The week*, in feelings...

Sean G rolled into town, down the escalator at Shoreditch High Street, well-cut navy suit, louche––no tie. His laugh singed with an infectious Aussie twang, he brought the last of the balmy evenings and an easy familiarity. The following week, in front of an open fire, Caitlin, here from New York indulged my whinging about modernity, identity, and control (in the face of my Linkedin stare-down**), allowing Al, (poor, long-suffering) to deal quite rightly with my repeated and infantile 'but I haaaate it', with 'do you hate money!'

Well no. As it turns out, money is super useful when you do stupid shit like lose your keys when your housemate's away in Finland and you need to pay some burly Israeli guy to break down your door and replace the locks with shiny new expensive ones. Watching the drill spray metal shards onto the footpath, you think about the manicures you don't get and then you think: I bet Slavoj Zizek isn't on Linkedin. Then you call your lover and cry, unsure whether this is about your status as a philosophical nobody, the 200 pounds, the rain, the state of the world, or the fact you simply miss him.

Amid the cacophony of crap that is 'the state of the world', I've been properly and surprisingly struck with the revelation that there are more nice things happening than not... This is huge; I haven't been inclined to glass half full for a very long time. Unfortunately, it was the jolt of another day's 'dramatic events' that caused this involuntary shift in gears. Here's a summation of the thoughts that followed: The world is peppered with dramatic events that don't impact me but make an impact; events echoed by further events that may or may not impact me, that maybe should do, but can't, because of my inability to bear being so impacted by events upon which I can't possibly bring any bearing.

Egocentric since we each saw our reflection for the first time––at an age too young to produce anything other than a deranged sense of 'self'––we conjure guilt as if the self-reflexive remonstration will in some way substitute for the real thing. But guilt is an utterly impotent emotion, an illusion of feeling something in the absence of having felt anything at all. Despair leads nowhere but depression, and anger, whose bedfellow is violence, perpetuates idiocy and thuggery. Action––seeking justice, reconciliation and dialogue––starts with a committed practice of peace, and one can't practice a long and lasting peace without adopting a modicum of optimism. And so it is in choosing to practice peace, that I'm compelled to be more optimistic.

Two days after my epiphany I'm at Royal Festival Hall for a lecture with rock'n'roll billing: Zizek, Varoufakis, Horvat and Assange. They're discussing the democracy deficit, an absence of aspirational ideology, class conflict and borders (and they're discussing Europe!). When the steadfastly pessimistic Zizek, concedes conceptual ground to the more optimistic Varoufakis, I think––maybe there's some momentum in this thing. Assange took it a step too far suggesting some kind of 'third-way' like a new Christianity that's a combination of Christianity and Islam (as if there were only two ways to begin with or that the 'original' ways––which as it turns out are not so 'original'––are worthy of replication in any way shape or form). The discomfort grew as he rambled on, missing the point entirely, and Horvat finally cut him off, no doubt thinking the guy's clearly gone mad holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for all this time.

Anyway, I'll put my mind to the ideology thing, and if I come up with anything semi-decent, I'll run it by you. In the meantime. Be good.

*Which week? That week Paris happened and the 'one minute silence' fell victim to supersizing.

**in the Amy Rudder v Linkedin staredown, Linkedin won. If you're so inclined, note, I am not the chiropractor.

Zizek, lost on stage as Assange looms large, and as for linkedin, well?