Yeah, I’m still here, both figuratively and literally – still behind the wizard’s curtain at VCTB, and still in Stockport. And, yes, still counting down the days until the latter no longer pertains.

Today saw a new phase of Operation #Back2Southsea* begin, namely the phase that focusses on ensuring that I have somewhere to move into down there before my tenancy expires up here. The three agencies I spoke to today all said that it’s a bit early to be hunting for a rental property with an April tenancy start, which I kind of expected. But still, I emailed them all a list of requirements, and will be doing the same again every weekday this week.

This is partly because I want to feel like I’m actively working on making the move a success; moving house is never much fun at the best of times, and doing it over a ~250 mile distance makes it all the more complicated. My major concern here is that I want to be sure that there’s no void period between the two tenancies; I have a whole lot of stuff (most of which, to be fair, is books), and don’t want to have to go through the hassle of putting stuff in storage, imposing on friends or crashing in a B&B for a few weeks, so on and so forth. A nice clean transfer’s what we’re after: get everything signed off on the new place before I have to be out of this one, then load my junk into one single (large) vanload, down the M6 and out into the new manor. Sorted.

It’ll probably work out that way, too. What’s interesting (in a kind of “damn, that seems a bit counterintuitive, not to mention annoying” kind of way) is how taking positive action as detailed above seems to have actually increased my anxiety about the move a little bit.

Thinking about it, though, it makes a certain amount of sense: actively beginning the house-hunt is functionally equivalent to opening a new book of uncertainties, and uncertainties – for me at least – are a big source of anxiety. Probably the biggest, actually; bad news I can deal with, but not knowing whether I’ll need to deal with bad news or not? That’s the killer. (I know; go figure.)

And right now there’s a whole lot of uncertainties flying around: job applications, freelance opportunities, further education options, creative directions, all very much up in the air like a set of juggling balls just about to reach the peak of their trajectories, and whose exact downward vectors are all interdependent on one another. Or like a selection of Schrödinger’s cats in quantum entanglement with each other, maybe. When just one wavefunction collapses – just one – the others will start to resolve themselves in a chain reaction, and the way forward will become clear. Until then, I’m stood like Hermes at the crossroads on a tarot card: one step beyond the fool’s blind leap into the unknown, buzzing with potential… but the real journey has yet to begin.

And so I wait for a bolt from the blue, for a cat to die-or-not-die, for the balls to fall. I don’t wait well, but I’d better get used to it, hadn’t I?

[ * Yes, my relocation has its own hashtag. That's just how I roll, yo; altermodernistic network realism, all up in yo' grill. ]

Is anyone still tuned in? This station as good as went off the air for a while there, didn’t it*?

Those of you who follow me elsewhere (most notably Twitter) will be aware – to a greater or lesser degree – that the last six months have been pretty bloody miserable for me; while I’ve made a handful of good friends up here in the Manchester area, living on my own in the rotten heart of an economically collapsed Northern industrial town has taken a considerable emotional toll. In short, and in the name of avoiding a drama-trip: I’ve been lonely as all hell.

The events of the last year-and-a-bit have taught me a lot of things about myself, many of which I’d probably not have chosen to learn, but all of which (I must assume) I’m somehow better off for having discovered. The largest and most pertinent of those is this: home is not defined by geography. It is defined by people.

The very title of this here blog represents the long and lingering love-hate relationship I’ve had with Southsea since moving there in 1994 as a callow and socially inept teenager. I’ve always resented it, for some reason I was unable to explain; why was I (like so many others) stuck to it, seemingly unable to tear myself away? Sit down and make a list: Southsea doesn’t seem to have much going for it, really. A cultural ox-bow backwater, cut off from the mainland both symbolically and physically, Britain’s only true island city; economically deprived and politically raddled; overpopulated, underfunded, and largely ignored by the world outside; faded, crumbling, caked with cheap make-up to flirt with the 21^st Century.

See? Still doing it now, aren’t I…

So why am I not glad to have left it behind? Well, the circumstances haven’t helped; discovering that your main reason for doing something was predicated on a lie can give you something of a jaundiced view of things, to say the least. But there’s a gift in the gutter, and it shames me to never have realised it was there all along. When you spend half your lifespan in one place, you become a part of the network of people that makes that place what it is. There are a multitude of Southseas, of course, mapped in the minds of the people who walk their streets each day, but they overlap like Venn diagrams. Once your own set is embedded and interlaced with enough others, you end up living in a sort of consensus reality: the city’s geography becomes governed and filtered by the social networks you move within.

(As a side note, I rather suspect this happens in non-geographical spaces – e.g. fandom – in a very similar way. A riff for another time, perhaps.)

I could waffle around this idea for hours (no change there, then) so I’ll cut to the point: being stuck here in Purgatory for half a year has made me realise how important my meatspace social networks really are to my psychological well-being… not to mention how much I owe to so many excellent people. It’s one thing to stay at home of an evening because one doesn’t fancy going out, but quite another to stay home because you’ve no one to go anywhere with. I can’t believe quite how much I miss Albert Road Syndrome: stepping out of the house for ten minutes and inevitably bumping into at least one friendly face, even if only in passing. I miss the sense of belonging; I never recognised it for what it was when I had it, possibly because I moved home so often as a kid. I miss my people. I miss my home.

Yeah, you can see where this is going – I’m a master of foreshadowing, me. My tenancy on this rotten garret expires on Easter weekend this year (April 23^rd, St George’s Day); as such, I aim to be back in Velcro City by that date. I’ve learned what I needed to learn, and now it’s time to act on that lesson.

And so: Operation Get-The-F*ck-Back-Where-I-Belong is go. If you’ve any advice or assistance to offer, our switchboards are waiting for your call… and the Peripatetic Tourist Board of the Invisible Manifold City will be re-establishing a broadcast schedule, however erratic it may turn out to be.

Don’t touch that dial.

[ * A lingering malfunction with the Delicious autopost plugin emphasised that somewhat, but its usefulness was starting to wane, and recent rumblings from Yahoo suggest that relying on Delicious long-term is not a future-proof plan. Selah. New year, new tools; adopt, adapt, improve. It's time I wrote more stuff manually, anyway; curation should be something more than mere collection. ]

M John Harrison:

To call a McJob a fact-as in “facing the facts of life” -to call the Debt a fact-as in “facing the facts of the economy” -to call a career at Price Waterhouse a fact-as in “it’s a fact that you have to get on in life to get the things you want” -is actually the most grotesque distortion of the facts. These processes are as artifical as the malls & offices in which they take place.

We live in a fiction, an arbitrary structure imposed on the actual. The goal of radicalism in any generation should be to expose that structure & its constraints. That’s why it was a good thing to break into Millbank yesterday.

[...]

Everyone can see that the life offered by our society is less a life than permission to plod along the same old tramlines until you die, while states & corporates commodify everything worthwhile & measure it back to you as an earnable privilege. Everyone can see that if you get on your high horse about this you will be passed off as a mindless criminal.

Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro’s point is that we are already clones, educated to stay calm while they cut pieces off us. That’s why everyone is so angry: because their anger, as ever, is constantly taken away from them just at the point when anger is all they have.

Anger… and voices. And networks to to carry those voices.

Laurie Penny, New Statesman:

They spent their childhoods working hard and doing what they were told with the promise that one day, far in the future, if they wished very hard and followed their star, their dreams might come true. They spent their young lives being polite and articulate whilst the government lied and lied and lied to them again. They are not prepared to be polite and articulate anymore. They just want to scream until something changes. Perhaps that’s what it takes to be heard.

It is my hope that, once we realise that screaming doesn’t work (and it won’t work, beyond the momentary catharsis it brings), we’ll try turning our backs and building the world we want for ourselves. The nation-state is dying, and the only alternative to being smothered by its decaying corpse is to step out from under it; being ignored is the one thing it can’t fight with truncheons and cameras.

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“We live in a world in which change is primarily driven by emergent technology. We live in a world in which, I suspect, technology trumps ideology, every time. I think that’s where it’s at, as people used to say in the sixties. It isn’t as though I have any space in which to stand and say “This is loathsome!” or “This is exciting!” It seems an awful lot like Frederic Jameson’s definition of the postmodern sublime, which if I recall correctly is the mingled apprehension of dread and ecstasy.

Our reaction to these things is amazingly similar to the reaction of the Victorians to technologies like the railroad and the gramophone. If you go back to first-person accounts — diary entries of individuals encountering those things — it wasn’t like, “Wow, that’s wonderful!” They were scared shitless. They were reeling with the shock of the new. They didn’t know where anything was headed, and it made them sort of angry, often as not. I think it’s the way we react to these things.

The surprising thing about it — I almost said the insidious thing, but I’m trying to be anthropological — the surprising thing, to me, is that once we have our gramophone, or iPad, or locomotive, we become that which has the gramophone, the iPad, or the locomotive, and thereby, are instantly incapable of recognizing what just happened to us, as I believe we’re incapable of understanding what broadcast television, or the radio, or telephony did to us.

I strongly suspect that prior to those things we were something else. In that regard, our predecessors are in a sense unknowable. Imagine a world without recorded music: I always come to the conclusion that it’s impossible for me to imagine that, because I have become that which lives with recorded music.” – William Gibson

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