm somewhat a slow learner when it comes to music. I started late (first Album, 1988, Guns and Roses, Appetite for Destruction, aged 16), and it pretty much always takes me several listens to get into music. There's literally no point me buying more than 2-3 albums a month because I just won't take in that much new music.

My music taste runs generally towards the darker end of the spectrum, although there are happy, joyful elements in there too. Staring at my music folder, there's Bowie and Coldplay and DJ Shadow and Depeche Mode and Alanis and Fatboy Slim and the KLF and Ministry and Mr Bungle and Nine Inch Nails and Pink Floyd and Pop Will Eat Itself and Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins and Suzanne Vega and The Beatles and The Prodigy and U2 and VNV Nation and numerous others that put me squarely into the 'alternative' charts.

I don't like being 'alternative' in anything, mostly because I'd vastly prefer it if the music I liked was mainstream and the drek that mostly populates the top ten was relegated to somewhere else. I've spent a lot of time thinking about music, about why I like what I do and what it is that categorises the music I like. This is mostly because people keep asking me "Why on earth do you listen to that??? The only answer I've managed to come up with is "It sounds how I feel" and that's generally true. Music, to me, is a primarily emotional experience. Sure, I've liked some music because it was technically incredible, or because the lyrics were well written, but that rarely carries a song past its third hearing. For something to be played more than a few times it really needs to sink in deep and pull out hanfduls of emotion.

The ever spiffy spidermonster was whining the other day that nobody else shared his taste in music. So I asked him for some recommendations, which I'm listening to at the moment (the joys of MP3, he simply copied a bunch of files into a "Nick Says" folder). Nick's taste runs towards the industrial. Well, that and really trashy pop music. So I'm mostly listening to Germans shouting over a drum machine that's obviously had a deeply unhappy childhood. Bits of it leave me cold (the very simple stuff), but bits of it are actually quite inventive, and even tuneful. I've never been into complete noise (except for the occasional blast of anger that catches me just right, like Ministry's TV II), but things which lie a few meters off the shore of complete noise can be very interesting and very satisfying. What I tend to like most is juxtaposition, where there's a really noisy background with beauty floating over the top of it or vice versa.

I've got nigh-on 100 tracks of various types lying here, which will no doubt keep me going for the next few weeks, by which time some of them will no doubt have inserted themselves into my consciousness and others will be gingerly picked up and deposited in the recycle bin. But it's definitely a good experience, pushing myself further into areas that I don't normally listen to, something which has always brought excellent results in the past.