A lunchtime walk with Louis Theroux
Listening to: The Bends - Radiohead (1994) - a truly amazing album from a band that is constantly reinventing itself. Every time a new Radiohead album comes out you just never know what to expect. Every track a winner, and - interesting fact - I can play all these songs on my wee acoustic guitar. Not very well, but I can play them, dammit!
Out for a walk around the polders at lunchtime. I do it to help deal with my mental health, but more often than not it just makes me hot and tired, and so doesn't really help, it just makes things worse.
Still, I got out of the house and away from the computer for a bit, so there is that. Work wasn't too busy, lots of meetings that just require being there and not so much participating. Not that I have much to contribute - we're completely developer-driven so whatever they say goes and the rest of us can just go and do one. Then we had a townhall meeting (a sort of all-hands) which was the usual chaos and poor sound quality. It doesn't matter what they do to fix it, or how much money they stick into it, it always sounds like someone shouting into a can attached to a string, 500ft down in the water. There was some talk of bonuses and a pay rise but the explanation was so complex that I zoned out half-way through, and for the amount we're getting - it adds up to about €80 per month, before tax - it's not worth asking for a better explanation. I won't be putting down the deposit on a new BMW anytime soon.
I took my camera with me and took a few photos. The walk I did this afternoon is a simple loop around the polders and golf course behind the house. I take the camera with me, but really I've been photographing this walk for so long there's not really that much to photograph, but there are spots I do stop for because I like the contrast between the flat landscape and the sky above, like some sort of → Adrianus van Everdingen painting. The Netherlands is not exactly known for it's mountainous terrain, so while I do long for a bit of variety (I get that when we're in Ireland) there's something to be said for seeing the spires of the village 10km away across the polder as the early morning mist cover the fields.
I don't have any pictures of that exactly, so you're going to have to use your imagination.
Sorry.
Some photos I took this afternoon
On the way around I met J., a colleague from work whose on maternity leave. She was out with the newborn and her husband so stood and spoke with them for a while. Then home for a nice lunch, and a raft of meetings in the afternoon that left me questioning my sanity. I'll not bore you with the details, but think paint drying, grass growing, etc., and so on.
Whenever I go on these walks I'm supposed to not take my phone with me lest it distracts me from the mindfulness of the walk. I'm supposed to take in the sounds of nature, to be in the moment but I find the silence hard. Whenever I'm at home I always need to have the radio on, or some sort of sound in the background. I don't listen to it, but I use it to keep the roaring silence away. So today I was listening to the → Romesh Ranganathan podcast, the one with Louis Theroux. I laughed out loud in places, Louis is a very sharp and witty. In particular the bit about going to the Skinhead Hate Core music festival had me in bits. Go check it out.
Louis, of course, has been in the news a lot lately after his documentary → 'The Manosphere' went up on Netflix. We watched it the other day and were suitably appalled by it. There's not a lot to add really that's not already been said by better people than I, but it's shocking that there's people - men - out there that believe the garbage these influences are spouting.
They're complete arseholes, each and everyone of them, but they're basically playing to the gallery. Every daft thing they do and say is designed for more followers, likes, views which leads to more revenue. They're really no different to those awful prosperity preachers you see on telly, the ones begging you for money or else they won't be able to afford that luxury jet Jesus wants them to have. Take away the oxygen of controversy and they would just disappear into irrelevance, just another screaming monkey throwing their shit into a foghorn.
This quest for likes and views - validation - is most apparent, ironically enough, in the women that feature in the segment with Myron Gaines and his podcast. They're sitting there being ridiculed and demeaned and insulted all for the braying men on the other end of the live chat. What I can't understand is why they'd subject themselves to all of this abuse, until I realised they're in it for the same reason as Myron is, and all the other people in the program - the likes, the views, the follows, the change to shift product.
Morals and dignity go out the window pretty damn quick when there's a buck to be made from that one extra follower.