Who put you in charge?

Some people are utterly amazing, I spent six months or so liaising with a team of palliative carers a few years back. They’d come in twice a day to give personal care to a friend I was keeping an eye on. Their work was backbreaking at times but they did everything with such good humour; the humour was vital. I’d make them a drink if they had time to knock it back before the next client, they knew I made good coffee and deeply respected what they did. There is an invisible army in Britain of underpaid, mostly, women that live out of cars and go from person to person caring for the sick and vulnerable. I was offered a job with them, funnily enough, but my life took a massive downslide and the opportunity passed. I’ve always known that humanity is as much bodily fluids as poetry and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise (but many do).

There is a lot of skill that comes with caring for the sick and dying, they knew more than the doctors in most cases as they saw it every day, the lady in charge was an SRN (state registered nurse) but it was only because I am very observant that I spotted that she was the boss, they were a unit and functioned so. They were part cleaner, part medic, part counsellor and part comedian and all of this with utter grace.

And so undervalued.

I’ve met so many others who treat such people like dirt, they give themselves airs and graces and waft through life as if they own the world; that it and the people in it are their playthings, little person shaped pieces on a board that they can pick up and move around for their own ends and amusement.

Other people would like you to think they are amazing, they give themselves big titles or act like they speak for everybody. I was doing some maths in my head this morning I’d counted about 15 people that I know of that, for no good reason I can see, have appointed themselves as pillars of the community. They weren’t born with extra brains (far from it in mostly) they have no visible gifts but for some unfathomable reason they act like they are in charge and their opinions matter more than everybody else’s.

For the sake of argument (and easy maths), let’s say there are a hundred people like that in this town who are (as they would describe it) bringing the community together. so one hundred out of 92,000 is… Roughly 0. 1% have appointed themselves as leaders, champions, heads of the community. Questions spring to mind; Who by? Why? What qualifications? What are the other 99.9% of people doing?

I have regretfully had a window into this world and watched these characters scurrying from cafe to cafe, getting this person to do this while that person does that and not actually doing anything themselves in-between, there might be loads of people involved in whatever but as they are the spokesperson, it’s them in the press, it’s them in the media and years later when you put their name in google, they are often the only one linked to the project. It’s a clever trick to say ‘community’ when what is really meant is ‘me! me! me!”

I think of those beautiful people up top and it angers me that while they are wiping bums, changing incontinence pants, emptying catheter bags and applying cream to bed sores there is a ridiculously visible minority that lift nothing heavier than a full cup of coffee and deal with nothing messier that a rare leaking ball point pen that will get paid twice as much and rewarded with attention.

I was wise to their game from the get go. Often, those that set up a ‘community’ project become the most important thing about it. You will find their name attached to some focal point or a statement that could have come from a whole team. All those little minions that they shined their light upon so briefly are left behind in obscurity as they inevitability move on to the next thing when the funding money runs out. They are like animals moving through the savanna , going from water hole to water hole, draining it back to dry mud and heading on, leaving a barren wasteland behind them.

I hate the insincerity of such people, they are all smiles and eye contact and they overuse your name because they did a course once where they learned how to manipulate people into getting what they want. They are the equivalent of the sets in an old western, painted fronts and bare boards and props for the parts that you aren’t supposed to see. That charm is linked to a switch, not a dial, and it flicks on when needed and off as quickly.

I have tried to remain anonymous for most of my life and I’ve met these types when they haven’t been aware of my skill set and they have looked right through me and every kind word is met with stoney silence and a glare; and then I’ve been introduced to them later, maybe a week, maybe a months, maybe a year as Chris Hoggins, “whatever” and you see the light bulb moment of what use I could be to their goal for attention and suddenly they are all charm and loveliness… but I never forget a name… or when someone blanks me.

Whether it’s turning your birthday party into a charity fund-raising event, using your victimhood as a moneymaking exercise, humiliating the homeless for your childhood ambition that you should have grown out of when you learnt the difference between right and wrong, claiming to be something you are not so that you can become the focus of a cause or running groups for the vulnerable while you and your immediate family are making their lives worse, a few people in my town or in any other town will always have an obscene need to be loved, admired and / or worshiped.

One thing that particularly fascinates me is how willing they are to scupper anyone else’s good works, often much better than their’s, for no other reason than it wasn’t their idea. They do not stand for the public good, just their own.

It’s safe to say that such people have some serious psychological issues that need to be addressed but like most of a narcissistic bent, they can never see that the problem that needs fixing most of all is them.

Crawl under a cow.

A few years ago now, I did a project with some vulnerable people. This has happened quite a lot over the years and on this particular occasion, there was going to be quite a bit of publicity. I walked in while the charity workers were doing the set up and there was a big photo of me…

I instantly asked them to take in down and any mention of me with it.

It was nothing to do with me, I just helped the people do the best they could, It was their work, their show. I was irrelevant. They were a little surprised but they were aware that I thought differently to most of the visiting artists (even I wasn’t aware how differently though as it was pre autism diagnosis)

I picked the wrong career basically. Or should I say, the wrong career picked me? Whatever! I don’t like publicity, I don’t like praise, I don’t like attention. I just try and do the right thing and that is that.

I have a motto; it’s slightly vulgar, “If you want a pat on the back, crawl under a cow.”

I cannot abide people that put more effort into seeming to do good than actually doing so. Particularly when I know the harm that they have already done in the past and the horrendous lies they are telling now.

Imagine, that you have experienced the most horrendous few years of your life and rather than put it behind you and bury it somewhere in your mind, you instead spend a year and a half trying to turn that into something positive that will help other people in a similar situation to help raise awareness and make a difference. Imagine just how traumatic that must have been and how much that must have taken out of someone with autism to relive nightmares and some of the worst moments of their life to ultimately help other people. Now imagine how it must feel to know that someone that has already demeaned and patronised vulnerable people has turned what you have experienced first hand into their latest hobby and source of virtue signalling?

What kind of person would do that? Is it virtue signalling? Some desperate need for approval? Or is it some sort of cynical career move?

I am reminded of the fake poor girl in Pulp’s Common People, the anger in that song. The barefaced, diabolical liberty of someone wrapping themselves in the cloak of the poverty of others for their own selfish reasons.

Does someone like that have any shame? Or is there just something missing in their psyche that allows them to behave in such a manner?

You never get a straight answer from people like that, they squirm and lie and obfuscate and even turn on the tears and pretend to be hurt, but it’s all just defence mechanisms. I doubt that beneath all that deceit there is even a person there. People like that don’t exist unless they are being validated by others and it doesn’t matter how horrible those people are. You can hope after hope that they will develop a conscience but it’s a waste of time. They cannot afford to take a good hard look at themselves as they would be horrified by what they see.

All that I can take from this bitter experience is the knowledge that I’m glad that I’m not like them. I’ve done everything for the right reasons and if that helps others great, and it it’s overshadowed by someone else’s vanity project, Its still out there in the world. At least I and a few other good souls will know the truth and it’s there for anyone else that wishes to join that number.

I would ask everyone out there to think twice before trying to feel good at the expense of the dignity of others and if you truly want to get a pat on the back for your, all too visible, good deeds…

Go crawl under a cow!

Looking good

No, this isn’t a knackered old geezer giving you beauty tips, although I do find it strange that people desire so badly to be thin that they end up looking all jowly, wrinkly and turkey necked, like way too much skin slung hastily over a skeleton… eurgh! Anyway, where was I?

I find it really hard to understand this need so many people have to be perceived as a good person, to be patted on the head and wait for a reward like a dog wanting a treat.

There are miles of difference between looking good and actually being a good person to the point that a lot of genuinely good people find life such a struggle.

Firstly, just who are you trying to look good for? Is it your friends, your family or the press and media? Or even the dreaded social media, that constantly mutating, algorithm controlled, cancer on the world.

If you are looking good for your friends, are your friends actually good? Are these good people? Because if they aren’t… oh dear… if you are trying to look good to people who are bullies, greedy, conceited, grandiose, superior, twisted inside or just plain unkind, things will always end in tears and if you can’t actually tell if they are or not then perhaps you should be working on yourself and dealing with that situation first. Families are just the same, I certainly wouldn’t want their approval unless I had a good long look at their motivations first.

If you want to look good to the press, then which? Then what are their politics, who are their advertisers, where does the money come from, who is the writer and why are they writing it? Are they a friend you’ve groomed, someone with an axe to grind, someone trying to bend the truth for some nefarious reason or cause or is it just someone wanting to make themselves feel important with a little badge that says ‘press’

Trying to look good on social media is relatively easy, just keep doing the same thing over and over again until the algorithms eventually find a little box to put you in. It’s an echo chamber where you can shout to your heart’s content about whatever and your ego will be stroked and your biases confirmed.

Being good is something very different and it’s exhausting. The first thing to know about being good is that you don’t; you don’t know if you are good and you never can. When being good, you don’t feel good and you certainly don’t feel a warm glow of your own wonderfulness because you know that you should have done better. Good people make bad leaders, they are never certain and they certainly aren’t filled with confidence.

Good people are often disliked because with goodness comes honesty. If you walk straight up to a puffed up person and punch your fist right through their fantasy world, although it rarely takes that much effort, a couple of words will usually do, they will not thank you, they will despise you.

Good people get nailed to crosses, for rocking the boat and making those trying to look good feel uncomfortable with themselves. I remember learning about that life lesson once but I’m not sure how many people got the memo. I think it’s in a book or something.

Good people get attacked a lot because they often are forced to try and contradict or even undo the deeds of those that want to look good but were too carried away to see what the consequences would be. Good people often stand alone because people get scared to get too close in case they get attacked too.

Looking good is as addictive as crack, it fuels you, it insulates you in a warm glow and it walls you off from reality. It rewards you with a false sense of security and self belief and then financially, possibly romantically and you attract what look like friends because they all see you as a bright little sun that they all want to orbit around because they are doing exactly the same thing as you.. It’s all so wonderful; so long as you don’t look too closely.

And maybe you will be lucky and you can keep looking good until the day you die like Gandhi, Mother Theresa, JFK and Martin Luther King Jr, all of whom are now widely know to have been rotten to their core, but mostly, it will catch up with you. Someone will eventually get hurt, someone will die or someone will be irreparably injured in your quest to look fabulous and garner praise. But I guess that’s okay because you just want to seem good and the damage you do doesn’t matter. Knowing any of these would crush a good person, shatter their faith and leave them terrified to make a single move for fear of further harm, but you aren’t good, not even close so crack on!

And how do I know this? What gives me the right to be so judgemental? Well, I’m not a good person, but I keep trying to be and that’s all any of us could and should do.

Didn’t you do well?

I had a very interesting experience the other day, I was sitting with a bunch of like minded people who were actually doing things for the right reasons. This doesn’t happen often outside my close knit group of very few friends and new occurances tend to fascinate me.

My community is full of truly pathetic people, it’s a much misunderstood word but it is utterly apt in this description. There are very few people I encounter that are actually doing what they do for the right reasons. They turn up at worthy causes to be seen to turn up at worthy causes and to meet the approval of everyone else there as a worthy and valid individual because they don’t seem to be able to exist outside of that circle of mutual validation. Like the light bulb in a fridge, they fail to shine when they aren’t being seen to shine by others. 

Compare that to the other day when everyone I was talking to had their own thing, they were doing it and had been doing it for a long while and they were doing it for themselves, because they had to, compelled to even. 

They weren’t doing what they do to feel better about themselves, they weren’t doing it to fill the yawning void where their soul should be and they weren’t doing it so that they could tell someone, they weren’t  doing it for some sort of approval.

That is the problem with much of what I see and hear around town, a lot of what is done is just done so people look good. The irony being, that most of the activities done to look good are done by essentially bad people and there is something rotten at the core of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

The first thing that anyone involved in the medical profession learns is the Hypocratic oath, and the first part of that is that one should do no harm. Much of what I see that is described as charity or community work breaks that very simple rule and is at best useless and at worst will actually causes either immediate harm or harm at some point in the future, yet still it goes on, as do activities that are just designed to draw attention to those participating in them.

The problem with having quite so many of the emotional and mental walking wounded in the community is that by that they reach a critical mass at which they can band together and convince themselves that they are perfectly normal, which is exactly what they do. The upshot of this statistical anomaly is that anyone who dares to pass comment on adults who either suffer from terribly low self esteem or some form of narcistic personality disorder become the odd one out by default, which is exactly what happens  to people like myself. In the end, you can actually start to feel that you have a problem in a way that these very damaged people are incapable of comprehending because, well, they are damaged.

You can’t talk these sort of people out of acting like dogooding arsehole and they won’t thank you for trying, (Trust me, I know!) all you can hope they do is get bored and go on to the next pile of crap before they cause to much harm.

Actually finding a few new people whose past doesn’t consist of a trail of chaos and carnage that goes back decades is rather refreshing and it helps me to soldier on through all the rubbish I have to deal with on a daily basis.

And the answer to the question in the title? If you need to ask, then you probably aren’t. 

A tyrany of extroverts

I’ve been trying to work out what the collective noun for extroverts is. A nuisance? An annoyance? A tedium? I think a tyrany works just fine.

Extroverts, narcissists, show offs and all those ‘in your face’ types are a constant bane of my existence. They are always out there doing something, showing off, seeking attention, jumping about and waving their arms in the air going “look at me!” They are the Tiggers of this world that I wish would bounce right into a pit of sharpened bamboo spikes.

Talking of Tigger, I remember hating him a far back as 1974. That constant fake, well it seemed so to me, cheerfulness. Give me pooh or eeyore any day, or soulful little piglet, but not that tiresome bouncy pain in the arse.

As someone who is much more of the stuffed toy donkey variety I find it tiresome on a daily basis to have to fight against a constant stream of needy people desperate for constant validation of their desire to be loved by everyone.

Let’s face it, the bulk of attention seeking behaviour is a manifestation of deep seated mental health problems. In the place where I live, the area is blighted by a plague of people  needing constant notice and praise. They self medicate with every substance going and their grandiose plans for events, parties and shows fall far short when they buffer against a reality of having very little talent. It’s low self esteem writ large, I would feel sorry and maybe a measure of sympathy if it wasn’t for the fact that their mental health problems infringe of the recovery of the quieter depressives of the town.

Well, just ignore them, I hear you say… I mean, seriously, have you tried to? I have, doesn’t work. They are everywhere and never stop. They are like ants at a picnic, you see one and then suddenly they are everywhere and you can’t even try and poison them.

I know they are not going to go away and they certainly aren’t going to get any better. So my wish is this…. Nah! I can’t event say it. All I wish is that they be transported to another dimension, something akin to a giant padded and sounded proofed cell where they can show off to their hearts content. Anywhere would do though, just so long as they are nowhere near me.

A very unmerry go round.

There is something very wrong with the place where I live. There is always something going on. It’s become like an incessantly chattering fool who never pauses for breath. If I were still living in London it would make sense as there are enough people to warrant the volume of things going on, but a tiny town? 

The problem is London though, or more exactly the exodus from it. There are two phrases I hear regularly now, DFL (down from London) and FILTH (failed in London, try h…………….), I left London to get away from the noise and nonsense but it it has followed me here. 

There is a reason most of these people failed in London and that is because they aren’t very good at what they purport to do and are trying to turn another place into their cultural playground in the hope that they can be big fish in a smaller pond. It smacks of desperation to me and many other people who quietly live here, many of whom do amazing things with little fuss.

It takes a lot of time, effort and dedication to get truly good at something and often it helps to have a natural facility on top of all that hard work. There is an easy  workaround though, and that is to host an event of some description. All it takes is five minutes on Facebook, maybe knock up a few posters, a trip to lidl to buy a few nibbles and suddenly you are the toast of the town! Well, you are the toast of the town to a few people, and to everyone else you are an attention seeking idiot but, hey ho, those people don’t count as they aren’t in the gang. Once you throw your event and get yourself on the reciprocal circuit of throwing and attending events without all that tedious being good at thing malarkey, job done! 

This actually worked for a while a few years ago, but now the town is utterly saturated with poorly planned and substanceless evenings out, so much so that they all blur into one. There are, however, only so many times anyone can go out in a year, even if you don’t really have a life and just trail from one to another before going back to your empty home and life.Over the past few years the town has turned into some shabby, coked up, version of Disneyland. There is stuff on constantly, including parades, and the same few attention seeking people turn up at everything. All that changes is that week’s silly dressing up outfit. People in their thirties to sixties do tons if drugs and get plastered and act like silly teenagers, many inbetween working with children and teenagers themselves.

It’s all utterly meaningless and anyone here with any real talent concentrates on working beyond the limits of this soiled hamster cage of a town and has much better things to do than turn up to any of it. It’s got to the point where it is all just a bloody nuisance.

I’d like to think it will all stop one day, and that all these arseholes with leave town and the place will settle down to something akin to normality. I suspect they will all eventually  keel over and die but then mainly they are as hard to get rid of as the cockroaches and the vermin that they resemble. It the meantime I shall keep on ignoring them and hope that they go away.