Last week, I finished Johan Hari's hugely enlightening Chasing the Scream, which documents the catastrophic effects of America's war on drugs. Hari is a far better writer than I'll ever be. He got into trouble earlier in his career for just making shit up (including, hilariously, writing that the Japanese Prime Minister was attacked by a factory robot), but I don't mind if there's a touch of bullshit in his writing because it's so damn entertaining. I also love his use of tildes to separate his intros and outros.
~
Chasing the Scream got me thinking about drugs. I've had my share of substances. I still count the whole year I spent at university smoking weed and watching movies as probably the best of my life; my grades went up because I was able to completely detach myself from the movies I was studying. But there was, of course, a downside: the paranoia, the laziness, the expense, the fact that I was doing something illegal.
Then I traded a cigarette for an ecstasy tablet in a club in Cheltenham and had probably the single best experience of my life; I was happy, unusually talkative, I was in love with everyone, streetlights became mini-discotheques. But then I came crashing down. I found it increasingly hard to find pleasure, so I would drink myself into oblivion and get kicked out of clubs and generally act like a complete fucking dickhead.
I'd go on to have dalliances with pills and MDMA powder, and each time the effects would be a little less, and I'd feel less euphoric until I reached a methylenedioxymethamphetamine event horizon, and the negatives outweighed the positives. I'm sure that my use of MDMA has been a factor in the past 10 years; the worst and longest depressive episode I've ever had.
Other drugs never really took hold. A couple of lines of coke made me into a complete fucking dickhead, so I've always avoided it. Mushrooms made everything hilarious, and I would have used them more often if they hadn't been outlawed. I always told myself I'd try acid if I turned 60 and still had all my marbles, but I feel like I barely have enough marbles for a two-marble game of marbles.
The single best drug experience I ever had was with a batch of cheap weed. It was strangely textured and full of seeds, but it made me feel a sense of elevated happiness without the overwhelming paranoia of skunk. I think my stoner mates hated it because it was weak, but, for me, it was just right. Unfortunately, I never found anything like it again.
This unusually mild weed was the exception to the high-THC rule. Johan Hari suggests that the rise in strong weed is down to its illegal status in the UK: growers and dealers would rather handle a small amount of powerful cannabis than a large amount of weak weed; it's the difference between smuggling whisky or beer. And so the strength of weed has increased steadily.
I can't help but wonder if this has had a knock-on effect on politics. There's a small percentage of men who carry on smoking weed when they're middle-aged and this seems to cause issues; the strength makes them paranoid and unable to maintain relationships, so they descend into catastrophically isolated thought patterns.
Like I said, I'm sure weed made me a little bit smarter, but it can go both ways; when you're stoned, you can think deeply on subjects, but if those thoughts aren't verified or discussed they can grow, and before you know it, you believe that climate change is a myth or that 15-minute-cities have been designed by a secret cabal of racoon people. And then you tap this into Facebook and it gets propagated by other stoners, and then it becomes part of the wider political discourse. There's obviously a lot more to it than this, but I'm sure it's a small but important part of the picture. If weed was legal, this might be less of a problem.
~
I haven't taken anything other than a moderate amount of alcohol since I hit my 40s. I grew out of drugs and started enjoying cycling more; if I'm tempted to have an evening beer I always say to myself that I'd rather have a bike ride than a hangover tomorrow morning. But if I could find that super-mild weed I would smoke it. And it would probably be horrible.
Hoping this won't happen for a while, but here it is:
I will probably add/remove stuff to this as and when I can. I'm not sure about "Journey to the Line" because it's a bit too, y'know, movie. Maybe I'll switch it for something by Fauré or Pärt, but then those are a bit pretentious and diacritical, but then even using the word "diacritical" is pretentious in itself.
Death is obviously the most horrible thing, but I have a couple of thoughts that help me stop worrying about it so much. The first is bastardised from John Gray; he concluded one of his books by saying that the overall purpose of human life is to see. And what we see in our lifetimes is insane. We can literally look up and see galaxies, or oak trees that are older than we can ever imagine, or look through a fairly basic microscope and see tiny creatures that can survive the harshest conditions on this planet and elsewhere.
But the remarkable thing is that we can understand what these things are. A few hundred years ago, doctors believed that maggots in rotting flesh came from the flesh itself. That you could transform lead into gold. That an invisible all-seeing man was watching our every move and secretly directing our passage through life. But now, humanity, as a whole, has never been more enlightened, and it's totally remarkable when you think about it. Just look around you now: there's evidence of progress and knowledge in literally every single thing.
We're also part of the universe. That galaxy, that gas giant planet, that puddle, we're all made of the same fundamental matter, and that's just really neat. When we die, we don't really stop existing, all our matter is broken down, and the atoms that we're comprised of return to this absolutely vast cosmos. The fact that we exist at all, and that we're equal, and we're all made of the same stuff, is more amazing than thinking we were made by God or whoever.
The next part of this is that if a universe can exist once, it can exist again. It might take an unimaginable number of trillennia, but, in theory, your exact atomic makeup, and that of a cup or a lobster or a comet, can exist again at some point in an infinite future. This might be a fantastical way of dealing with the existential anxiety of death, but it helps me just a little bit.
Anyway, I'd like "Extreme Ways" to be played as the casket is lowered so it makes my life feel like a Bourne film.
Just a quick explainer on the awful dad jokes at the bottom of this page. I really, really got into Rob Manuel's Fesshole and Anon Opin Twitter accounts. I would post a lot of stuff, 80% of which was completely made up, but a lot of it got picked up by poor Rob and his enormous spreadsheet and reposted. And I was quite proud of quite a lot of my bollocks.
I wanted a way to record my nonsense so, at some point, I could say, "hey look, I wrote that." thoughts.page seemed like the perfect place, but somewhere I got a bit lost and just started attempting to write jokes here instead. And now I'm using it to post thoughts and feelings.
There was a point to this post, but I can't rememeber what it was. Ah yes, so, in a way, I'm still using it to post my confessions. In a way all stories are confessions *. But these posts are true. Honesty is the best policy.
Yesterday it was an aggressive DPD driver.
I can't remember where I learned about it, but every day I wake up and think, who's going to be my Dickhead, capital D, today?
Is this a healthy way of thinking? Maybe not. But it can be helpful. Because when you inevitably meet your Daily Dickhead, someone who annoys you or doesn't think about they're making you feel, you can say to yourself "That's just my Daily Dickhead." The person who didn't hold open the door for you. The shop worker who was rude. Then you can move on with your life, safe in the knowledge that the all-seeing Lord of Dickheads has given you your daily dose of Dickheadedness.
Your Daily Dickhead could be anyone. Your partner, your parent, your progeny. Your boss. Your best friend. A random guy on the street. It's usually a man. And they're only your Dickhead that day; it resets at midnight and a whole new Dickhead is assigned to randomly surprise you with a surprising Dick Move™.
It goes both ways though, because you can be someone's Daily Dickhead, sometimes without even realising it. The person you forgot to wave at when they gave way to you. The aunt you omitted from your Christmas card list. But, as long as they're subscribed to The Cult of the Daily Dickhead, they can move on with their life as well. And everything's fine, because we can all be Dickheads, can't we?
It turns out I've been lying quite a lot lately. I've been telling Sam (my 11-year-old son) how studious and focussed I was at school, in the hopes that it'll help him knuckle down a bit. This is absolute fucking nonsense though. I'm currently at my parents' house, and looking through my old school books, so many pages are marked in teacher's handwriting, blood-red ink: "Why isn't this finished, Henry?" or "Where's the rest of it?"
~
I was diagnosed with ADHD in late 2021. My ADHD isn't the bouncing-off-the-walls energy of some kids; instead, it's the more morose and introspective ADHD, which makes me prone to long periods of inattention, of staring out of windows and tumbling deep into imagined worlds -- and not finishing work.
At first, my diagnosis came as a bit of a shock, but it was ultimately a good thing; it let me off the hook. I knew I wasn't quite like everyone else. People would say I was boring, but it felt like my brain was going at lightspeed all the time, and my physical being was clumsily picking up the pieces. This is very hard to describe.
I - obviously - leapt at the chance to try a magic ADHD drug: Elvanse. The most common drugs for ADHD are stimulants, essentially the same amphetamines used recreationally, but in lower doses and with time-release elements to prevent major side effects. And they were brilliant.
For the first time, I felt like a normal person going about my day-to-day life. I would find myself casually chatting to people and not wanting to ejector seat out of the conversation as soon as possible. I could play football. I could concentrate. Just the sensation of getting those keys clacking on a keyboard felt euphoric.
For a little while, it felt like the exact solution I'd been looking for. But my brain soon adjusted to the dosage, and the NHS ramped up my milligrams maybe just a little bit too soon, and I started getting side effects.
I've always been so bad at sleeping. Some people just seem to have a knack for sleeping, but I've had chronic insomnia since my teen years, set off by all sorts of weird little things: a drop of caffeine after midday, a minor argument at work or home, looking at screens too late in the day. Elvanse took this sensitivity and ramped it up to an extreme new level. Three hours became a good night's sleep, and even then, it didn't feel like real sleep. I didn't wake up feeling refreshed. I'd just take my next dose and it would power me up again. This went on for months — but something had to give.
One night, I was lying in bed at 3AM, still utterly wired from the drugs, and I think I might have died? I had the strangest sensation, an iciness I'd never felt before, radiating outwards from the centre of my chest.
I was aware that ADHD medications had been known to cause sudden cardiac death in a very tiny minority of cases. I'd had some heart issues before; as a tall man, my ticker has to pump a lot harder to get the blood from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. Could this be it, I wondered? Had my heart stopped for good, and was my blood instantly cooling as a result? At the time, in the middle of the night, I shrugged it off, put it down to my sleep-deprived drug-addled mind playing tricks on me, waited to hear the birdsong so I could get up, get my next fix.
The next day, over breakfast, I took a look at my heart rate report from my Garmin watch. And there it was. Right in the middle of the peaks and troughs of my pumps was a little gap where no heart rate data existed, pretty much exactly where I had that sensation. Of course, there are many explanations for this: my watch could have slipped off my wrist a little, it could have just malfunctioned for a minute, or it could have been that my heart literally stopped for a few beats. I'll never know, but it was enough to give me a scare.
I stopped taking Elvanse soon after. I still miss it, or, more precisely, I _miss the person I was when I was taking it. But it showed me that I was capable at least, of existing like everyone else. I had to find new, non-amphetamine-powered ways to boost my focus: exercise (but not too much), careful planning (a little every day), and timers (but not too long) help me knuckle down and get shit done. I've also found a new medication that's helped my day-to-day existence.
More on that later. Unless it kills me.
Yeah, so I'm posting some stuff up here. These are random thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for the past 10 years that I've never put to paper.
I like this site because I can't save posts as drafts, which usually means a slow and interminable death on a server somewhere. Instead, I have to post them as they are, and there's no edit function, so there will inevitably be typos and grammar stuff. But I think this might be a good thing because people will know I haven't had any LLM help.
Thanks for reading!
It was a grey November day some nine years ago. I had just cycled down a big hill in Bath and reached the kind of absurdly stupid roundabout system where everyone needs to pay extra attention. As I rode along, I was suddenly aware of a presence on my left side, drawing impossibly close, and in adrenaline-enhanced slow-motion I was given a glancing blow by a car that threw me off my bike.
As I careened into the next lane in adrenaline-enhanced slow motion, I didn't think of my family and my life didn't flash before my eyes. Instead, I thought: this is going to be amazing for my YouTube channel.
~
Filming rides combined two things I loved: filmmaking and cycling. As part of a grouptest for T3, I'd accumulated a handful of action cameras, and I started attaching them to various points on my bike and person and recording my rides, then uploading them to YouTube. I became part of a then-small circle of camera cyclists that included people such as CyclingMike and CycleGaz. My first big hit, "Close Pass, a Slap and a Chat," documented a taxi driver who passed within inches of my handlebars, and then became irate when I slapped the side of his car.
From there, my channel grew. Vehicles would do things that, while illegal, probably weren't all that bad; turning left in front of me while I was slowly ascending a hill, or driving past the advanced stop line. I would get angry and upload the videos, and while a lot of viewers seemed to support me, a growing minority would say things like; "that was far too aggressive," or, "you're looking for trouble." I carried on posting, reviewing footage, editing it, uploading it maybe twice a week.
But those doubts began to take hold. Most camera cyclists are based in London, where conflict is diluted and washed away in the vastness of the metropolis. But Bath is a "city" that's smaller than a lot of UK towns. I put a lot of effort into keeping my YouTube channel and social media accounts anonymous, but there was still a nagging feeling that people knew who I was and what I was doing. I also made the ridiculously stupid but completely innocent mistake of posting an upload from a pretty major website's Twitter account.
This insecurity came to a head on that drizzly November day. As a cyclist, you always imagine drivers to be these extravagantly hairy men intent on plowing through anything that moves. But the driver who hit me was a young mum. She was so remorseful, so apologetic, maybe more upset than I was. She was absolutely in the wrong, but she was also a person who had made a mistake, just like I had on Twitter.
I deleted my YouTube and social media accounts a little later. I still have that video floating around on a hard drive somewhere, but it's likely to never see the light of day. Now, I think this is worth another post, I try and avoid conflict wherever possible.
"Hey Google. Make a note."
"Sure. What do you want it to say?"
"44:21. Thoughts on AI."
For the past eight years, once a week, usually on a Wednesday morning, this has been a familiar conversation. Part of my job at Chaos was listening to and writing up episodes of the CG Garage podcast, which consisted of conversations between host and CG pioneer Chris Nichols and esteemed members of the VFX industry.
Chaos was a work-from-home job, and I was lucky enough to be given free rein. So rather than hunching over my desk listening to the podcast, I'd pop in wireless headphones and go out on my bike. I figured out a route that would take 30 minutes each way (the podcast was usually an hour), and used Google Assistant on my phone to make notes of interesting anecdotes or changes of topic.
I got it down to a fine art: my route was largely off-road, so it didn't matter that I had headphones in, I figured out how to keep my phone's display on so I could keep track of the time. When I got home, I'd have timecodes for all the most important moments, and then it was just a question of joining the dots.
Were you taking the piss, Henry? Riding your bike while you're meant to be working? Maybe. But since my diagnosis with ADHD, I've come to realise that exercise can be the key to helping me focus my attention while giving me a chance to think things through. But something more interesting happened: I would come to associate physical space with whatever the podcast guest was talking about. There's a particular hill in Bristol that I will forever associate with an amusing anecdote about a party in Wales with Digital Domain co-founder Scott Ross (there are many amusing anecdotes about Scott Ross).
This association between time and space even gave me a kind of superpower. If there was a missing part of my voice notes, I could work out where I was at a particular time, fast-forward or rewind the route in my head, and then recall what the guest was talking about, and fill in the gaps.
Off-bike, the time I worked best was on the hour-and-a-half train journey from Bristol to London, and I used to joke that if I caught a train to Edinburgh I'd be able to write a book. There's something about moving through space, be it new or familiar, that boosts brain power; maybe because you're mentally mapping your surroundings all the time and this is encouraging blood flow to other parts of the brain. I'm - obviously - not a neurologist.
For me, this only works on a bike or train, as well. With both, you're relaxed but focused on your surroundings just enough. On a train, you can look out of the window and always see something different or new. On a bike, you're thinking about your pedals spinning and where the bike's going, and that's pretty much it. Car journeys make me feel sick and stressed and cloud my thoughts. There's too much going on, too much to think about, even when you're a passenger.
~
I no longer work at Chaos, maybe because I spent time riding my bike when I should have been working. Inevitably, those long bike rides, accompanied by Chris' voice and his guests' thoughts, are the part of the job I miss most.
Today, I retraced my podcast route, genuinely worried that it would be upsetting to revisit those locales without ever hearing the podcast again (I can't bring myself to listen to it now that I don't work on it). But it was replaced with something else: the sound of birds singing, dogs barking, people chatting, the drone of my freehub, the distant hum of city traffic. Things that I'd never heard on this route before. I felt a kind of inner peace that's been missing for a long, long time. My mind wandered and I thought, maybe I should write this all down.
I once bought a submarine with the intention of turning it into a crazy golf venue. But it turned out to be sub-par.
I was recently cast in a recreation of the making of Terminator 2. I was set to play the guy who did the music, but someone pipped me to the post. They offered me the chance to be the stand-in for some shots. I turned it down because I didn't want to play second Fiedel.
I bought a Batsuit, but I'm far too fat for it. I'm going to send it back using Batman Returns.
glassdoor.com should be renamed burnedbridge.com
I was recently approached by a guy who wanted to sell me a portion of Wadi Rumm, in Jordan, where David Lean filmed Lawrence of Arabia. I almost bought it, but it turned out to be far too expansive.
Penguins are just big ducks.
There's a remarkably subtle detail in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace: some spray painted Epson inkjet cartridges attached to Anakin's bedroom wall. I think they were chosen because they looked futuristic. Curiously, George Lucas digitally removed the cartridges in the 2019 reissue. Apparently they weren't Canon.
You could make a sequel to both Quadrophenia and Con Air. It could be called Mod Cons.
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