Resources For Shy People

"Are you lost?"
"No, I'm just looking around..."

"This Nostalgia for charmless times = Fear of Tomorrow." Grant Morrison.

All we ever wanted was everything

"Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? - for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is ther except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it? Money has become the grand test of virtue."

George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

Beneath the pavement, the beach...

the news is a veil. Behind it sits a sniggering child's idea of what truth is. The news pimps , like the politicians and media stars they simultaneously attempt to deify and destroy [like true believers], exist in a world that is far [removed] from our own. Their priorities are not the same, their standards of living. But on an emotional, and pyschological level, there lives are no richer than ours. And surely these are the aspects of our lives which are the most treasured, the most vital.

We live under a continual pressure to conform to other people's notions of who we should be, how we should behave, appear, speak, think; what we should eat and drink, who we should associate with, who we should want to sleep with.

Teachers, preachers, politicians, journalists, directors, marketing executives, employers, the people we always end up arguing with down the pub - none of these people know the first thing about who we are, what we really need, who we really want to be, where we want to be, and who with.

They too exist under a pressure to continually sell us images, materials, objects, things that we never really need - and yet time and time again, they sell us more of the same. Even those of us who attempt to bypass the endless one step behind of fashion, find that the images that we create are taken from us, imitated, stripped of meaning, and sold back to us at massively inflated prices, in the kinds of stores we feel we shouldn't be shopping in in the first place.

It's a fabulously cruel equation that the majority of us are not permitted to understand.

If we could really start to attempt to decide the difference between what we are told we need, and what we really need [in food, clothing, entertainment, objects], how much less money would we need to survive? And how much more of our time would we be able to reclaim through this pressure to earn?


Beneath the beach, the pavement...


We have a tremendous thirst that will never be quenched by consumerism. We have barely begun to decide what we are really craving for, but we are continually failing to find it amongst the endlessly regurgitated consumer garbage we are being sold - bigger TV's to watch the same old crap; more expensive stereos to listen to the same old music, in the latest, but not necessarily better quality format [fact: minidisc holds far less information than CD; fact: CD holds a lot less information than vynil]; clothes that are past their sell-by date regardless of the fact that they are still of wearable condition [we're just not ALLOWED to wear them anymore for fear of looking out of touch]; clubs where we have to PAY for the privallege of dancing to our favourite kinds of music. Drinks that only make us more thirsty.

Cinema that never satisfies. Music that says nothing about our lives.

I am learning to stop and admire the view. I am learning to sit and listen. I am learning how to just shut up and just feel.

Roll[o].