Hello and welcome to my blog, you absolutely gorgeous cunts.
So something made me get really introspective about an email reply I got a few days ago. The email I sent wasn’t particularly important, I was just ordering some stuff. But because of my background and natural ability for wordsmithery, I always try to add depth and humour to any sort of writing I do, even in the most professional of settings. The reply I got had fuckall to do with my inquiry, it was all about how much they enjoyed reading the email.
This is one of the few things in which I feel really confident.
I thought about where it all started, and I think I found it.
I’m not a super keen reader now, but when I was young, I’m talking 5 or 6, we used to have those massive Encyclopedia Britannica cabinet sets. Once my older brother went to school, my Mum used to pull them down for me and I would spend all day going through them. Just browsing and asking questions. I was always curious about how things worked, and I still am. Most of my free time now is spent on Wikipedia. My Dad told me that whenever he bought us toys, he had to buy three. One for my brother, and two for me. Because he knew I would strip the shit out of one of them.
I’m sure my Mum used to get annoyed with me bothering her all day and started showing me words and sounding them out so that I could at least understand the very basic shit. This meant that by the time I went to school the following year, I was well able to read and write at a higher level than the other kids. I was by no means the smartest kid, I couldn’t count for shit and I was as coordinated as a Jack Russell with human hands. But I could put thoughts on paper, and I had a massive imagination because of the encyclopedias.
I was a fat kid with a giant head. I also spent the first two months of school with a barrage of boils on my lower body. I haven’t a clue why I got them, but I do remember being very anxious when I started school. Needless to say it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I couldn’t play with the other kids because I was contagious and I had to sit on the mat as my boils had made it impossible to use those old school benches. They were as utilitarian as Stalin’s eyebrows in those days.
We had this task to do, a very basic task.
The teacher was Miss Daniels, she was lovely, I even have her on my Facebook. She was covering our class one day and she told us to write a short story and draw a picture of what we were writing about. I went about writing a fantasy story about this utopian society where all the citizens had massively large heads, like mine was at the time I guess. The story goes that there was this normal kid with a normal head that was constantly teased and ridiculed by the other citizens. Until one day he was called upon to get the key to the city that had fallen into a hole. His normal size head was able to fit into the hole and he was hailed as a hero. This was the first story I have ever written I think.
I was the only one who asked for extra paper and all the kids were laughing at me, thinking that I was making mistakes. I was already laying flat on my stomach with the capillary action of the boil pus forming geometric shapes on my shorts like crop circles.
When the time was up, I hadn’t drawn my picture yet.
As a 6 year old, I wrote 766 words. The other kids had written maybe around twenty or thirty, but they had awesome drawings.
Miss Daniels contacted my parents about this story and initially I thought I was in trouble because I hadn’t drawn a picture. However, the next day she asked me to join her in the standard 5 class, this was the highest class in Primary School. She let me read out my story in front of them, helping me along the way. I got a massive round of applause from this and thus my ability to have the confidence and have no reservations about writing.
I wrote that for me.
Even now, when I’m writing and submitting works for publication using my pen name, I write for myself, I honestly do not give a flying fuck about what people think. I am my target audience.
Just thought I’d have a bit of a rant this week.
If you’re new to this blog I suggest you go back and read some of my earlier stuff so that you can get the jist of what happens here, but you can start here if you want. The blogs aren’t necessarily sequential. If you’re a regular reader, welcome back you absolute prick.
I want to talk about online activism for a bit, and particularly the oldest online justice protest I can remember.
Let me get paid first.
This blog is sponsored by you, the reader. As you know, I don’t have any sponsors anymore. They seem to be bothered by my profanity. But like I mentioned in my rant, I write this for me. Once I lose creative control because of corporate cunts, I won’t enjoy doing this anymore. I pandered to the old goblins once before when I was actually dependent on this blog for income.
Here is the link to my Patreon.
If you feel you want to donate, and you are able to, please do. If you can’t or won’t, this is ok also. This is a system that is based on kindness and everyone gets the full blog content.
https://www.patreon.com/Blacksheepwriting?fan_landing=true
What made me think about this shit?
I’ve had well over 20 years of work that wasn’t really making this world a better place, in fact it was fairly destructive and counter productive. So as I mentioned on a previous blog, I have taken a job that purely serves to help people, literally the worst people of society. My online content and writing is not generating nearly enough income in this gig economy, so I may as well do something noble as a supplement.
However, after doing this secret job for about 3 months now, I’ve come to realise that my intention to help is very often mistaken for being self-serving. These kinds of misguided assumptions are extremely common and dangerous. Today I feel pretty discouraged.
The best example of this, that everyone will know is the birth of clicktivism way back in 2012. Do you remember Joseph Kony? You don’t?
Kony was a Ugandan Revolutionary who used child soldiers to wage war against the Ugandan government.
A video by an organization called Invisible Children surfaced in February of 2012 about what is happening in Uganda. This was also the birth of click bait and clout rage. This ended journalism full stop. People would rather find their news on social media as social media is more personalised and it felt like real time. This evokes an emotional response.
I was one of the very few people in my community that had the internet before Facebook, and this kind of thing never happened on MySpace or Bebo.
Also, this was the first time that celebrities and people with influence jumped onto social media and supported a cause. With Kony, I think Oprah was on it, Michelle Obama, Rihanna, Beyonce and some others. This kind of White Knight online activity from already famous people is very influential and also does wonders for their fame.
I remember going deep with this, as at that time I was a Journalism student. The internet allowed me to follow and research every aspect of this new kind of activism and reporting. For about 3 months this Kony shit was going viral. The use of the word ‘viral’ in the online space hadn’t even been invented yet.
I also discovered that the creator of Invisible Children, Jason Russell was a white American Evangelical Christian who pledged to help people and do as much good as possible. He seemed a genuinely empathetic person as far as I could investigate.
Then one day all the Kony stuff disappeared from the internet, even the tabs I saved. I tried finding out where it went, but all that remained was these articles about Jason Russell. There was an article in the Ugandan paper about how they refuse the help of the Great White American Saviour, and how this Jason fella is only doing this to make money.
People online started ripping the shit out of him, calling him selfish and self-serving. The whole thing just went away and I focussed my attention on something else.
Then in early 2013 this video of Jason Russell surfaced on the internet. It is him, balls naked in a public space, masturbating while being recorded on CCTV. I wasn’t there and I don’t know the guy, but I bet he couldn’t handle the stresses that came with being misjudged for good intent.
When your personal rules are that rigid about the end of a means, you are bound to have mental health issues. I’ve come to realise in my experience with life, is that life is meaningless chaos, and you can’t control what happens to you or what people think of you. You can only react to how you handle these thing.
The only guarantee in life is death. Everyone and everything will die, you too will die. Suffering is part of the human experience, it is an essential part of being alive. This is very liberating existence,
So to prevent myself from wanking into a CCTV camera is to stick to my internal locus of evaluation. I judge my activities by the way it makes me feel about myself, as long as I’m not hurting anyone else.
I am my target audience.
Ok look after yourselves, look after others.
Stroke a cat, go to the gym and eat well and encourage others to do the same.
