Almost immediately, I ran into a problem. The cops tried to blow up my luggage.

A man can’t even take a whizz on a train without the state getting up in his grill. Damn these post-terrorist times. Thankfully, the rest of the train journey was less eventful. In fact, it was so uneventful that I decided to do some watercolours out of the window, after drawing a dog and my waterbottle.

Painting on the train was ace, and I really enjoyed it. Sadly, it was the most productive – in terms of work I made – during my trip. As soon as I got off the train I was involved in the process of picking up my stuff and working out what to do with it.

I thought I would draw all the boxes from storage, but dealing with it was so exhausting – and so distracting – that it was hard to keep it together. Just waking up to the thought of all my boxes of crap was enough to wipe me out on Tuesday, and I spent the morning in bed under a giant fluffy duvet.

On Wednesday I picked myself up and went into town to see some friends. I took an early bus into the city centre so I could do some drawing, and this was pretty much the only time I managed to do so in the city. Lesson learned: if you want to do drawing, you have to make time for it. I particularly wanted to draw the train station, but those builders grabbed the good seats so they could smoke. I ended up surrounded by a bunch of teenagers.

(Oh, and by the way, excuse my fingers – this sketchbook’s uneven spine doesn’t make for good scanning. It does have lovely paper though, which makes it quite useful for on-the-go sketching.)

I managed a few quick watercolours before it was time for my lunch date, and then I barely managed to scribble anything on Thursday. I was exhausted by the prospect of throwing away, or giving away, pretty much a decade’s worth of stuff. Most of that stuff was books that I had built up, thinking they were the backbone of my “adult” possessions, but were just another lump of stuff that ended up needing to be disposed of.

I’m trying to write a short essay about it, but my thoughts are complicated by the reasons why I had to throw all that stuff away. Bad relationships, serious illnesses, and confused education choices made my life a lot more interesting than it normally is. The act of actually getting rid of the stuff was quite nice – a chance to see old friends, catch up, and give them presents. The act of sorting it out in some literary form is really tough, and I worry I’ve traded a talent with words for a talent with images…

My visit was generally fun, and it reinforced my urge to make more drawings, to make better drawings. But it also made me want to communicate better with those drawings, because otherwise, what’s the point?

It’s no fun running an email group. You end up doing a lot of work that nobody really acknowledges, and having to spend time listening to crazy people who just happen to have your email address, so therefore feel it’s applicable to send you any old bullshit they believe in. I can’t tell you the amount of unasked-for crap that ends up in my inbox these days.

At least most of that crap is about art though.

Now, in the past I’ve been somewhat respectful but disinclined to believe this stuff. Of course, I’m quitting ‘graft and have left newcastle, so I can just annoy people and not worry about it now. Hurrah.

With all due respect to (redacted), she’s one of those nice people who believe in a lot of airy-fairy bullshit. I have friends who are deeply into auras, chanting, magic, etc, and I’ve observed a few things about them. I’ve noticed that being inclined to believe in that sort of thing (auras, etc) seems to mean that you don’t have a very good critical facility; they tend to go on what “feels” right to them. They have trusted networks that send them emails – which I would consider to be spam – warning them about whatever cause du jour they consider important now.

Some people refer to this as relativism, meaning that what is important to one person must be given the same weight as what is important to another person. Or something. That’s not really a great explanation, but it’s one of the terms used to describe airy-fairy thinkers. It’s actually a bit of a bending of the term relativism, but that’s not so important.

I’m currently reading a Stephen King book about writing, and he describes how poetry in the sixties and seventies was full of relativists. They would write poems about the mountain – using it as a never-fully-explained analogy, and if you asked them to explain the analogy, the poet would decry you as somebody who doesn’t “get it”. King’s attitude to this sort of poetry seems to be “fuck you, I just wanted to know what you were talking about”.

That’s the problem with arguing the toss over geo-engineering, vaccines, or any of the other hot-button topics that airy-fairy thinkers favour. You make a logical reply and it’s all “you don’t understand”, or “but what about this proof from <a dodgy blog on the internet>” or “if you love science so much why don’t you marry it”.

I mean, it’d be perfectly possibly for me to go through those links and say what they really mean. I was even considering doing that. But we’ve been down that road before and it just leads to people asking me why I’m not getting gay married to science because I obviously love it so much. So bollocks to that. Did you expect me to sit here and let you pelt (metaphorical) rotten vegetables at me? No thanks!

Anybody who believes in airy-fairy bullshit because they “feel” it to be true, anybody who ignores the evidence that contradicts them because they have a set of beliefs, anybody who talks down science because “it doesn’t know all the answers”, is basically out to fuck you up. They want you to believe in something rather than think for yourself. They want your trust.

Because then they can feed you any bullshit they want.

Not only am I sure that I shouldn’t really be in Platform this year, I’m also sure that if you were to award/chose me to be in Platform you’d only be getting something along the lines of “Pete Hindle is nebbishly funny in a sarcastic manner about an element of geekdom.” This would suck; not that I’m not funny – far from it, the other day I made somebody laugh by putting on a jumper, and I’m pretty practised at making ladies laugh from the other side of the room by wiggling my eyebrows. But the reason that it would suck is that you’ve commissioned it before, I’ve done it already, and frankly, we’re all a little tired of stuff like that happening.

Hey, since Platform… whenever I did my last thing… nerds have taken off. In fact, you better be nerdy these days, since all the other social niches are pretty much played out, giving us this massive glut of homogenised stylish young people (girls: pretty, boys: dishevelled) who will no doubt be applying to do various things at this event. Hoo-fucking-rah; even the audiences at Platform are pretty darn hot these days, and considering that it’s a live art event (the epitome of niche) that’s saying something. I came to Platform last year with the pretty young girlfriend who broke my heart into a thousand pieces when she dumped me in Berlin, and even she was intimidated by some of the girls in the audience. Which is why I left early to go and drink mojitoes with her rather than stare at performance art.

Because, honestly, drinking with pretty girls is far more fun than performance art.

I was actually drinking with a few pretty girls recently when I made my nerd credentials quite clear. I said I was going to go home and watch Star Trek, at which point they laughed. I pointed out that I was wearing a red bodywarmer, and that I really was going home to watch Star Trek. I think they might have laughed some more at that point, but in a good way. I was, in fact, desperate to get home owing to the side effects of carrying around an ulcer in my stomach area for the past few months, such as not being able to drink and creating evil smelling farts out of my bottom. I’m presumably carrying around this ulcer owing to the stress of not working on my thesis, but I’m not entirely sure that having a useless fine art education and nowhere to display my “skillz” hasn’t also played a part in it.

So, if you really want an evil smelling, post-graduate educated sarcastic asshole who would rather be off drinking with pretty girls than making lame jokes about the puerile obsessions of a set of closeted individuals that value gadgetry and science fiction over personal contact and the real world, I’m your man. I do carry around in my head a few ideas that I might be able to turn into performances, so I thought I’d make a note of them in a list format in case you didn’t read any of the above.

•    The Quaker Performance: everybody sits in a circle and we have a traditional Quaker meeting, where there is silence for an hour. It’ll be awesome, promise.
•    Juggling: possibly with glasses. I can do a three ball cascade for around ten minutes.
•    Dialogue: I talk with the people in the audience, making them the focus of the performance. People will laugh.
•    The Fleetwood Mac Thing: I explain how I was in the unlikely position of having two girlfriends, and how I adopted the Fleetwood Mac album “Rumours” during that period.
•    The Roman Talk: I heart Romans. Did you know that Caligula tried to make his favourite horse a consul of Rome? Romans are comedy gold.
•    Full Lock: Somebody puts a car in the full lock position and does multiple donuts outside the venue. Again: awesome, with the added bonuses of illegality and danger of death.

Obviously, rather than fleshing out any of these ideas you’d be better employing another artist and giving them an opportunity that they’d enjoy. I’d probably find the whole prospect of standing in front of another audience gut-wrenchingly fear inducing and it’s not like I care enough to keep my CV updated anyway.

Arto Polus has some documentation of the day at his website, so please click through for the other serious artists, and a couple of pictures of me throwing balls around.

It was also nice to meet Andrej and Ewelina in person, finally, and I really enjoyed their company during the day. They are doing the Digital Media Mres that I’m now loosely attached to, so it was interesting to hear some other students talking about the course.

Above: Heaton Park, last weekend.

Like I said in my last post, I was back in Newcastle at the weekend. Luck had it that I came back for a scorchingly hot few days, and the local park became full of people. On one side of the park, there were families playing, a bowling green, and a coffee vendor. On the other side of the park, pictured above, there was a horde of students. These students clustered in groups of between two to thirty, and I felt far too intimidated to sit anywhere near all these young people being all hip. So I sat near the bowling green and read my book.

On Monday the weather changed, and the council sent some men to tidy up Heaton park. I was amused to see the leftovers:

Heaton Park is actually quite lovely, when you don’t have to kick half a dozen students out of the way to see the views. But I felt a little left out; I didn’t feel part of this world of young, lazing students, each posse blithely burning the shape of a disposable barbecue into the grass.

Heaton is a student area now, and for all that the council might talk about setting right “student ghettos”, they are ignoring the people like me who have lived on the edges of studenthood for a while. I chose to live in Heaton to get away from the reverse snobbery that other areas in the Tyne and Wear urban conurbation have; Sunderland might be a city, but it doesn’t have anything like Heaton. There’s no nice area with a choice of coffee shops in Gateshead’s Low Fell. There’s no late-night shopping strip in Fenham.

But that weekend, unable to get out of the house for fear of triggering my fatigue, I spent a lot of time looking out of the window. In the main, the people who live in Heaton have somewhere to go. Something to do. Last weekend, they might have been headed to the park to see their friends, but Monday meant that they were back at work, or back in the lecture hall. For me, it seemed like another day of an ongoing holiday.

Huck Scarry’s book “The World Around Us” has a brief introduction, where he talks about seeing the world from the window of his flat in Zurich. From my flat, I could see the inhabitants of Heaton pass by, sometimes headed out, sometimes headed home. The best seat in the flat is the one that lets you people-watch all the busy lives outside the window.

This final picture is of the watering of the bowling green. It was late on Sunday evening, in the magic hour, but still hot. The smell of the water jetting out over the grass was just right after such a long, dry day. We stood and watched the water droplets as they were whipped by the strong wind. For a little while, I’d got out past the window.

Six months ago, my Dad had driven to Newcastle to pick me up and take me back to my parents house in Biggleswade. I’d just got out of hospital, but I was far from well; I had a mysterious rash that covered my entire body, I was weak, and parts of me were swollen with arthritis. We all thought that these would go away (and I mean everyone, from doctors to parents to friends, right down the line to me) but three weeks later I was so sick I got dragged into hospital again*.

Somewhere around the 7th of December, I woke up on a hospital ward in Bedford and then had a massive rectal bleed. That mysterious rash that I mentioned earlier was the start of my vascular system shutting down, and when it became unable to pump blood around my internal organs, it started draining out the quickest way possible. Luckily, doctors were able to save my life, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this now.

I’ve spent the entire year so far recovering from that event. I’m a lot better now, but there’s still some lingering side effects – like fatigue, meaning that I get worn out from doing the simplest things. I’m not strong enough or well enough to live in my flat at the minute, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be well enough for another few months, by which time the lease on my flat will be over.

If I’m not well enough to live in my flat, you can bet I’m not well enough to work. As I was technically still a student when I got sick, I can’t have any welfare from the government – but I’ve obviously still got bills to pay. It looks like the only place I’ll be able to afford to live for a while is my parents house.

So, that night when I was lying in bed, it felt like I was moving out of Newcastle. Usually when you move it’s because you make a choice, and because you want to go somewhere new. This isn’t like that, and my reception on getting off the train at Biggleswade Station (nearly getting into a fight the very moment I stepped off the train) confirmed how I felt: I’m here, but I don’t want to be here.

* I don’t know why, but I always seem to get taken into hospital on a Friday. It’s really annoying – I assume that I’ll be fighting my way through an emergency room full of booze-damaged drunks.

Although I thought I was ready to start getting out again, I’ve found myself completely flattened by the experience. I guess I have to be a lot fitter – a lot healthier – then I am now, before I can pick up my old life. The only way I can explain it is like when you’re tired after some hard exercise. Except I don’t pick up after resting. This is my third day of resting up after my trip, and I’m still very weary.

Which really sucks, because the last thing I want to do is be stuck on the couch.

I might put a few posts up explaining what happened to me, as my medical crisis was both hilarious and gory. So when I can unstick myself from the couch, where I’m watching my way through these Star Trek box sets I brought back, I’ll update my blog with something a little more exciting than a post about shoes.

Addendum: I’m not actually that happy with this entry (hey – no links and no pictures?! Does this still qualify as a blog post?) but I’m just so knackered right now that it’ll have to do. It’s not like I can improve it with a picture of my couch.

Zed Shaw is an important man in the Ruby on Rails world, but more interestingly he’s a short-tempered essayist on elements of internet culture who has no truck with shibboleths. His blog might occasionally throw up a few nice pieces, but it’s his essays that are really interesting.

Mark Fisher has been linked to by a few people whom I enjoy reading, and I just finished his book. Thankfully, for a heavyweight leftist political tract, it was really short and kept referencing SF.

The Meat License Proposal by John O’Shea – imagine if you had to take the equivalent of a driving test to eat meat? One of the projects that, when I describe it, always has people volunteering to take a meat license test, where they would learn to kill and prepare their chosen meat.

The AV Festival is back again, with various installations and talks across the North-East. Some things are harder to locate than others on the sprawling website, and some feral trade coffee sounds good, but is this an open workshop or is it something else?

(I’m just too prudish to have it on my front page, but you can click through for NSFW object)

After a brief discussion between me and Alan (“Is that a…?” “Yeah.” “Look, it’s got crusty poo on it!” “That’s not poo, that’s blood.”) we took the above photo to mark the day we found a sex toy loose on the mean streets of Heaton. I’m not sure if that was the correct thing – the object did have blood on it, so perhaps I should have disposed of it safely. In a biohazard site, or something. I have nightmare images of a dog chewing it.

However, that wasn’t even the strangest thing I found. One street over, I found a 110 volt hammer drill sticking out of a skip. Considering these things retail at around £200, it seemed odd to just chuck it in the skip when you’ve finished renovating a house. They did take the plug off it before disposing of it – as if plugs were the expensive part of power tools.

I really wonder what’s going on that I could find these two disparate objects discarded in my neighbourhood. I am, however, the proud owner of a (probably broken) 110v hammer drill. Yay!

Some people suggested that I combine the two found objects. However, I have a personal rule not to take home blood-encrusted sex toys that I find in the street. I didn’t know that I had this as a personal rule until today, but you have to admit it makes a lot of sense.