Archive for October, 2006

Only connect

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

It is one of the many ironies of my life that I earn a liv­ing con­nect­ing things — sys­tems, peo­ple, ideas, money, resources — when I am so shock­ingly bad at con­nect­ing with them myself.  I can, and do, con­nect words and ideas, but I find it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to con­nect with peo­ple.  Per­haps it’s inevitable that as your sense of self both erodes and crys­tallises (in the sense that it is ever clearer how un-important the indi­vid­ual is.…) that see­ing oth­ers as your­self becomes more difficult.

Ptcha.  That isn’t what I wanted to write about.  I wanted to write about peo­ple.  Three peo­ple today:  as I was walk­ing in to town today I was approached by a man with a small child rid­ing on his shoul­ders and another in tow.  They were a bit dishev­elled, but were laugh­ing and jok­ing — echo­ing, albeit through a class lens, the fam­ily from yes­ter­day on the train.  This changed, how­ever, when the man approached me for money.  He was beg­ging, with his (pre­sum­ably) chil­dren in tow.  I was furi­ous, but lacked the wit or grace to deal with this sit­u­a­tion effec­tively.  I declined, and was mocked for being so rude — which is becom­ing some­thing of a rit­ual when I am approached by beggars.

So, I was swim­ming with the feelie-fishes again.  I admired the cyn­i­cism and chutz­pah — to talk to me he’d had to cut across a fam­ily.  The chil­dren were happy — pos­si­bly too small to under­stand what was going on.  Anger, at him, myself and var­i­ous other lib­eral guilt insti­tu­tions.  Sad.  Betrayed by sys­tems I believe in and sup­port (polit­i­cal and char­i­tiy).  Frus­trated with John Bird, for mak­ing me believe him and his Big Issue ideals (which are essen­tially vin­di­cat­ing cap­i­tal­ism and seem­ingly part of the long march to the right, polit­i­cally, I appear to be mak­ing).  Pro­fes­sion­ally annoyed that the var­i­ous come­backs I could have made (but would not have the bot­tle for) didn’t come to me until it was too late — and why was I car­ing anyway?

So.  To cut a long story short.  BEANS.  Shit hap­pens.  Shut up.  Move on.