Mother Teresa’s Sandals

Fetch the falcon from the forlorn forest you fallacious Fabians.

Welcome to my blog.

If you’re a new reader, I suggest you go back to some earlier stuff so that you can get a taste of what the fuck I’m about. There are some good ones on mental health and also some short stories. The short stories in particular, will definitely give you some context of what I will be rattling on about this week.

If you’re a regular reader, then welcome you back you magnificent cunt.

So I’ve just come off an eight day stint from my new secret service job. It requires a fair bit of physicality and I have sustained a rather offensive abdominal muscle strain while working out and it left me walking around like a had to have an urgent poop all the time. So every spare minute I had, I spent it doing stretches and yoga so I didn’t look too ridiculous. It is much better now and I was hoping to gym again on my days off, but gyms are now temporarily closed due the resurfacing of Goblin of Strange and Uncertain Times. Jacinda says it will be three days at least, but I’m pretty sure we are in for the long haul.

I’ll still be doing my day job, but bike riding will now be out of the question. So I’ll just be sat here doing this when I’m not at work.

A few weeks ago I made a Facebook post about some middle aged man I saw riding a skateboard with some kids at a skatepark I was taking my kids to.

Now I was never blessed with the ability to understand how to ride a skateboard. When I was younger I gave it a go, same as with surfing, and I was never good at both of these.

I felt a strong contempt for the older gentleman doing grinds and flips and jumps. Not because he was good at doing them and I wasn’t, but because I felt that this was not the kind of thing that an adult should do.

This thought I had was somewhat hypocritical, as I am called a giant child rather often in quite a disparaging way by some of the people in my life. I said this before on my blog that when I was a young boy my material and life goals were pretty clear. I was doing vision boards way before the hipster cucks starting making Netflix shows about it. My bikes, my cars, moving overseas, my gorgeous missus and Kylie Minogue that I keep locked up in my garage are things that I had pinned up on my bedroom wall.

These are the dreams of boys and I still enjoy the same things I enjoyed when I was 14 now at 41. I still prefer a game of football or rugby over a deep conversation about existentialism. I prefer spending my money on toys instead of purchasing a Rolex watch.

This leads me into what I want to talk about this week. I have spent days trying to understand why I felt that high level of anger towards that fella on the skateboard and I discovered that as an adult, I felt threatened by his behaviour. The way he was majestically riding that ridiculous four wheeled contraption was contrary to what I think adulthood should look like.

I might go deep on this one lads.

But first.

This blog is funded by you, the reader, and although I have lost some donors due to the lack of frequency of my publications, I will continue to do them as I do find them cathartic and I know that some of you enjoy reading it. However I have a demanding day job now and I’m ramping up my other projects as I’m so far behind with them.

I am no longer doing it for the money, but if you feel that you would like to buy me a coke or a cup of coffee, you can. Just support the Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/Blacksheepwriting?fan_landing=true

I used to be part of a startup company. I was not a stakeholder, but I was employed by these two lads to run the production for the service and products they were providing. I was the first employee. It was a good few years ago, but I remember the journey.

We were punching well above our own weight at that time for sure. We used to attend conferences and award shows in these overstated bespoke tuxedos and buy cheap drinks in posh glasses. I used to be the only black guy at these events and the novelty of that often made me a bit popular, this inevitably helped us with business. Plus we were all great at pretending we knew what the fuck we were doing.

This was how we grew our business, but as we made more money and we grew older, I noticed that the bosses were slowly transforming into the mainstream paradigm of adulthood. As they bought sportscars and top shelf whiskey, I witnessed them grow more and more miserable. No more tuxedos and laughable glasses of cheap drinks. No more novelty conversation and gimmicks. They became proper businessmen, and I was not enjoying it anymore.

I’m under no pretence that the problem laid with them. Having a serious, successful business is what they set out to do. The problem was once again with me, they were performing a version of adulthood that I did not understand or enjoy. But watching them go from happy entrepreneurs to miserable successful businessmen leaves me wondering if this is what they actually wanted for themselves or is it just a performative version of adulthood.

Call me a shit cunt if you like, but I have a theory of why I think people participate in this performative form of adulthood.

I think it is caused by capitalism and luxury advertising. When you watch an advert for a Mercedes Benz or see a promo for Rolex, I noticed that these ads are super serious. They never use humour or fun in these ads, and although nobody I know can afford these things, they talk about them anyway. Just because something is serious, doesn’t mean it’s correct. Solemnity in anything other than being humble, serves no fucking purpose.

This makes these things exclusive and people strive to attain them. This makes us better consumers, and subsequently, better cogs in the capitalist machine.

I’m not going to talk about capitalism again, we all know I am a Marxist Beta Snowflake. Instead I will talk about what I think proper adulthood is.

Being an adult for me, and I’m not talking about just turning 18, means knowing and understanding your own feelings and emotions.

Here’s one that I struggle with all the fucking time.

I’m properly into my 40’s now and I have had to start over with my career. I am now meeting loads of new people that are younger than me and have much better jobs than I do. I am not devoid of feeling jealousy and often I do feel a bit jealous of them.

Quite often I have to really cop onto my thoughts about not prejudging people.

Let me humour you for a second.

Imagine if you’re invited out to dinner and a new friend is introduced to the group. Maybe he is a lawyer or some shit, and you are a forklift driver.

I can guarantee that without even knowing the person you will instantly believe that he is a right prick and you think he will show everyone up with his success. This is a normal first thought for almost everyone, but some people will actually run with this theory. This is your mind’s way of protecting your own insecurities. The rest of the night you will protect yourself from this person by displaying antisocial behaviours.

The honest way to think about this situation is “This person is successful and I feel threatened by him. He makes me feel that I should’ve done more with my life and I think he is a prick because I am trying to protect my insecurities and self-esteem”.

If you can acknowledge this, to me this is being an adult. Those who can’t do this are often the ones who play into performative adulthood. They often find themselves looking at things they can’t afford and almost always find themselves in loads of debt so that they can live up to societal expectations.

My word count is getting too high, but this is only one example of how physical adults have the emotional maturity of a child. There are loads of them, like gossip or impulsive buying. Anything that delays gratification or puts it off altogether is a good indicator of maturity. Not the other way around.

Adults know that fun and happiness does not lay in material goods, but don’t get me wrong. If your Bentley and Rolex makes you genuinely happy, then keep buying them. But if you’re buying them because you think that it makes you an adult, you’re adulting wrong.

This is why I love bikers so much. The reasons and rules around riding are so rigid that posers or fakers are easily found out. There is an honesty in riding, especially in groups.

Here is an actual true story example of placing maturity in capitalistic things.

So one of my riding groups turned up at our rendezvous point one Sunday for a breakfast run. There was this new guy on a Ducati that decided to join us. None of us had met him before, but everyone is welcome to join us. In our usual fashion we were ripping the piss out of each other, joking about our bikes and our flaws when riding. I then decided to take the micky with the Ducatisti. I suggested that his bike was made from old cappuccino machines. He did not like this as the bike will have costed him north of $30k. We all knew this.

He did not like the joke and decided to leave. As he started his glorious machine he told me, and I quote “Talk shit to me when you can afford one of these”. He then stalled the bike and we all laughed. He then did a pretty awesome wheelie and disappeared. Never to be seen again.

This seems like a bit of a non event, but is a fine example of someone being a performative adult. We were the ones acting like children and he thought he will be the adult in the room. He was unable to have the emotional intelligence to understand that we were playing around and subsequently embarrassed himself.

I don’t know this guy at all, but to me it seemed like there was too much of a gap between his real self and his ideal self.

The real self being you. The person you are when you are by yourself or with the people you feel comfortable with. The person who laughs at dumb shit and cries when you’re watching City of Angels.

The ideal self is the person you want the world to believe you are. The ones you tend to promote on social media.

When there is a very big gap between these two, you tend to fill this void with material goods. These are the people who end up placing their value in owning things. Advertisers love these cunts.

I still have loads to say about this topic. Especially around psychoanalytic theory so I might pick it up next time. The average toilet break is 6 minutes and I’m over that threshold.

Hope that makes sense.

Rub a dog.