Here’s a selection of stuff that’s happened to me over the last week or so: I had a close encounter with a squirrel legging it out of a tree in our orchard, saw the world’s cutest blue-eyed border collie puppy down in the woods near ours, trimmed my ear-hair and left huge clumps of it in the bathroom sink, was saddened by the news of the death of Leon off Gogglebox, laughed a lot at a new cartoon by Lee Healey and Barney Farmer (of Drunken Bakers fame) and made my girlfriend watch The Signalman starring Denholm Elliot, purely so I could tell her the superior ‘double Denholm’ joke I’d thought up an hour earlier.
It’s all minutiae innit, just daft little scenes from a life, and none of it’s even vaguely important, not even the ‘double Denholm’ joke (which was a fucking cracker, by the way). But all of the above things have something in common, and that is that as soon as they happened, my first reaction was to log onto Facebook and let the 1,000+ mostly-strangers that I laughably call my ‘friends’ know about them. And that’s when I realised that Facebook is altering the way I approach my existence; rather than just living my life, I seem to be regarding it as a way of creating content for my social media persona, and that’s not healthy.
I’ve got an addict’s mindset, always have had. If I enjoy doing a thing, I absolutely tear the arse out of it, to the exclusion of everything else around me. when I was too little for drink and drugs, I was addicted to playing table-tennis. When I got sober in the late 90s, I did so by plunging head-on into writing, which, looking back, was probably my first ever habit. I listened to Caitlin Moran on Desert Island Discs the other day, and she said that when she’s about to sit down to write, her mouth begins to water as if she’s going to eat something delicious. I get that too, a glorious sensation of anticipation, flexing my mental muscles and buzzing like fuck doing something that I’ve always considered to basically be Free Drugs.
We’re all made up of different personas, tailored to fit into assorted scenarios, and one of the reasons I plunged obsessively into doing JaZZ RiOT is because I thought that the skinny rhyming gobshite in the battered top hat was my favourite of these personas, the one I most wanted to be as often as possible. But I’ve since come to realise that, much as I love that over-confident, svelte and suave motherfucker who thinks he’s in the best band in the world and will happily tell you as much, he’s not my favourite Ettrick Scott, because all he’s doing is reciting words that another Ettrick Scott crafted. And it’s this Ettrick - the one who’ll sit at a PC for hours in a manky dressing gown, sifting through his vocabulary and trying to make himself laugh - that I most want to be as much as I can.
And while I don’t need other people to validate my writing for me, Facebook has got me into the habit of fishing for ‘likes’. When I stick a new lyric up online, I’ll obsessively go back and see how it’s being received, instead of trusting my own judgement. As a result of this, JaZZ RiOT’s lyrical catalogue is full of stuff that I’ve written and then just forgotten about or never bothered returning to. Jon Lee from the band often says “can we have a crack at X”, when we’re rehearsing, because he’s seen the worth in a song that I’ve gone right off, largely because it hasn’t hoovered up the admiration of my online audience. It’s not a great way to work, is it? I really don’t care what people think of my work, yet our current set is being shaped largely by being based upon how many people could be arsed to click on a blue thumb.
So I’ve knocked it on the head for now, yer Facebook, gone proper cold turkey. I’ve got over fifty notifications since I’ve been gone that I’m itching to click on, if I’m being honest, but y’knaa, they won’t be anything important, will they? Seeing what people like or what they’ve said won’t enrich my life one iota, so fuck that.
I hope you enjoyed reading this. I enjoyed writing it. But don’t bother yourself liking it or commenting on it. I won’t be reading your thoughts/kind words/insults. I’ve got other stuff to be cracking on with: they say that a mythical land exists out there beyond this blue-and-white echo chamber, and I’m leaving the bubble to see if I can discover it….
I hope you enjoyed reading this. I enjoyed writing it. But don’t bother yourself liking it or commenting on it. I won’t be reading your thoughts/kind words/insults. I’ve got other stuff to be cracking on with: they say that a mythical land exists out there beyond this blue-and-white echo chamber, and I’m leaving the bubble to see if I can discover it….
