About Me — Stephen Blackford
I write on behalf of the ghost of Hunter S Thompson
I write on behalf of the ghost of Hunter S Thompson
So, and in the spirit of immediate openness and transparency, I don’t particularly care for these types of “About Me” articles but being the proud contrarian that I am, I thought it time that I wrote a 4/5 minute article that will give you precisely no idea about me whatsoever. That’s the thing with these articles and perhaps The Matrix as a whole: How can you possibly know anything substantial about me from reading a no doubt tangentially annoying short article that might well run to 7, maybe even 8 minutes?
I don’t know as I haven’t written this article yet.
That’s what I find so exciting about writing. The unknown of what might tumble from my tiny and overactive mind at any minute. The questions I want to pose. The tangents I have in my mental notes. The scribbled notes that infuriate me later as I can’t decipher what I meant when I jotted them down in the first place as I was on the way to the kitchen before remembering I turned the shower on 10 minutes ago, and why doesn’t anyone get my jokes on Twitter? A cathartic release. To pen a personal story. Perhaps let a little light into my darkness. Rail against the dying of the light. To stop believing my lying eyes. The appreciation of a film and a zeitgeist defining director. To pour my heart out over a baseball film that isn’t about baseball. To start a fresh page. To entertain oneself when simply larking around with words, in the hopes it may do likewise for someone else.
Is that enough about me yet?
We’ll return to all of the above and perhaps some more shortly but first, even as you approach the denouement of this article much further down the reading line, will you really know all about me? Do you care? Should you care? How in heavens name will you ever be certain that a single word of this article is even remotely true?
Long form writing has been dead since way before I started exactly a decade ago, and we may well return to the beginning shortly too. But the explosion of social media has seen the growing trend of the “Introduction Paragraph” or more simply “Profile Biography” and so we are immediately squashed and restricted (because internet characters are expensive, obviously) and suddenly you have just 140/280 characters to play with, and with which to introduce yourself to the rest of The Matrix. Why go deeper into someone’s social media character and read a host of their posts/articles/tweets when on their profile page they have a picture of a flag you don’t approve of, or a liking for a football team you despise or their politics don’t immediately align with your own?
Why indeed.
Again, in the spirit of openness and transparency, and according to my Twitter profile, I am a father, a son, and a holy goat and right off the bat there’s two factual errors and a rather lame (if constantly pleasing) reference to Rowan Atkinson’s brilliantly flustered Priest in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. I am a father and a proud one too, but sadly my parents are both now exploring infinity together and organised religion makes me shake my head so violently I often fear it toppling clean from my shoulders. According to my own Twitter biography I’m also a fanatic of Liverpool Football Club (true) but sadly I don’t have the immense, otherworldly pleasure of sitting at a drum set behind the greatest band in the world and I only worked for the CIA once when I ran drugs and guns for the US Government with a pilot named Barry Seal. Poor old Barry died in mysterious circumstances but a fantastic book was written on the subject and even Tom Cruise starred in a film based loosely on the book. Yet the whole drugs/guns/overthrowing Governments farrago is still largely seen as the domain of conspiracy theorists and people still refuse to believe their own lying eyes.
Truth eh? What are we going to do with that?
If you were to read the above paragraph again (and I certainly don’t endorse you doing such a frivolous endeavour), I’ve actually laid out a lot of truth about me wrapped within my own in-joke lies. I am a somewhat lapsed Liverpool fan these days and find far more enjoyment in watching their otherworldly football in the hopes it’ll spark a memory or a reason to write about it. The same can be said for the cinephile side of my persona, but just mention the name of British director Christopher Nolan and watch me light up like a firework and expect the tangential rambling that follows to veer in the direction of my love for magic or my obsession with Salvador Dali and his surrealist theories and the elasticity of time. A voracious book reader, podcast listener and wistful daydreamer, I’m also obsessive about the music of the UK band Radiohead and, as only those in the know will know judging from this paragraph alone, I’ve been known to pen the occasional boring internet dating profile in the past.
I write for my own personal amusement and if this touches just one other soul in The Matrix who gets my absurdist ramblings, then I narcissistically win. I occasionally write about characters, occasionally from the actual vantage point of these created characters. I don’t converse with the ghosts of either Lee Harvey Oswald or Hunter S Thompson, obviously, but it amuses me to write as if I do. I enjoy giving “call backs” to characters as they often sprout a couple of tangents and before my piping hot cup of tea has barely cooled, I’ve already formulated three or four paragraphs in my head, and a kernel of an idea has begun to take shape. I put digital pen to digital parchment on existentialism and the questions that gnaw at my bone marrow and I try to mock the absurdism that is social media. I write free form longer pieces of writing, nearly always autobiographical and very reverentially toward the human beings and friends I populate these pieces of writing with.
Regardless of whether I’m ripping off the style of my great literary hero Hunter S Thompson, questioning my own sanity within an existential upside down world or a film review that I don’t particularly care for, there will be a human heart beating at the centre of the story. Whether it’s a tip of the hat to Hunter’s “Gonzo” style of writing whereby he places himself in the middle of his own story and regardless of the contents or theme of said story, or a simple match report on my beloved Liverpool Football Club handing out a footballing lesson to their opponents, I always endeavour to highlight the human family at its core.
I’ve written lengthy blog articles on/off now for over a decade and always in an effort to soothe a troubled mind. A Mother’s son who shouldn’t have seen the passing of his Father. A contrarian. A daydreamer. An idealist. A liberal socialist in a world of liberal socialists that aren’t liberal socialists. Politically homeless and apathetic in a world of binary Red and Blue rosettes that people cheer for as though it’s a sport and not a rapacious oligarchy in George Carlin’s “Big Club” that are in fact one, global, all encompassing, freedom deleting, party. The One Party State? It was ever thus. The elephant has been leaving huge piles of shit in the living room for decades, and still people refuse to believe their own lying eyes, as well as their noses presumably.
After reading Carl Sagan and his “Pale Blue Dot” or the works of Erich von Daniken or Graham Hancock, I can’t but be enthralled to be living within a prehistoric rock spinning gently on its axis through an unfathomable infinity and around a ginormous fireball and a benevolent sun I lovingly call “The Great Fire God of the Sky”. Authors such as Erich von Daniken and Graham Hancock posit theories that we are just another species, another generation and another “Age” of beings that have inhabited mother earth, and perhaps that’s why I believe us all to be utterly and thoroughly irrelevant and unimportant, and rather than fight amongst ourselves over the colour of our skins, genders, pronouns, cultural identity, sexual orientation, sports teams, class, money, security and nationality, we should all be constantly free to skim stones on a shallow shore as the sun sets in the distance and a new day will be dawning soon, so that we can enjoy that simple pleasure all over again.
Viva humanity.
This was all about me apparently, and I hope I’ve puzzled, entertained or bemused you in some way. Thanks for reading.
Norbury Junction to Gnosall
A pictorial stroll along the Shropshire Union Canalmedium.com
An old man needed to see the sea
So he treated himself to the finest coastline Wales has to offer.medium.com
“Pi” (1998)
Darren Aronofsky’s debut film still plays on my mind.medium.com