Last Sunday I decided to brew a new batch of kombucha. Whilst this tipple does edge into socially repugnant territory — that of the kombucha classes — I have found myself in recent years quite enamoured with its fermented tang and powerful state-building properties. Placidly I weighed out the demerara sugar, for a fleeting moment worried that I would not have enough to fulfill the ambition of my five-litre megabatch. My gaze fell upon the suburban tranquility outside of our apartment: a quiet back-street thick with beautiful high trees. The golden rays of late afternoon illuminated swathes of their foliage with a metallic tint, their shimmering motes like rippling shoals of minnows in the air.
I took a small pickled cucumber from a jar then carefully washed it, slicing it longitudinally – just the way my daughter likes. My mind wandered, as it is prone to. How curious, I thought, that I was carrying out small domestic tasks and feeling a mysterious sense of contentment. How curious that I was slicing a small cucumber for my own child. It was something I’d wanted for a long time, but never felt I could have.
I finished the cucumbers and then decanted the pans of sweet tea into the glass fermenting jars. My dog snuffled. I realised I was… happy? Satisfied? It seemed strange to me. Why would I be content doing mundane domestic tasks on a Sunday afternoon?
Why wouldn’t you be?
Good Lord, I was pottering. Actually pootling about the house, like a normal person.
Always up for a spot of overthinking, I cogitated further – starting from the fact that content pottering had been suspiciously absent from my former life. I remembered in former incarnations carrying out domestic tasks now and again, of course: occasionally cleaning; sometimes preparing food. But did they contain the mysterious element which I was now experiencing? As I stood in thought, my preposterous dog woke briefly from his snooze upon the kitchen floor. With a snuffle and a yawn he moved himself a half-foot to a new spot, to track the beam of sunlight as it gradually traversed its way across the floor with the passage of the afternoon. Here, here was a master of the Moment, a Zen guru at my feet.
Perhaps I was getting this the wrong way round. It could be that my former life wasn’t lacking a secret ingredient, it was just that a poison was present which now was not. A bit like kombucha: if mold infilitrated the jars then the whole batch would be tainted. What could I call that toxin? Maybe The Strive. A kind of chode toxin, a tax on life’s enjoyment, always there, nibbling away, making it more difficult to enjoy the smaller things and just take a moment. There had been, in those days, far more tension upon the clock-spring of life and it seemed like this had soured some of the potential richness of existence. Always, there had been that ice under the skin, the constant low level fear that every terror-stricken incel has, unleashing its stream of terror-babble:
You'lldiealonenogirlslikeyouitspointlessyoucantevenbuyahousequickdosomethingquicktimesrunningoutyouneedtogetjackedandrippedatthesametimethengoouttoclaphamandpullgirlsandmakeoneyourgirlfriendyourejustwatchingamoviealoneonfridaynightyouresadloadsofmenareoutwithalltheirfriendsandbanginghotgirlsyouneedtotastelifebeforeitstoolateyourgettingoldereverydaysetupyourpassiveincomeyouwonthavechildrenyouvefailed...
Perhaps it was worse for the autists, like me. Certainly, plenty of the homogenous lump of non-Alpha maleness did manage to pootle, and it seemed real. Normal guys in normal groups, on the way to the footie, having a pint. Watching telly. Not the ‘Deano’s’ of course, for in a later post I would like to argue what I will simply summarise now: that what drives Deanos to such ghastly perversions of taste and mediocrity — a mediocrity so folded and hammered in upon itself that all it achieves is a moral and spiritual abyss of orange faces and circus-freak appearances — is the secret whispering voice of incel fear.
Let’s not be coy though… we aren’t here, reading this blog, because we’re normal, right?
I have a final theory to explain why making kombucha and preparing gherkins felt satisfying (the neccessity to develop a theory because of this says volumes). Perhaps it is due to the way a person experiences time. Some people are certainly more ‘present’ than others. I’ve spent entire decades zipping between the past and the future, spending most of my present with head cocked at a spergy angle staring with glassy eyes at some point in space up to the top left. Perhaps when The Strive is removed, then the horriblness of ‘Time Ranging’ briefly stops, and I simply get to exist for a few moments without yearning or suffering for something. It took a long time to wash and cut the gherkin, to be honest, what with so much time staring in to space and mentally masturbating. I’m not waffling purely to try and whip some sugar into candyfloss — I sincerely struggle to put my finger on what I felt, and feel, but I know it is real.
I am married now, and it seems that exiting from the mating game was not, as I once thought, the end of life, but possibly the beginning — although on some bad days I think it could be the opposite, in a very literal sense. I’ve had some moments of tranquility which I’ve hitherto never experienced. Krauser’s brother (of all people) — placid, multi-spawned and long-married — once said to me “Never underestimate the benefit of a quiet life.”
It’s a funny thought, to consider that humans have a lifecycle. We’re arrogant, and ignorant. Man is special, they think. We are not caddis flies, metamorphosing through our brief moment of time as we fight to reproduce before the sun sets. No! We are above the flesh and blood, above the mere programming of our tiny four letter assembly language, the ruthless operating system which we’re all installed with. We can choose. We can make our own way! Deny nature at your own peril.
For now, this wee bug has shed his skin, and at his feet lies the discarded pupa of his mating phase: a spent leather jacket, faux-distressed boots now so genuinely distressed they are unuseable and some lurid shirts which no longer fit. I’m glad it is over. Being a fatalist, I’m not sure how long any of it will last, but for now I can appreciate the small things in life, like Kombucha, and my child. Sometimes.
What a long history this blog has had. I think the first post, in its first incarnation[1] was fourteen years or so ago. I started it to try and make real (by the power of self-narratization) what I thought was outrageously difficult — my foray into character rebuilding care of game. I think at some point, and I’m not sure where, that the writing became as important to me as the game. Art mimicked life, then became life — two snakes entwined together, becoming one. Then I decided to write a book. Writing the book shaped my life, changed it, and the tail started wagging the dog. It got worse with the second and certainly with the third. Where does the book about the life end, and the life shaped by the book begin?
Over the years I’ve had quite a few emails or in-person questions along the lines of “What happened to the blog?” The answer is simple: I stopped blogging when it occured to me that I simply had nothing left to say.
Whilst writing DBATS III I felt that I really did have something left to say about our tiny little niche in the world. I’m not trying to fool anyone that I’m still in the game anymore, of course, but sometimes us grizzled old bastards by the camp fire have something worth listening to. I have a lot to say. Some of it will be in the new books, and some of it will be here, on this blog.
I’m back. For a while.
[1] Originally ‘mygreatexperiment.wordpress.com’, then ‘bodipua.com’ and now this, its final form. All old posts have been migrated to this server.
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