‘I don’t want to save the World, I don’t even want to save me. We’re so boring that we don’t even want to save ourselves… There’s nothing left to say, we’re so fucking boring. Let it die I say. Let there be a new beginning… It’s awful. Goodnight!’ ~ Charles Bukowski
mellon collie and the infinite banality
reflections, 21c…
It often feels like we’re in the winter of humanity, unconsciously consuming ourselves into nihility in the pursuit of something unimaginatively meaningless – like a bad dream. Dark satanic mills, in all their destruction of nature and human relationships, have since been replaced by server farms and data centres. Sinister in its anodyne aloofness, a restless hum pervades humankind fragmented globally via the hypnotic radiance emanating from millions of screens serving an all-seeing eye: a prophet for the annihilation of all that is beautiful.
western values
There is no such thing as a ‘dream job’. There is no ‘land of opportunity’. It’s all a con, a lie, a mirage, a piece of shit – shit opportunities, shit jobs and shit pay so you can buy more shit and serve the insatiably greed-driven, psychopathically vampiric rich… and then you die. That is the reality for most of us. Those who put up with it are simply better at kidding themselves than others (usually with the aid of drugs, porn, gambling and/or alcohol). When a realisation inevitably cuts through the fog of incessant bullshit clouding one’s mind amid the barrage of soul-sucking banality within a wretchedly nihilistic, consumer-mad, mind-penitentiary of a zombie system, when reality hits, few can endure the pain of staring omnipotent horror square in the face, hence the high suicide rate. We live in a culture that has no justice, no art, no love, no beauty, no romance, no joy, no democracy, no freedom, no reason, and which is not even remotely connected to anything that could be deemed ‘divine’. It’s all just a vapid, corporately packaged delusion; an automated prison of which there is no escape. Western values have long been as empty as the false idols it perpetually sells to suckers in the form of homogenous ‘dreams’ chased like dragons. Malaise is part of its design – there are no ‘values’. There is no ‘hope’.
performative radical
A supposedly left-leaning man (name I forget), scoffed at landscapes and portraits (Guardian in hand), then became rather annoyed with me upon daring to point out the vacuity of a well-known street artist’s ‘protest art’, amid the anti-monarchist chants of equally vapid LARPers performing to a juvenile crowd at another one of those English summer, sophomoric, boutique music festivals (surrounded by its own border wall – the irony!).
I assume, Dear Reader, you’ll likewise feel irked by such insolence.
Rest assured, my intention is not to cause offence but, equally, I couldn’t give a flying fuck if I do.
I have bigger fish
To fry.
Orwell foresaw its manipulation of language,
Kafka prophesied its suffocation of the spirit,
Huxley intuited its stratified numbness.
The 21st Century:
As tediously
Conformist
As it is depressingly
Meaningless,
Pervasive
Elusive authoritarianism
Its genius,
Yet
Many seem trapped in a bygone era
Demanding illusions of subversion
From their artists,
Do they really believe deposing vassals of the Goblin King
Would change a fuckin’ thing?
Who shall we topple first?
Trump?
Orbán?
Putin?
Erdoğan?
Starmer?
Macron?
Why not try
Rebelling against
That which sits
In your pocket?
Why not dare
Disobey
The all-seeing eye
Glaring through a screen
That sits before you?
Why not find the mettle
To walk alone
Ignoring
The Spectacle?
Its unreality
Has a much greater hold
Over your mind!
Do not demand of art
If you have not
The
Balls
To
Simply delete
And switch off!
Subtlety
Of imagination
Facilitates
Greater resistance,
How hard is that?
spitting image
‘The Male Gaze’, ‘White Privilege’, ‘Deconstruct Whiteness’, ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’, ‘Smash the Patriarchy’, ‘Just Stop Oil’…
‘Support Our Troops’, ‘Make America Great Again’, ‘Axis of Evil’, ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People’, ‘Jesus Loves You’, ‘God is Great’…
If you think there’s any difference between the above, congratulations, you’re a moron.
Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, Reform…
If you think there’s any difference between the above, congratulations, you’re a moron.
If you think there’s any difference between the Guardian, the BBC, the Daily Mail, Channel 4 News, ITV, the Spectator, Novara Media amid countless others (too many to mention), congratulations, you’re a moron.
I’ve travelled across the world; lived and worked with people from all over the world; taught English to people from all over the world. Personally, my experience of encountering people from all manner of cultures different to my own has been overwhelmingly positive. If anything, it’s taught me that people have more in common than what we’re encouraged to believe divides us. Equally, however, I have found people from cultures different to my own – be it Eastern European, African and especially Asian (particularly South Asian) to be notably more reactionary in disposition.
I’ve lived with a Ghanaian who was pro-Bush. I’ve worked with a Nigerian immigrant who voted Brexit. I asked her why and she said, ‘I don’t want people coming here taking all the jobs’ (‘But you’re an immigrant!’ I replied, incredulously). Not to mention the most enthusiastically capitalistic Thatcherites I have ever met have not been any white, Bullingdon Club, posh twats (not least because I’ve never met any, though don’t doubt they exist) but from Southern Asians: ‘Privatisation is good because the workers are lazy’, one recently informed me.
As for those ‘Smashing the Patriarchy,’ feminists have long been domesticating the arts, media, politics and academia into a null gentrification ever since Edward Bernays duped egoistic, high society women to light up their ‘Torches of Freedom’.
Why, therefore, does the West, specifically its white, urbane, middle-class ‘intelligentsia’ insist on paternalising supposedly oppressed groups into a faux-left identitarian fantasy through vapid slogans masquerading as truisms mentioned in the opening of my lament? How do they not see the assumptions inherent to their insipid virtue-signalling? How do they not see they are Nietzsche’s ‘Tarantulas’, Orwell’s ‘Sandal-wearers’ or Yuri Bezmenov’s ‘Useful Idiots’?
How do they not see the exact same totalitarian use of language as their right-wing ‘opponents’ cited in the following line of my lament?
How did we arrive at such an infantile, culturally blind Disneyfication of the human condition? Was it destiny for universities and the humanities to become so irrelevant?
Is religion to blame? Or is this all just technocratic capitalism reaching its nadir before we evaporate in a nuclear apocalypse due to man’s pathetic inability to integrate his own shadow?
Please tell me where, if anywhere, the intellectually curious and artistically free reside. I wish to emigrate from a world where such things have become taboo… before it’s too late.
pseudoscience
I began studying a master’s in psychology while living in Exmouth and switching jobs to an NHS crisis house in Exeter. However, I got halfway through and found the whole subject rather soulless and overly feminised. Indeed, I learned that 96% of psychological research is done in Western countries, predominantly American universities, whose participants are mostly white, female students from relatively affluent backgrounds. So much for diversity (almost as bad as the arts!). I also took issue with its claim to science through a comparatively lax p-value. I found it too much of a chore studying a master’s around full-time shift work in the NHS, which involved hours of reading dry academic journals where I felt the ‘research’ was telling me shit that was self-evident (for certain, my years working in mental health have taught me more about the pervasive nature of despair than anything I’ll learn at university!). During this time, my money-grabbing landlord decided to evict us so he could develop his property into luxury flats. The stress led to being prescribed anti-depressants by my doctor… not for the first time, although this one actually worked (for a while).
I moved to the small village of Tedburn St. Mary (where I reside as of writing, shortly before moving again to Teignmouth: where the valley I grew up meets the sea, I have a view of distant clouds beyond its horizon and can feel the sand beneath my feet). I then read an interview with German film maker, Werner Herzog, who was critical of psychoanalysis. I can’t recall the exact way he put it, but he alluded to the soul as being like a house – if every part of it was illuminated, it would be uninhabitable. He considered it to be equally true of the soul that some darkness is necessary, which runs contrary to the aim (in his opinion) of psychoanalysis. I found myself agreeing with him, which made me realise that if I agree with such a view then I am probably not going to make a very good therapist. It’s oddly reflective of how art has lost its implicit qualities: these days, everything needs to be explained! I faced up to the fact that I had simply lost the confidence to pursue dreams of being a writer (after more rejections for Adrift in Amnesia and The Cycle Diaries than I care to count!). I jacked in the master’s and got back to work.
An art student in the early noughties, I was initially optimistic about Big Tech’s brave new world connecting us all. For a time, this seemed to have real potential – finally releasing creatives from the shackles of the gatekeepers, ushering in a new era of indie. I collaborated with artists, writers and musicians as far afield as the US, Russia and Thailand, but also connected with people who were simply interested in art and were drawn to my work. However, in the last 10-15 years, something has darkened to the point of being weirdly uniform, insular and polarised (curiously coinciding with the rise of iPhones and social media colonising our lives). The nineties feel like a distant memory. Britain no longer feels like a creative country. There is no joy in our disembodied tech malaise. Now is surely one of the most depressing times to be a writer (and artist)… be it facing the totalitarianism of AI, the abject and perpetual nihilism of the Internet, the Americanisation of everything, the absurdity of a pathologically ecocidal and banal consumerism (not least in its commodification of protest), or the mind-numbing conformity of a bourgeois arts scene kowtowing to the egocentric demands of entitled, terminally online activists: cultural homogenisation jacked up to the max in a linear society… it has all become so fucking boring, let it die! Let there be a new beginning. Step one: avoid social media – representative of the neo-establishment and anathema to the entire creative process.
it’s awful, goodnight!
Hello, more road closures, potholes, potholes and more fucking potholes! A madman wants to takeover Greenland… to save it from other madmen, apparently. Britain remains incurably inhibited, stuck in its rotten class politics, while Europe is a self-made impotence by its own bureaucracy. China is on the rise; Russia rubs itself with glee.
I was reading a badly written article about Oxford’s sex parties. It was the usual predictable, petty musings treating sex as if it’s some kind of avant-garde subject, utterly blind to the fact that sex is everywhere… how are we not bored of this shit? I’ve never understood the bourgeois notion of sex as transgressive, but then I went to a bog standard comprehensive, and we were all randy little fuckers! Seems the posh kids have to wait a bit longer for such ‘exploration’ and didn’t get the memo that there’s nothing neoteric about it, but why do we only care when it’s the rich indulging in such things anyway? It’s not like sex parties don’t happen elsewhere in society all the fucking time. What struck me (asides from the crap writing) was just how anti-bohemian these soirées are: people signing NDAs, committees overseeing events and vetting participants… it was all so typical of the old establishment – neurotically controlling, taking all the fun out of a carnal act and reducing it to a contract. Then the depressing realisation hit me: such uptight cunts will likely end up ruling over us all. Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
FUCK 2026
© Percival Alexander