Armed with a half price South African red wine and some suitably depressing music, it’s probably time to begin with the first post proper. I’m usually banging on to anyone who’ll listen that experience is all about perception. Nothing new there then, but I feel that many people miss the whole point of this assertion. Perception isn’t just about receiving information from our environments, the means by which this information is processed and interpreted is equally important, if not more so. Self helpers, motivational speakers and other social parasites of this type capitalise on this basic truth to try to turn shy, insecure unsuccessful people into brash, insecure unsuccessful people. As I said to someone recently, we aren’t just automatons going through life reacting to external stimuli. She stared at me and told me that I wasn’t helping.
I’ve just spent the past nine years of my life living in Aberdeen, North East Scotland. The backdrop it provided of Gothic gray granite architecture and shambling dead eyed heroin addicts ended up giving me the impression that I was some sort of living George from Rainbow, bimbling my way through the city in a dewy eyed haze of pinkness and endearing speech impediments. Unfortunately, the truth is that I’m no camp pink hippopotamus and never will be. Moving to South West Wales, where green hills and valleys are gently dotted here and there with postcard ready villages populated by people with easy going natures and a fondness of humour seems to have cast me in a different light. Gone the pink gay thing from my childhood television set, bring on the cackling gray miserablist. I actually live in an old mental asylum on top of a hill next to the town I now live in. I have visions of being chased out of town by angry locals with burning torches, albeit in an easy going and good humoured way.
The point I’m coming to is concerning the differences I’ve noticed between a good friend of mine, I’ll call Mark, and I. His world view is, although not an optimistic one, certainly a healthy one to my mind. I called him some time ago and, as etiquette demands, asked how he was doing. As it turned out things were not going that well. “You know when you have the shits and you have to puke in the sink because of the smell?” was his reply to my half sincere inquiry after his health. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him he revealed after I’d stopped laughing. The thing about Mark is that he is able to simultaneously see the horror of a predicament yet also the inherent humour. Initially he’d automatically assumed that everyone must have to “puke in the sink because of the smell” every now and then, what could be more natural? When he discovered that not everyone led their lives in such a base fashion, his response was to find the whole thing hilarious. Undignified, uncomfortable, but none the less fucking funny. For my part, I don’t deal as well with embarrassment or personal discomfort. I can agonise for a whole day following a night out where I might, for example, flirt with a lesbian, be threatened by said lesbians girlfriend and then go on to piss in an ornamental fountain. Not that I would behave in such a way you understand, this is merely illustrative of the sort of thing I would worry about.
For fun, can you guess which of the two guys in this picture is Mark?
