γνῶθι σεαυτόν

I got my haircut today, in a salon with exculsively female tunic-wearing staff. I may have gotten slightly aroused. It occured to me (when I caught the faint whiff of seven working hours’ sweat mingled with her perfume as she moved around me, running her hands through my hair) that getting your hair cut by a member of the opposite sex is a bit like getting a lap dance or sleeping with a prostitute; you’re paying to have your prick teased, and your ego massaged by someone that flatters to deceive for a living. It’s a somewhat odd situation. Other than the fleeting brush with enduring female sexualism, I don’t enjoy getting my hair cut much; I never know what I want as I sit myself in the seat, and I try to convey my vague notions to the hairdresser through a succession of references to obscure musicians, actors and footballers she’s never heard of, and I end up with a style that isn’t unentirely not what I didn’t ask for. This time wasn’t so bad; I managed to get across that I just wanted a trim as I’m trying to grow it longer; it’s not quite Shoreditch standard, but it’ll do.

Maybe my struggles with haircuts are symbolic of my struggles with life in general. I don’t know what I want or what suits me, I just want something that doesn’t cause me too much trilogy. I’ve come to the conclusion that I might not long for happiness after all, and that I’d rather settle for equilibrium. I find myself expressing an interest in golf and snowboarding and becoming determined to carry out some joinery work in my sister’s house. I’m saving up for a house and a car; I have a pension and have joined a union, but I’m also learning about music production and I still find the Guardian too right wing for comfort. In short, I haven’t the faintest idea who I am or who I’m becoming, which is mildly unsettling. Am I returning to the middle class stock I was born into, somewhat against my desire to remain (at least notionally) a socialist, working class proleterian?

I have become smitten with a song from the new Doves album, Kingdom Of Rust. Called ‘Jetstream’, it’s an imagined closing track to Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, and I think it’s absolutely magnificent. It harks barks to Jimi Goodwin and the Williams twins’ days as dance act Sub Sub, merging subtle electronic flourishes and drum machines with Jez Williams’ always elegaic, atmospheric guitar playing create a dark, brooding and utterly wonderful track. Perhaps my appreciation of its merits can be guaged by looking at the Last FM play stats at the right hand side of this page; I listened to it about 24 times in a row last Friday night alone.

Now I am away to watch a DVD or perhaps play the Xbox. I might venture over to Edinburgh tomorrow and see if I can’t get into Murrayfield for the rugby.

Guitar hero

I appear to be reborn as a guitarist. What feel likes half a lifetime ago, I played lead/rhythm guitar in a post university band. We weren’t very good, but I always thought that had circumstance been a little more in our favour, we could have made a better fist of things. Since I left the band nearly four years ago, they’ve continued, changing their bass player but retaining the name and sound.

Since then, I’ve found myself drifting away from music a little, and certainly the guitar. I’ve dallied with the bass, piano, singing, drums, clarinet, accordian (and I long to buy a trumpet); I’ve familiarised myself with home recording techniques, and managed to record a few of my own songs, despite making things more difficult for myself than they needed to be, and I’m currently attending a night course in music technology. I cannot deny I’ve longed to perform music in public again, preferably as part of a band; however, I’m cautious about responding to adverts looking for musicians because I don’t think I have any talent whatsoever. I feel much more comfortable playing with people I already know and like, as I had with my previous band. Around six months ago, I found myself playing drums with two friends as we tried in vain to get some kind of band off the ground, and recruit a bass player. Presently the band would merge with another group of musicians I’d found myself in the company of, and now the six of us are trying to work out a sound and who should play what instrument. Although F is a better guitarist than me, he’s expressed a desire to play bass or drums, so after a few years of prodigal dabbling, I find myself the principal guitarist of our outfit.

I haven’t been completely neglecting my six stringed instruments however. I have been striving to get a few, fairly tricky songs down pat, to prove to mysefl that I’m not as bad a guitarist as I think I am. And, in the last few months, I have finally mastered ‘Sultans of Swing’ and ‘Breaking Into Heaven’. Well, 95%. I’ve also finally broken a couple of mental blocks with ‘This Charming Man’ and ‘A Design For Life’, which I put down to eventually realising I’d had my fingers in the wrong places.

Hopefully this latest attempt at forming a band comes off. I no longer possess the same dreams of writing the great British album that I used to hold so dear, but there’s something incredibly enjoyable about playing music with other people, in public.

I sometimes wonder if I do have depression. This isn’t some post-teenage angst however, it’s a reflection on the way I generally feel and the fact my sister, mother and father are all on some form of anti-depressant medication, but…

There’s something that’s always prevented me from pursuing the matter, from making an appointment with the doctor, to seek his opinion, mainly because I feel that if I’m fed up (and if it even is depression), then it’s a sign that something’s wrong in my life that needs to be resolved. If I was to start taking medication, would I then find myself oblivious to problems I should deal with? Then again, the pills my mother takes apparently have reinvigorative properties; that’s certainly something I could deal with.

I felt particularly fed up in Glasgow yesterday. This was perhaps instigated by it taking me 45 minutes, 15 miles and five petrol stations before I found one with a working air pump I could check the tyre pressures with. I shouldn’t go into the centre of one of Europe’s bigger cities when I’m exasperated with humans and their so called nature. There are a few bits and bobs I need/want to buy, and yet I’m struggling to find. For instance, I needed a new wallet, preferably a leather one with a coin section and a window for my driving licence (it took so much hassle to get it, I like to show it off), but I couldn’t find one anywhere other than Marks & Spencers. I wasn’t quite prepared to pay £22, despite the fact it was a nice wallet, and I don’t really want to hasten my descent into middle-aged, middle-class inertia by shopping at M&S anyway (apologies to M&S customers, it’s a personal thing). I finally found a wallet that fit my criteria in the very last shop I looked in, which is based in the ground floor of the car park I’d deposited the car in.

I nipped back home for a short while, but I was due back in Glasgow at 6 for a band ‘rehearsal’. A potted history: Kevin, Freddie and I had attempted to get a band off the ground for a while without much success. Meanwhile, Freddie recruited me to play bass for a backing group his friend had put together. After the talent show Andy (the friend) had entered, we all expressed an interest to do something else in the future. As both groups were struggling to get off the ground, we decided to see what merging them would do, and thus Kevin has joined Freddie, Andy, Dilane, Daniel and I as our de facto bass player, a somewhat cunning move on my part. I don’t particularly want to play bass, at least not full-time, and Kevin would be the first to admit he’s not a great guitarist.

The rehearsal was a little shambolic to be honest. We attempted a version of ‘High and Dry’ by Radiohead which we eventually managed to make sound almost passible. We also played ‘U Got it Bad’, the song Andy performed at the talent show, and the only one we can actually play from beginning to end. Otherwise, it was a complete shambles. Dilane (a very competent all round musician) got a little fed up, and I think some of the others were quite dispirited. I’m a little more optimistic however; I think we’re bound to sound awful during our initial practices, so we should look at the situation again after a few more sessions.

I gave Kevin a lift to the station from Concert Square; it took us fifteen minutes to exit the car park. Because there are roadworks on Cowcaddens Road, traffic exiting left from the car park is currently taking a good deal longer to get through the lights at the junction of Port Dundas Road/West Nile Street. Ideally, I would have liked to have turned left for West Nile street, but by turning right a few times, I could be on the same street in a fraction of the time it would have taken to sit in that left hand lane. It never fails to amaze me how human beings can be such unthinking, ovine drones, unable to think laterally or outside the group mentality.

I don’t think I have the same operating system as other human beings though. I’m normally aware of this, but perhaps not quite as acutely as I was yesterday. During the search for my new wallet, I ventured into Princes Square, something I haven’t done in years, mainly because the shops are too exclusive for my wallet. Strange irony there. Anyway, I was just about to step onto an escalator when a young couple passed in front of me, in that blissful, symbiotic ignorance that freshly minted lovers seem to share. My first impression of the male suggested he was a bookish, guache type fellow, but he was more familiar with the above noted feeling than I am, as a less bookish, guache type fellow. I’ve also noted it in the difference in writing styles of Kevin and I; I have a compulsive need to explain, document and analyse everything, while Kevin seems to deliberately obfusticate life. Which of the two of us do you think is the more comfortable in his own skin?

The success of the long term goal depends on the success of the short term goal

I haven’t blogged in a while, anywhere, which would have been unthinkable five or so years ago. My mind is increasingly drawn to that famous quote of Winston Churchill’s that “If a man is not a liberal at eighteen, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is thirty, he has no mind”. As I hurtle uncontrollably towards 30, I cannot help but accept that human beings quite often metamorphose into completely different people during their twenties. Churchill’s quote above about the passion and fire of youth cooling into the more mature and sanguine mindset of middle age.

I find myself recently on my own journey towards this ‘respectability’ over the last 18 months or so. There are subtle indications of me becoming a tweed-jacket wearing, Volvo-driving, boring old fart. I’ve recently expressed a desire to take up golf, and I’ve become obsessed with watches and loafers. However, the main sign of burgeoning ‘maturity’ has been not a shifting in the spectrum of my political beliefs (still as befuddled and apathetic Liberal Democrat/Labour voter as ever) to Conservative as much as to Communism.

No, that’s overly dramatic. In reality, I’ve started this year with a flurry of short term and long term plans to try and ease me through the next 15 years of my life. I have discovered in recent years that I function far better when I delineate the tasks I have to carry out each day, both in work and here, lest I end up getting swamped under or spending all evening playing the Xbox and getting absolutely nothing done. It’s this approach that’s led to me missing out on so many opportunities in the past just because I simply wasn’t prepared for them.

So, I aim to set myself a series of daily tasks, of things I really should achieve that day. In addition I have further three, six and nine month plans, two, five and ten year plans. It seems a horribly sanitized way to live, an abomination of free will, but I’m rather more upbeat about it. I have goals and aims I want to achieve in life, and specifically over the next 15 years, and I’ve put this framework in place to help me meet those goals. It’s like the maxim that one should work to live and not live to work; I’m planning to live. I’ve started on these long and medium term plans, and if all goes to plan, I should be in a far better place (mentally) by the summer of 2010.

Not that I’m hung in a bad place at the moment; I have quite a comfortable existence at the moment. I’m still three weeks away from my return to football, but my job’s going well-ish, I’ve completed a quarter of my day release course, I’m going to a night class in music production, I’m swimming twice a week and cycling to work twice a week and my framework of ambition has given me some faith in the future for the first time in a long time. I can actually see where I want to get to, and that’s infused me with a wonderful sense of calm.

I’ve said this before…I’ve said this so many times before, but I think I’m getting somewhere at last.