Archive for September, 2006

29
Sep

A Warlord Messiah

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: Business, Life and MySpace

A strange thing about speeches is that you end up learning a lot more about yourself than you about the issues or the audiences. And of course you meet a lot of interesting people who pick up what you say and offer their own viewpoints in response which bring you to a deeper understanding. I’ve done a lot of them in the last year or so and been lucky enough to have had a phenomenal response to each. I’m getting pretty good at it too. I’ve been trying new things each time, trying to find my niche and what kind of delivery suits me best.

Today was very different and very strange.

I was the last (headline) speaker at an industry event in Brighton this morning, which was held in the ballroom of a hotel and consisted of just over 700 people. All the heads of all the main media cavalry were there, including Orange, Haymarket, Guardian Media Group, Channel 4, MSN, Virgin, AOL and bizarrely, MySpace. The morning was just one of those ridiculous carry-ons where i forgot everything and was one step away from chaos. Sound checking first thing isn’t my idea of fun. Normally then I’d be head deep in coffee explaining why I can..t go on.

Naturally, being the highly organised consummate professional I am, I only wrote the speech last night, hadn’t rehearsed it at all, barely got my presentation over in time, had no background on who was attending, was dressed casually, arrived later than expected and was about as unprepared as you can get. Ad hoc doesn’t quite do it justice. Total, utter horrendous mess, more like. Just my style. Raw. Passionate. Ready to rock. Feeling like death, but happy to sacrifice my last 2 joules of energy for the greater cause before collapsing in a small untidy heap.

The romantic amongst would say that this is what happens when Emma decides to seclude herself away from me and the effects ripple to paralyse my delicate mojo. That, of course, is balls. I survive perfectly well without her. OK, I..m lying. She..s a pretty useful adrenaliniser if I need a push. I just imagine her sitting there in the front row with a suggestive look on her face, and it..s pretty easy to get in ass-kicking testosterone charisma mode.

Occasionally I go for the serious approach. I’ve done corporate, provocative, downright offensive, jovial, reflective, but today was something else. It was religious in tone. I noticed it and so did the audience, and it was automatic. Traditionally I just turn up, get warmed up with a video or two and then let it flow from there, so where it ends up can be a number of different places. A few times there have been standing ovations, but mostly I get a damned good round of applause. The approval ratings have so far been above 90%. It..s not your average powerpoint pitch.

I did a lot of the usual pitter-patter, but something happened around a third of the way through. A new voice broke out in me I hadn’t heard or seen before. I was louder, more calm and more profound. I have a good knack of being able to command attention in a group of people, but this was something else. There were Tony Blair-style gaps, politician hand movements and a very strange atmosphere. Absolute concentration from all 700 in the room, watching my every breath. Total command. The air was electric. We were beyond technology. We were into spiritual grounds and talking to the hearts of people.

I got angrier and more passionate. My words were bouncing off the walls back at me. People sitting forward in their chairs staring at me. I was standing confidently at the podium inviting them to join me, to sacrifice, to change and to believe. I have a vision and it will be accomplished, no matter what. I was asking people to believe in that vision from their hearts and to change the world with me.

But most dramatic of all to me was that I was so calm whilst doing it. And I was calm afterward. No adrenaline, no anxiety. Totally natural. I had slotted into place, a place I had seen but not got to before. I know I’ll go there again as it’s only just the start. The door was already open and I faced no resistance. I did the job so well there were barely any questions as nobody had any doubt or disagreement. What I had painted would be. Pure strength, integrity and clarity, delivered with passion and authority.

The applause was absolutely deafening. But no adrenaline, no rush. No embarrassment or surprise. Nothing. No feelings. Not even numbness or surrealistic haze. I had done what needed to be done, nothing more. I thought I’d be feeling like a warlord screaming for vengeance to his commanders and infantry. But I was calm like you would be at home on the couch. Chaos is home for me.

And the feedback was immediate. As the conference came to a close and the last remarks were being given, people were flowing past me to comment and take my contact details. Twice the word ‘messianic’ was used. It’s a word I’ve been hearing a lot recently and been doing a lot of thinking about. I’m no messiah like Martin Luther King. I’m no prophet like Bill Hicks. I’m no visionary like Issac Newton. But people believe what they want to, and make myths and heroes out of the ordinary to satisfy their need for hope and revelation. They are painting onto me what I was supposed to be painting on to them. I’m becoming a public face for revolution.

“I look forward to joining your religious organisation soon.”
“Very messianic. Nice one. ”
“Are you going to be another David Koresh? ”
“More like a call to arms than a speech. ”
“Haven’t seen that at an industry thing before. ”
“I’m not sure what to say to be honest. Still a bit stunned. ”
“Thought we were at the Labour party conference for a minute there! ”
“Fucking amazing. Really fucking amazing. ”
“The end of the world? What i’m going to take back is that we’re ‘going to die’. ”
“Clearly a man on a mission then. Can i come? Where do we sign up? ”
“Impressively violent. Wasn’t sure whether you were angry though or just pretty passionate. ”

All absolutely 100% genuine quotes, ugly warts included.

Before you roll your eyes, it may sound fun, but believe me its not. You would think it’s a welcome luxury and a fantastic ego boost. With that kind of influence comes massive responsibility and expectation. If you fail, so does your cause and your future. You take the blame for a whole movement and can be stigmatised as well as lauded. It..s just as easy to become a villain de jour as it is flavour of the week. It can be a deadly trap that no-one will offer to get you out of for fear of their own safety. All you have to do is take one look at Tony Blair and you can see why being the face of something can be your undoing, and theirs. The packaging is a lot more attractive at times than the substance.

The more you narcissistically believe in yourself, the further you get from the people on the ground who grant you the authority in the first place. Those who have been abused either become heavily sensitive and against the misuse of power, or use it blindly as a tool for their vengeance. The cycle typically continues until you are murdered metaphorically or literally. A blessing and a curse, you might say. It’s easy to become confused and delusional. It’s easy to believe they want you and not the message. Maybe it’s both, as people respond to people. I’m not ungrateful or unwilling, just very sensitive to the potential dangers.

But this is me. This is who I am. This is part of what I am to do. I realise that now. I don..t know what it will be or what I will be fighting for, but I know where I’m going and that this is only the beginning. If I am a weapon now, then it can only mean what is to come later will be nothing short of nuclear. I’m nowhere near my peak. This is my training ground for the bigger fight. I’ve marked it for remembrance in my diary as ‘The Koresh Day’.

So in a single week, I’ve had the most amazing night of my life with the most beautiful girl I..ve ever seen, and also been hailed as the new quasi-Davidian media messiah who will go on to change the world as we know it. Not bad going for little me. Not sure I agree with the latter, and I..m sure the guys in our office would argue that it would be more appropriate to label me along the lines of a highly strung banana republic dictator. Who knows? It’s just interesting to see the way people see you, when you can’t quite see yourself. People see things in me I’ve just laughed at. I just hope I don’t disappoint them.

I’ve spent my life chasing magical spiritual moments that transcend the ordinary and affect me profoundly. Sometimes it was when I was talking to someone and the world seemed to disappear; sometimes it was playing music and getting to that place where the music takes a life of its own to be so special; sometimes it was looking in the eyes of a beautiful girl you care deeply about just before you kiss them. Those times you remember and hold onto forever. They become a myth and a fantasy that you perpetually chase, like a junkie. They are the seconds of wonder that you experience the beauty of existence for.

But I realised recently that it wasn..t other people, places or things that made the magic. It was with me all the time. I was the one who was there in each of them. I was the one who sought them out, nurtured them and led others to them. I am the source of that magic, as is everyone else. A simple thought, but a profound epiphany for me. Life is an extraordinary fairytale and movie plot when you make it and appreciate it as one. There would be no surprise birthday for Emma or rapturous speech for the audience this morning without me. If its missing from your own life it’s simply because you have to make it yourself or find it in the people around you.

Messiah? No. Genius? No. Reckless maniac who sees the world a bit differently to everyone else. Definitely. Potential car crash in slow motion? Possibly. Infamous reputation? Increasingly. Good PR? Certainly.

The time is coming when I will need to be this man. You would have contributed and made him what he is. The smallest gestures could have changed the world. A pound in change here or a supportive slap on the back there. A kiss in the darkness or a smile in the morning. Every one of you has made me who I am in some way. That..s who I truly owe this to and whose it is. This will be to you, and for you. You are not insignificant, unimportant, irrelevant or powerless. Those 2 seconds you don..t remember you gave me are in every word, every action and every thought. Who you were made all the difference.

Just take care of me afterwards when they have what they want, and all I see is my world falling apart in front of me. It..s only in the darkness that you notice the light.

More thoughts later I think. Privacy, freedom of speech and that Jamie Bulger bulletin that everyone keeps posting relentlessly. Going to go into sexual abuse soon too, and start saying some of the unspeakable. Its time now.

26
Sep

Reason That Reason Knows Not Of

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: MySpace and Romance

“The heart has reason that reason knows not of” (“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”)
From Pensées, by Blaise Pascal
‘
There is an irony in 2 important women in my life telling me that I think with my heart in favour of my head. All the women Ive ever known have been ruled by their heart, and its been the men who are cold, hard and logical. I’m a bizarre mixture of 2 very opposite people. My mum is a chaotic emotional mess whose heart is not just on her sleeve, its on every fucking part of her body like an ugly tattoo. But my dad is the opposite. Hes cold, indifferent, uninterested and totally unable to deal with any emotion other than anger. That might go some way to explaining why I swing so violently between the extremes.

We talk in so many ways about the sources of our feelings and thoughts. We have our brain, mind, heart, soul, intuition, gut and for men, their dick. A lot of business literature theorises that 90% of our decision is emotional, and we use intellect and reason to justify it as the remaining 10%. That may be true, but human interaction is just too complex for anything to be a simple formula. The reality is that we use a combination of all of them at different stages. We use them to pick up signals and the context and circumstances change. Its a bit like people saying we only use 10% of our brain capacity, which of course means the person claiming that has a 90% chance of being wrong.

I have never thought of myself as a heart person, but I guess I must be if everyone keeps pointing it out. Ive always been spontaneous and reckless, thats for sure. Highly strung and emotional, yes, although Ive done my best to cover it up and stuff it all down for the best part of 2 decades. Expressing feelings is an alien concept to me, and its something Ive needed to address for a very long time. I cant handle them, and I don’t know what to do with them. I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know what they are in the first place when they happen, and all I can do is grit my teeth and pull in my chest.

Im naturally a very nervy guy. My mum says that Ive always paced around like a caged lion and the only thing that could calm me down was momentum (i.e. knowing I was going somewhere, like being on a train or in a car). In fact, she continually repeats. I flinch a lot. I dont like people in my personal space and although Im an affection person, I don’t like you touching me. I wont kiss you on the cheek like youll kiss me. I want to but dont really know how and cant extend myself to do it. Ill probably just shake your hand and keep my distance. You have to be strong to deal with me like and just override me. If I care for you, Ill let you do it, and if I don’t, youll quick realise it.’

Emma says that its always all or never for me, or now or never. Its always urgent and I have to have it now. I rush in. Lisa says I forget my head. I probably do. Im an intense and passionate person and life for me isnt something that can wait. I want it all now and I want it bad. I want it more than you do, and thats how Ive always stayed ahead of the pack. But the other coin face of my indulgence is selfishness. Sometimes I get so caught up in what I want that I forget the other people involved. Its like an intoxication that floods me with desire, but one that also drives me to achieve all the things I have.

Cheesy phrases like life is short and carpe diem have become crass now in our modern age of advanced medicine and consumerism. We all think were going to live forever, and these idioms emerged in the days when the average life expectancy was half of what it is now. Wars meant young men rarely lived into their twenties, and indeed, Alexander The Great conquered a quarter of the known world by the time he was that age. Wisdom requires years of experience, but none of the greatest things in history were ever achieved by people who assumed there was always another day when they could get it done.

A lot of it comes from self-employment. You learn very quickly that if you want something done, you cant rely on anyone else to even do it in the first place, let alone do it properly. Everything you want done has to be done by you, and its the reason a lot of people who own companies are control freaks who cant let go and insist on micro-managing every little thing at a granular level. Entrepreneurialism means you naturally spot opportunities and want to make them happen. That requires speed and flexibility.

But more that that, for me its a spiritual concern. I truly believe life is short and I don’t have much left. In fact, I have a countdown I keep running to remind that I have to be as good a person as I can, and do as much as I can so the people I love can have what they want. Life for me is a few decades and no more. Something terrible could happen that left me unable to do all the things I want to, even if it sent me down a different path to do different things. Whats meant for me wont pass me by, but every second is a gift. Every moment is a potential memory to cherish and everything could be better. Every day is an opportunity for us to do something amazing.

And once that second has passed, it has passed forever. We cant get it back. Its gone. No more. Never again. Its lost in the ether of history with every other missed opportunity. Life for me is urgent. There are so many times in my past that I wished I had acted on my impulse or done something I didnt do then. Its not regret per se, but rather a welcome aggravation that reminds me that life is precious and cant be taken for granted. One day things can be one way, and then the sun rises and everything can be different. Everything can change in a day.

If I dont kiss you now, I may never get the chance later. Too much water may pass under the bridge for us to be in this moment again. The seconds are passing as I write this, and I cant get them back. My diary fills up in advance so fast that I barely have the time to decide what to do for myself. The world has its way with us all whether we like it or not. Shit happens. Life happens. We dont get the chance to do what we want to, when we want to, as life interrupts. Schedules are fickle things that are so sensitive to disruption. We cant rely on having another chance.

And thats the reason Ill turn come to Scunthorpe when you want me to, even it its late at night when I have work the next day, or when Ive only just left. Even its ridiculous or crazy. Because I may never get that moment again, and it could be amazing. I could miss out on what is meant for me. The exact combination of everything at play at that exact millisecond will never occur again, like the position of the stars or the atoms that make up the surroundings. You’re so precious that I cant bear to miss a thing, even the tiniest feelings, words and atmosphere.

I live and work with the end in mind. What I do every day makes us what people will say at my funeral. I see where I want to be at the end, visualise it as realistically as possible and then everything naturally gravitates in that direction from that point on.

Is there anything more than the heart? Should we try to be people of reason? Is there anything more important? The greatest works of art were inspired by and driven by the heart. Impulsively following your urges has produced even accidents that were world-changing. Arguably the most wonderful and moving things in the whole world are those we feel with the heart. No-one is saying it should act alone, but the wisdom is when to know when to follow it or allow it to be moderated by the head.

How many people would be doing their boring 9 to 5 offices jobs if they followed their hearts and did what they really wanted to do, rather than what they feel into to pay the bills? Do people follow their dreams with their mind? Was it Shakespeare’s mind that led him to write The Tragedy Of Romeo & Juliet? Was it Eric Clapton’s mind that inspired him to write Tears In Heaven? Is your mind that feels that way when they tell you they love you? If they were sensible, they would just calm down and deal with it differently.

Fuck reason, and fuck being sensible. A life of that is a slow death. At least with the heart you have stories, even if some of them are painful to recount.

And lets be honest and not lie. Lets not moderate the truth as we moderate our decisions and behaviour. It feels fucking amazing. Living for right now is about the most amazing feeling in the world. Breaking out of the routine and going into the unknown is an incredible journey that makes the blood rise, the hairs stand up on the back of your neck and every nerve in your body tingle. Its exciting. Its fun. It feels natural. We may be designed for cyclical routine, but were not designed for sensibility other than that of our own survival. Breaking out means challenging ourselves and becoming better and stronger. Its healthy to risk and take chances that open us up to the wonderful diversity life and abundance of opportunity we may have become too glazed over to see.

Failure is about whether you get up on the horse again once youve fallen off. Believing and faith is about having the strength of character and defiant belief in the good to carry on. Its why I blindly persevere and keep on doing on silly things like surprising people by turning up unannounced or paying for everything when nobody expects me to. Its why I tell you that I love you that one more time when Ive already told you twenty times before. You have to keep knocking until someone hears and lets you in. You need to know that last inch of yourself, and as Jim Morrison so wisely said, its only when you stare at your own death that you truly feel alive. The razors edge may be deadly, but there is no boredom or compromise there.

Let me be clear though that just because Im advocating the heart, it doesnt mean Im condoning being stupid. Love makes fools of us all, and there are times when being rational does help. Situations of that nature include obsession, stalking and other pursuits where you are out of touch with reality. Im saying that taking a risk is healthy and essential, and we are spiritual creatures for whom the heart is a barometer of sorts that brings out the best and worst of us. We love and kill for the heart, and the world is changed through feelings that stem from it. Businesses profit from manipulating it, and it defines almost our entire perception of the world around us.

Who knows what will happen in the future? Do we really need to know? Is it more exciting to know the ending? Those bright lights in the tunnel could be the headlights of an incoming train, but for that moment youre alive. Nobody who has ever given their all to something has ever regretted it. It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all. A life of misery can be made everything from having just a year where the heart loved. A second of joy can be analgesia for the long hours of emptiness that follow it. You have to put your hand near the flames to feel the heat when youre out in the cold.

As Bill Hicks said, its all a ride. So many prophets and wise men have come to us and tried to tell us that. And our response was to kill them all. Life is a journey, not a destination, whether you think its predestined or not. How and when we get there doesnt matter, only that were with each other on the journey. All that matters is youre holding my hand, because then Ill know well make it.

Em, lets go for it.

24
Sep

Emma’s Version - What Happened With Project VS

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: MySpace and Romance

I was going to write this up, but thought it might be better coming from the horse’s mouth. She’s let me reprint it here.

——————————————————————————————

So most of you know that it was my birthday on Wednesday. I turned 22 and had a good day! What I was really waiting for though, was my present from Alex. He’d told me very little about it, except that it would take my breath away. And it did. This is how he did it.

The present was split into 5 parts. I didn’t know what these parts would be, and I was so confused and nervous I was going insane! Alex wouldn’t tell me anything. Not a thing. Nad’s kept saying “Oh my god! You’re present is so amazing!” and I was thinking, “WHAT THE HELL IS IT” haha. Well I knew it would be pretty special. Alex and I met on this Myspace thing about 5 or 6 months ago. Since our first conversation, we have spoken nearly every day. We know each other inside out. That isn’t necessarily because we have told each other everything, we seem to have this amazing ability to just “know” what the other is thinking and feeling. When he comes on msn, I know straight away what mood he is in. I’m always right, I don’t know how I do it, but it’s weird, in the most special way possible. The same happens to him. If I’m upset, or angry, no matter how hard I try to cover it up, he always says “what’s wrong”. Sometimes I don’t even need to speak. What me and Alex have is very special. I trust Alex completely. I can tell him anything, and him me. People should be jealous. Hehe.

Part one was the anticipation. I didn’t know this untill the very end, but my god it was done so well! My heart was in my shoes with fear, excitement, frustration, anxiety, nerves, the lot! I was told to drive to a hotel just outside my town. I had to call Alex before I set off so he could confirm everything was in place. The number I was given to call him on was a London number. I couldn’t call him on his mobile because he was in a meeting. Before this day I had wondered if he would be there waiting for me at the hotel. But no. I called the London number, and he picked up. So what the hell could it be? On the way there all I could think was “Oh fuck”.

So I pulled up, got out the car, and made my way to the reception. I had to say, “Hi, my name’s Emma and you have something for me!”. How fucking gay would that have been if they’d said, “erm, no sorry but we don’t have anything for you.” But they did. They gave me a room key, and a bright pink envelope with “Emma” scrawled across it. Shit. So I made my way to the room. Due to my nervousness, it took me AGES to get the bloody door open. It was one of those card key things, and in my experience, you put the card in, then open the door. But no! This one, you had to put in, then take out, THEN open the door. For god sake, as if I didn’t feel nervous enough as it was. I was stood there trying to open the fucking door like a blind thick ass, because the instructions were on the back, but in my current state, I wouldn’t have even been able to open a packet of crisps.

Anyway, I eventually got the door open. There, lying on this big four poster bed, was Alex. HAHA! Only joking, no there was a bright pink bag with something in it, with a gorgeous white rose and a CD lying on top. I immediately smiled to myself. Then I had a sudden thought. I checked the bathroom, the wardrobe, even the drawers, just to make sure I was alone and nobody was going to suddenly give me the heart attack that was already well on its way. I sat down on the bed and opened the envelope I had been given at reception. There was a card in it with another telephone number, a blank piece of pink card, and a shocking pink pen. I called this number. (another London number). Suddenly Alex’s voice was on the end of the line. A pre recorded message. He was instructing me to put the CD into the CD player, follow the instructions, and have fun. Fuck. So anyway, me being me, is only half hearing the recorded message and tries to put the CD into the television. I’m searching it for little rectangle shaped holes for the CD to slot into, when suddenly I look at the cover and see “CD-R” written on it. ARGH!!! Somebody should have walked in and slapped me right there and then. I was a mess. I’d never met Alex, and there I was, receiving the most amazingly though out gift on earth. So the CD went into the CD player. I pressed play. Again, it was Alex’s voice. He has the sexiest voice on earth by the way.Ahem. Where was I? Oh yeah. This time, he went through every single gift in the box. Explained it’s meaning, and why it was there. The box everything was held in was a shirt box. It had been modified, and made he’s had it covered in some sort of “material” that was only made when forests are burnt down! Something like that anyway, I left the CD at the hotel so can’t remember the exact name of it. But the most amazing thing about the box was the colour. Now I love pink. It’s my favourite colour. But Alex hadn’t chosen just any pink for the box. He had taken every single sample of pink I had ever used on the computer, i.e.; my msn messages, my Myspace profile colour, etc, and he’d had someone put them all together to come out with “MY pink”. Wow. Wow is all I can say about that. What sort of person would go to all that trouble just to get the right colour box? I’ll tell you who. Alex Cameron. Because he is the sweetest, most thoughtful person out there. You’ll never meet anyone like him. Ever.

So what was inside the box. Well it’s almost as if Alex has been taking notes about me and the things I love from day one. Everything that was in that box had a meaning. There were 22 things in the box. Here are a few.

Pro plus - because I’m always tired

Plasters - because I’m so clumsy

French toast and a mini tin of baked beans - cause I love them

A map of London - cause its where I’m moving to

A tea bag - I’m always drinking it

A bottle of rose - I love the stuff

I bottle of Smirnoff - I love the stuff

A black top with MBGITW put onto it. - It’s who I am to him

A letter he wrote me printed out and put into a frame - cause it’s bloody amazing and I want remember it forever

Dirty dancing DVD - Cause I love it even though he hates it

There was so much more. But you can see there’s a lot of thought been put into it. I’m not missing detail out deliberately, I just want to get to the good part. Hehe.

So anyway. On each gift was a pink strip of paper wrapped around. On the CD Alex had informed me I had to use the ultra-violet pen provided, to read the messages on each. On each, there would be a letter underlined. I had to note these letters down, work out a code, then call somebody’s fucking mobile number and give them the code! HA! He wanted me to work out a code. He wanted me to work out a code in the state I was in. Oh good god. Lol. He even provided background music for me at the end of the CD so I could do my de-coding to it. Hehe. Okay, so I got the code. I rang the number, it was Marcel. Alex’s good friend. He told me that Alex had sorted it out so that if ever I need help with my course then I was to phone him, or email him, and he would help me out. What a cool thing!! Then, Marcel said “I’ll just nip and get Alex for you, he’s in a meeting still”. I think, “Ok, so he really isn’t here.” Marcel then comes back and says, give him a ring in 5 minutes when he’s out of the meeting. So I call Alex after 5 minutes. He tells me there’s a secret hidden compartment in the box, and that I am not to look until he has hung up. I have to text him with the answer to the thing that’s hidden, in one word. OH MY GOD!!!!!! Lol. So he hangs up. I find the hidden compartment, it’s a piece of paper right at the bottom, it says “If I could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you want me to be?”. Fuck. That’s when I knew. He was right here in my town. I forgot to mention that another of his gifts was a tiny electronic device that buzzes when ever he gets within 30 feet of me. My eyes were on it the whole time after that. So I text him, and say, “here”. He replies and says, “there’s a bottle of champagne waiting for you at the old farmhouse”. I text back and say” where the fuck are you”. He calls me and says “You didn’t think I wouldn’t hand deliver it did you?”. I’ve put that sentence in bold letters because it will stay in my head forever.

Like a fly straight into the spiders web you might say. Haha.

So I’m in his hotel room. He tricked me. Oh my god. I’m pacing around the room like a fucking maniac! He takes ages to arrive. I have the buzzy thing in one hand, and my phone in the other. The carpet is nearly worn out, and I need to be at work soon. Lol. So There’s a knock on the door. I just freeze for what seems like an hour. I go to answer the door. I can’t quite grip the handle though. It slips out my hand and closes on him. Oooopsy. Hehe. I tried again. I could hear him speaking on the phone. The door opened, but nobody was there. Huh? And then he appeared from the side of the door. I cannot actually remember what was going through my head at that point. I think it was a mixture of shock, nerves, excitement, and pure fear. The first thing he said was “Hello you”. Hello me. Yep. Hi. I wanted to shake his hand! Lol. But I stopped myself and let him into his hotel room. I sat down on the sofa. He sat down on the chair. He started talking. Just talking away like he does. I have absolutely no idea what he was saying. I couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t concentrate on anything. I was just thinking, “This is the guy I have been talking to for all those months, the guy who knows just about everything about me, the guy who makes me smile every single day just by coming on line. That’s all I could think. I laugh when on films people touch the other person to see if they’re real or not. But now I know where that comes from. Cause I really wanted to fucking check! Just for a minute, cause everything was so surreal! Nobody had ever done what he’d just done, and an hour ago I thought he was in London. But now he was sitting in front of me talking non stop about something I wasn’t listening to. I could tell he was nervous. It’s a good job he likes to talk. Cause if he didn’t, the room would be in silence, and things would probably be a bit awkward. I couldn’t speak. I was a pathetic mess.

But I had to go. I had already told work I would go in for a few hours because I hadn’t known then that Alex would be making an appearance! I told him I’d be back later on, and off I went. I was in such shock that I left my purse in the room. But I wasn’t in the slightest bit worried. I trust this guy one hundred percent. Even though we’d never met before, I feel as if I know him.

Work dragged. I didn’t wanna be there. I wanted to be with Alex getting to know him better! I hadn’t eaten all day because I was so excited. Now I couldn’t eat cause I was so nervous! Alex wanted to go out and eat, but I couldn’t. I do have a slight fear of eating in front of people I don’t know, but that wasn’t the reason. I just wanted to get to know Alex properly alone. So I text him and said so. He replied saying “as you wish” and next thing I knew he was on his way to the supermarket stocking up for the night.

So work finishes, I go home, get changed, and head back out again to where Alex is. Once again my heart is doing flips, but I’m not half as nervous for some reason. I get to the room and the door is already open for me. Which I like. Much better than the whole “I can’t open the fucking door ” incident repeating itself. I walk in, and he’s sat on the window ledge having a crafty cigarette out the window. He asked for a smoking room and didn’t get it. He smells gorgeous. He doesn’t look much like his photo’s though. Well of course he looks like his photo’s, but I suppose in person you can see more. The eye colour is what I loved most. Very piercing.

Alex had stocked up with champagne, chocolates, marsh mallows, vodka and rose wine (which he knows I love). He poured me a vodka and we started chatting. There was no awkwardness or anything like that. I felt totally at ease with him. He wanted to watch the film “Silent Hill” with me as he was too scared to watch it on his own. So we started to watch that. He talked all the way through it. Haha! But it was cool.

We talked about everything. From ruling the world, to how to make a pepper turn blue. We looked at midget porn (Alex’s request not mine) and we ordered a camping stove from reception.

Alex made me laugh so much. We got on really well and we just clicked straight away.

Something I noticed about Alex right away was that everything he feels shows in his eyes. So I always knew exactly what he was feeling.

Well I won’t go into anymore detail, cause I’ll be here all day. And I’m only doing it cause I want to relive every minute f it. We had an amazing night together. One I’ll never forget. Me and Alex have fallen out a few times, and with anyone else I would have just walked away. But with him I never could. I knew there must be a reason for that and now I fully understand why. People often get carried away over the internet. People can be who ever they want to be and not themselves. You can be easily led astray and lose all sense of reality. But with him, my instincts were right. I had to leave and go home that night. I couldn’t stay, I wanted to, but I thought it would be best if I left and stopped things right where they were. It was hard to do, but had to be done.

So now what happens? Who knows! He took the plunge and went for something I was too scared to do. And it turned out to be amazing. When he left the next day, I was in two minds about asking him to stay or not. I didn’t want him to go, but I was already upset about him leaving and I knew it would only make things worse for me. I missed him the instant I walked out his door! We are both at different stages in our lives right now. A part of me doesn’t care and just wants to be with him every second of the day, and another is telling me that I should wait and not to rush into anything. That’s where me and Alex differ slightly. He rushes into things and thinks with his heart. I think with my head most of the time. Maybe I should break that habit and go with it. I know I want to. And I know that what ever the future has in store for me and him, It’s gonna be good.

18
Sep

From This Day On

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: Business, Life and MySpace

In times of peace, we prepare for war. In times of war, we prepare for peace. In my own way, I have been preparing for war, one that I never wanted but was born to be in and have become so used to that I barely notice it until it affects the people I love around me. All my life seems to have been lived in the midst of one, be it the never ending conflict within my own head and heart, my family, business or the places I am heading into now.

Something switched on in me today, as it did recently in a meeting in Gloucester Road. 2 very severe things happened in a matter of hours. I stood up in court to sue South West Trains, and the rail manager who angered me was fired in front of my face.

Its strange what happens when you stand up and say no more of any of this. The world ticks over and the new person falls into place.

Im a ruthless bastard when it comes to business. Ill block, punish and suffocate anyone who rivals me, and Ill do it with megalomaniacal impunity. I feel nothing at all, especially when it comes to obnoxious suits who thoroughly deserve it. For those in the position as me with a good heart, Ill help along the road as much as I can. But if you threaten my little kingdom, the black arts are marshalled. Being young means you have to work twice as hard, be twice as harsh and be twice as smart to get ahead and stay there, not to mention have even the most meagre slices of credibility in a very brutal environment where the stakes are higher and the prices of mistakes can be terrifying.

In Gloucester Road, I was unusually cold. Normally I have a amiable disposition and charm my way through with visions of the future, mental dexterity and an infectious enthusiasm. But this day was different. Short sentences. Numbness. Im not justifying anything to you. Youre going to need balls and a strong stomach. We have 5mins and 30 seconds for this meeting. Were going to make you a lot of money, and for that youre going to need to give us what we want. Its on its way, and so are we. Join us or youll end up fighting us, and we will be stronger. Brutal, harsh and cold.

Something happened during that meeting that took me to the place I needed to be in. The poker face and single-minded Bond villain-style determination was all over me and I was there in the moment weaponising it beautifully. I resolved then to get into that moment whenever I could from then on. The light had been switched on, and I had hit the frame of mind I needed to cultivate and savour.

Today was very similar, but on a social level. To cut a long story short, I refused to pay a fine a ticket collector decided he was going to impose on me at Wimbledon station, and SWT have been screeching at me ever since, despite every letter reply to them stating my refusal. So they took it one stage further and lined up a court date. Being as impetuous and bloody-minded as I am, I decide to take legal advice and sue them right back. The intimidating rhetoric was that I should concede my guilt and pay up now, as it could cost me much more in the long run.

My rather belligerent and bullish response to them was that it will cost them a lot more than it will cost me. The figure of damages weve put on the table is almost 20 times higher than theirs and into the thousands of pounds. I wont be intimidated by these underperforming, corrupt and cynical companies. Penalty fines are abused heavily for their profitability, and its well known.

But I nearly missed my hearing, due to another scrap with ticket collectors at Wimbledon on the very morning I was suing them for the very same thing. I flipped and lost my temper completely with idiot moron fat blond bitch behind the counter and nearly put my fist through the glass. Its scary when that happens as Im as near to psychotic as you can get in that state. She refused to sell me a ticket due to the swearing (swearing is abuse apparently), and as a consequence I decided to rip the roots from underneath her on my return.

I Camerond the clerk, security guards and prosecutor, the latter who was slyly trying to get me to save myself the hassle and plead guilty because he claimed it was a straightforward offence I was guilty of. I laughed. We were in full flowing conversation about life, law, the third world and the deterioration of government in no time at all. Working cases like mine must be an appallingly boring life. Someone else is out there defending at a murder trial or taking down an Eastern European dictator.

So we got into the courtroom, and after joking about a bit, 3 magistrates appeared to talk though the hearing. Now I have some experience in these things due to an unfortunate criminal past, so being in a courtroom doesnt phase me too much. In fact, I rather like it. Today, however, was about something much bigger. It was about making court my home. To have ultimate victory, one must be familiar with their surroundings and masters of their circumstances.

Anyone would be surprised how farcical magistrates courts are. The magistrates themselves were late, half the defendants didnt turn up, the briefs were mostly missing and even the security guards were sitting around doing nothing as people set off the metal detector when they walked through it. Thank god nobody brought a bomb in that day, as no-one would have even noticed. The types of people who frequent this time of place are largely there for traffic offences or enforcement notices, and of lower class origins.

They were expecting quiet submission from me and were quite taken aback when I stood up and told them I was there to challenge the law and the validity of the technical process. I gave what can only be described as a 5 minute Churchillian diatribe that could only have come out of my mouth that early in the morning. My argument was that the law was deficient, the train companies and their employees are wilfully abusing their legal allowances and the paperwork was wrong. Laws are made for the people, by the people. The people in this instance would not be SWTs side, and neither should the court be.

For me it was almost an epiphany. I was intimidated like I thought I would be. I relished it. Ive addressed crowds for years now, but this was a different story and opportunity. Pointing the finger and arguing for truth just felt right. I was at home. I was fighting for me and everyone like me. The adrenaline wasnt there, but the will to conquer was. It wasnt a macho thing either; I wanted it bad, and I was bigger than that courtroom. I felt them watching as I spoke, and how they were listening and reacting to how I was. Thats quite a drug.

But the overriding feeling was that this was the first time I had stood up and taken a side. I always try to see all views and sit on the fence because time can bring out new angles and information that brings new light to the decision you made earlier. It felt good to fight. It wont be the first time Ill be in court, but the next time will be for something greater, a cause that needs fighting for or for something that needs changing. Its the centre of power and the place where lives are changed. And nows its mine. I want it, bad. I resolved that day to stand up for each and every time anyone threatens me, and not be neutral any more. I wont cower, I wont concede and I wont fail to be someone that fights for what is right.

The wisdom for me is that war is unavoidable when there are those who would wish you harm. Fighting is a natural urge and a natural consequence that we try hard to avoid at any cost. But its part of us, its in our nature. Its the proving ground for courage and a moral grey area. The innocence that believes peace will come and all things can be settled by peaceful means is wrong. There are bad people in this world who live by the sword, and they must be challenged and felled by the sword to protect the things we hold dear. And we must not feel guilt for their destruction, as it was their choice to harm us before it was ours to use violent means to defend ourselves against them.

My father used to preach that you could stop a fight by talking yourself out of it. I learned quickly that it doesnt work because once someones has made up their mind to harm you, there is little you can do to stop it. Bullying doesnt stop because you report it to a teacher or boss; it stops when you make it too much hassle for the bully to continue. And it doesnt stop after one act of resistance. You need to keep fighting and resisting until they give up and move onto someone else. The SAS teach that the first thing you do when attacked is to take the battle to the enemy, as its the last thing they expect. The guy who gets the first punch in normally wins.

You cannot convert the choir, and you cannot get through to those who have closed themselves off to outside influence in order to prepare themselves for violence. Many people cannot be reasoned with and ordinary compassion becomes a liability that can endanger you. I find it hard to disconnect that compassion and switch to kill mode, but its a difficulty I coming to be at peace with as times goes on. I am coming to see those who want to harm me and learning to strike violently to disable them before they can threaten me.

Laws are not right or wrong. We are taught that breaking the law is an absolute wrong, and in the black and white definition it is. Laws are attempts to find absolutes by which we can judge our behaviour and the consequences of it. But that is not only a lie, its a very dangerous lie to tell. Laws are made for the people, by the people. Laws can be bad, deficient or nefarious. They are what we as a society, community and culture decide makes acceptable and unacceptable conduct. Just because a law exists does not make it right, ethical or moral. Just as Martin Luther King rightly observed, everything Adolf Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal.

Moreover, laws are often created with vested interests in mind and must be regularly challenged and refined to ascertain their validity. Following them blindly without question or thought is extremely dangerous and worrying. It they are ineffective, incomplete or broken, they must be resolved. If we teach children to abjectly follow, we add to the ignorance and bang nails into the coffins of those who will make up the coming generations.

Bill Hicks said we should take just 10% of the worlds yearly defence budget and spend it on feeding and clothing all the children of the world, not one human being excluded. A counsellor in Holland I spent a long time talking with told me it was his mission to rid the world of weapons altogether.

There is a time for peace with all men, and struggling for it is an admirable cause. Insofar as it is possible and within our control, we all know we should live in peace with others no matter how tempting it may be to do otherwise. But many will decide not to live in peace with you, which means you must cut them down without guilt, remorse or hesitation as they would wish you and those you care about harm. Not everyone has the same constitution as you or thinks of you with the same respect as you do of them.

Thats a very, very difficult and painful realisation, one that many only come to realise on a battlefield or when at their last inch. We are born with that innocence until the world erodes it from us so that we end up shedding the remains. Its easier to believe the world is a nice place where there is love, compromise, loyalty and diplomacy that can fix anything. But the reality is that diplomacy is appeasement, and appeasement almost always one side being favoured over another.

In other words, someone has to roll over or concede. Diplomacy is the business of saving them face as they do it.

Appeasement is commonly known as keeping the peace or doing anything for a quiet life. Or plainly, giving someone what they want in the short term for getting something in the long term. It was Chamberlains flawed and fatal policy in World War II that gave Hitler time to build his empire, or his stroke of genius that bought the Allies enough time to collect enough resources to oppose him. In that case, the ultimate victory of the Allies justified the initial action but it came at a very heavy cost.

Some people just hate arguments and avoid them; some will tread on eggshells so they dont upset someone; others will give in as they dont have the strength or faculties to disagree; some are scared of the consequences of their action; others are terrified of their own inability to fight back. Whatever it is, there are always excuses to justify the same cowardly behaviour and they all involve giving in and rolling over.

But human beings aren’t built to do that.

The process of getting hurt by someones jibes or criticism is a very strange one when you think about it. What they say is designed to provoke a response and we automatically accept it as truth even though its an opinion. We dont question it like we would an outright lie. A criticism isnt a lie per se, but it is not truth either. You don’t have to agree with them or assume they are right, but in the process of not questioning it, you do.

The words go to your heart, and not your mind, because if they did, they would be thrown out very quickly for the irrelevant rubbish they are. The opinions are almost always wrong, misjudged, ill-informed, based on prejudice and poor previous experiences and the person is saying what they do for another reason.

Some people spend their lives wishing they could avoid being hurt or just blot out peoples harsh remarks. But it is possible. It involves interrupting that acceptance process you learnt after no-one told you how to do it the first time it happened.

Getting them to roll over and do the persecutors will is easily accomplished with violence or other forms of intimidation, but submission often simpler by pandering their vanities, insecurities or greed. All involve a conquest, and all involve a victor to whom the battle is eventually conceded, the only difference in each being the timeframe in which the victory occurs. Sometimes its immediate, sometimes it takes years.

When in times of doubt or confusion, I consult religious text as it gives me a reference and cornerstone of wisdom to help me base my decision or help me understand what to do next (or indeed, what not to do). My favourite choice is the bible as its full of fighting, killing, betrayal, corruption and the evils of human nature. It commands mercy over vengeance.

But I struggle with this, and it pains me. Knowing when to have mercy or not to have it is an intensely difficult decision and commands the deepest of concern. There are parts of me so dark that I cannot face them myself. For some reason there has always been a dichotomy at the centre of my heart that feels the intense guilt for hurting anyone or anything, and another part of me that revels in it.

Power is addictive and it is seductive to all. But it is also granted, not taken. The mind is always overruled by the passion of the heart and sometimes its so difficult to pull yourself under control again once your blood is up and your eyes are wide.

Ive always been a man of extremes, as my friends often tell me and testify about on my behalf. I spend so much time rebalancing; time spent adapting from the swing of going from one end of the scale to another and levelling out to normality again. There are days when I am so cold that you could mistake me for a rock of ice, and some days when I run so emotionally rampant that the tide carries me to places I cant deal with or even understand. The middle ground is sacred to me, as is the peace it brings. I wish I could stay there for longer than I usually am able to. For the people around me its charming and frustrating at the same time.

Philosophy only takes you so far in a world this wicked. When you are faced with the evil that only men can do, there are few choices but to defend yourself for sheer survival and in all war, there are innocent casualties. Al of it is a crime. But the choices of the malicious are not your own, and the consequences of their actions must remain with them rather than be induced like an electrical conductor in the minds of those who would fall prey to them. The terrible darkness that comes with the circumstances of the battle is knowing you have to fight, that you may be injured and that you will cause the suffering and destruction of something or someone else.

I guess what Im saying is that as well as the red-faced warrior that lives in all of us, theres also a victim. The twin of comedy is tragedy, and the partner of light is dark. To understand one we must appreciate the other as a matter of contrast. The question is to how much the wild animal must be exercised, or exorcised. Some believe that as a natural part of who we are, we should let that beast out of its cage whenever it rattles the bars, and others who feel restraint is the pinnacle of dignity, which helps us to become closer to the ideal of the divine.

The hands of man can be gentle and brutal with the same blood running through their veins. What man has created, man can destroy or undo. Genocide and serial killing is facilitated by a process in the mind of an aggressor where their victim becomes an object, not a person. The first thing we do in stereotyping or criticising is to demote a person to a thing, and deliberately remove our awareness of the parts of them that make them an individual person so they are no longer anything we can recognise or communicate with. This is a short-term psychological measure we use to survive trauma, but is tragically misused.

And there is great evil in this world. A third of it is at war, and two thirds do not have access to drinking water. The top search term on porn sites is rape. Despite the horror of war, we continue to engage in it. You’d think that after the first experience, wed abandon the whole idea.

Peacemakers and activists are naive. Their motives and compassion are noble, but their reasoning is foolish. Men have always done evil to one another, and they will not stop as it is part of our nature whether we despise it or not. For every man who lays down his weapon, there will be another who sees him do it and attacks him because of his vulnerability. We need weapons to protect ourselves from those who would harm us, and there are more of them than we think there are.

Politicians inadvertently conceal the truth from the people about their double dealings because they think they will not understand their motives or actions that lay beneath the most appalling sins they do in the name of the interests of the country. Politics is a business where you betray your principles for your interests. We keep our neighbours at war, for as long as they are killing each other, they are not harming us. Its a tactic the Romans perfected long ago, along with divide and conquer.

We sell arms to dictators as buyers rarely attack their wholesalers, and we can equip them to undermine our enemies and keep them in a situation where they are drained of resources and weakened. We keep them in place without active pursuing their removal from office as the devil you know (and can manipulate for your own ends) is better than the devil you dont know, havent dealt with, or cant see yet. The blood of innocents is powerful political bargaining material when you want to force the hands of those who spilled it in the first place.

The enemy of our enemy is our friend, and we have no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. We go to war for 2 reasons, and 2 reasons alone: to protect, or enhance our interests. But he who wields the dagger never wears the crown, and we can never been seen to be the one feeding the frenzy. We keep the economies of countries weak so they cannot undermine our own, and we stay close to our allies so we can punch above our weight with the aid of their support. Fighting in their wars allows us to profit from the spoils that would otherwise be theirs alone to consume, and better to get fat from someone else’s table than starve from not having one of our own.

This is the simple reason we went to war in Iraq. Oil underpins the economies of all the major nations, and not going to war with America would have been disastrous. He who controls the supply of oil controls the world. We couldn’t not do it. The US administration was going to do it anyway for their own reasons; we are simply latching on to enhance our interests from their vile crusade into the country we ourselves created so many years ago from the 3 Babylonian regions. The message is clear. If you mess with Britain, you mess with America.

There is only one defence against the onslaught of Western armies, and that is nuclear weapons. America will not attack any country that possesses thermonuclear arms for fear that the desperation of a smaller nation against such a massively more powerful army will cause them to repeat Hiroshima in order to stop the war and win the day. Pakistan has sold the secrets of weapon manufacture to anyone with enough money to pay for them.

Its again the reason that North Korea and Iran have now embarked on active and virulent nuclear programs, because if they possess those weapons, they are well defended against an appallingly punitive US regime that has destroyed its neighbours and will most likely be eyeing them up next. Bush’s Axis Of Evil was a self-fulfilling prophecy constructed to serve the purposes of those who funded his campaign and wish to see the dawn of a new worldwide America’s empire. Wars feed economies and drive technological innovation as a mother of invention.

There is something terribly wrong with this country, and there is a poisonous evil growing underneath us in this world that few can see for the blinding lights of political spin and the insidious influence of the media on our ability to think for ourselves. It has been said that for evil to triumph it is sufficient that good men do nothing. Apathy will be our undoing because whilst they smile sweetly, they will rape, and the comfortable pillow behind our heads will be the instrument that suffocates us in our sleep. Say nothing, do nothing, and you die.

He who controls language, controls thought, as Orwell understood well. Language is more powerful than nuclear arms as it steers the will of the people who grant political power, and labels can be used to neuter as well as they can corrupt or inspire. Truth is so sacred that it must always be protected by a bodyguard of lies, and the greater the lie the more likely it is that it will be believed. If you tell it enough, it eventually becomes truth in the minds of those who know no different or lack the integrity, strength or energy to discern one from another.

But in order to control, you first need a war, which is always unpalatable and driven to be ended as soon as possible because of the political fallout it brings to those who initiate it. The tried and tested answer is a perpetual war that never ends. The war on drugs never ends, nor does the war on terror. They can never be won, only carried on forever. A perpetual war gives you licence to do whatever you like, for however long you want to do it for.

Fighting for peace is not an empty cause like fucking for virginity; its a very noble and essential one that demands massive belief and integrity. The problem is that peace can only be achieved in a world like this if it is in the interests of those who are resisting it, not just as an idealistic pursuit of hippies, little girls or extreme liberals. Peace needs to be a political expedience, not a fruitless dream of philanthropic generosity.

This day has changed me. It has opened my eyes and let out some of the human animal in me that wants to fight and conquer. It changed the way I look at who I am and how the path will be trodden in the years to come. More than twenty dreadful years of fighting, arguing and being abused have given me the stomach I need for a scrap.

I want blood and dirt on my hands. I don’t want to be a bystander or a victim any more.

And Ive been a victim too long and not realised it fully. Ive let people walk over me, convince me to roll over, allowed myself to follow the direction and influence of others, and put myself at the mercy of those who don’t have my best interests in mind when it comes to how they treat me. Ive been scared to lose, to separate and to detach. Ive been paralysed by the fear of the grief I would feel and blinded by the black curtains of cynicism and doubt when it comes to my ideas on the intentions of others. Ive lived in fear for too long. Today was the day when it came to an end, and when I realised I was half awake.

I felt nothing when the ticket guard was sacked. In fact, I smiled at her. It was her choice to be that way and anger me, and her decision to have repeated the same behaviour shed obviously committed too many times before in order for her superiors to be so severe with her. What I wanted to say was that she should consider herself lucky that she came out of it relatively unscathed. Next time Ill come for her family. There is no remorse in my eyes, and there is no compassion in my heart for that person who threatened me.

I stood up and was counted, and I will do again and again until the day I take my last breath. I know who I am and what Im here to do. You are not permitted to stand in my way or obstruct what needs to be done. If you ignore the warnings you will suffer for your choice as that is the limit of my compassion. I will treat evil men with the disdain and contempt they hold me in, and fear nothing as they try to challenge me. I will be smarter, faster and more lethal than they imagine. I have taken my own side, and I will fight for it like I will fight for the people I care about and people who need my firepower on their side.

There will be a time for forgiveness, but it is not now. I would rather burn alive than go down on my knees. There is no wishbone where my backbone is meant to be.

14
Sep

Calling All Objectionable, Irritating And Undesirable Human Vermin!

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: MySpace

Are you

  • fat? hideously ugly? hilariously unattractive?
  • Lack any discernable dress sense? Lack any form of social ability?
  • Rude? Insensitive? Downright obnoxious and offensive?
  • Ignorant rascist, sexist, anti-semitic, anti-immigrant, UKIP/BNP-member or other vile bigotry of choice?

Maybe you, or someone you know or had the misfortune to meet, are:

  • An angst-ridden attention whore who spends their hours desperately pleading for people to comment your pictures and/or entertain you?
  • A shit band who never knows when to give up with the spam and believes it is their god-given right to be famous?
  • An unstable, confused and melodramatic emo kid living off the money given to you by the parents, who you hate for bringing you into this horrible world that doesn’t understand you?
  • A predatory paedophile who is looking for fresh kiddie meat to groom?
  • A serial pervert who messages girls with filth hoping you’ll impress them or that they will reply in kind?
  • An alcoholic, drug addict or loser lacking any ambition or purpose?
  • An ill-informed, over-patriotic illiterate American redneck?
  • A right-wing, highly-opinionated fundamentalist Christian?
  • A political or religious activist forcing your emotive campaign in people’s faces regardless of whether they share your beliefs?
  • A superstitous moron who forwards chainmail messages and bulletins threatening bad luck if you don’t?
  • A man-hating feminist lesbian who refuses to even acknowledge the existence of the male species, let alone even address them?
  • A lazy sportwear-fanatic chav with more than an ASBO or two on its way to evict you from the council estate and cancel your benefits?
  • An arrogant, stuck-up posh twit with a superiority complex that you have no justifiable basis for?
  • A superficial fashionista who’s sole aim in life is to be a diva and stockpile lifestyle accessories and items of female indulgence?
  • An emotionally retarded, car-obsessed lager lout macho man without the simple ability to comprehend anything thats not a games console, lads mag or pint glass?
  • A charmless nerd with suspect body hair, monotone voice, unsettling smell or a need to indulge in strange war games?
  • A clueless teenager who has forgotten how to wrt gud frm tking txt att?
  • A self-obsessed and delusional friday-night playa who is just too cool for skool?
  • A vacuous mood hoover who has nothing to say for themselves other than the most tedious small talk and cliches?
  • A gooey, soppy over-romantic wet blanket who collects Mills & Boon stories, girly feelgood movies and has a dreary naive obsession with love from watching too many Hollywood movies?
  • A miserable, blood-drinking vampire goth adsorbed by the beautiful melody of speed death metal?
  • A pre-pubescent wannabe pretending to be older than you actually are by uploading semi-sexual pictures for middle-age men to get confused over?
  • A social degenerate so profoundly stooooopid that the oxygen you consume would be better spent on an inanimate object like a tree or wall?
  • A bitter, resentful and angry ranting emotional wreck who can’t put the axe down or let something go?
  • A cowardly fraud masquerading as someone else by stealing their pictures?
  • A frighteningly obsessive stalker that won’t take the hint or thinks restraining orders are a gesture of affection?
  • All of the above? (God help you)

Do you know someone like this? Ever been messaged on MSN or MySpace by someone like this? Had to block someone like this?

Then Lieutenant Licious Lovebeam and Commander Don Juan De Cameron want to hear from YOU! We want your human social waste!

Send your lists of emails, usernames, myspace addresses, pictures or anything else about the people you would rather never hear from again to either of us with PROJECT JOINER in the subject line!

If you don’t forward or repost this in the next 30 seconds you will have bad relationships and bad luck for a year. Or maybe that friend of yours who needs cheering up today won’t get to laugh from reading this. Your choice. It could happen and you just can’t afford to take that chance this week.

12
Sep

24 Hours In The Life Of Us

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: Business and MySpace

Don’t try and do any business in Amsterdam.

Lots of people enjoyed my email updates from our India when we went over for the weekend, so I thought I’d expand on that and do one for Holland. This weekend is the yearly IBC conference, where anyone who is anyone goes to. It’s the reason you have shit TV for a week, as all the people who make or run that TV you love are lying in a gutter somewhere in the red light district over here.

First a little bit of background. We have a mean team. They work very hard, and they play hard. You wouldn’t want to meet them over a negotiating table or down a dark alley. They are a wealthy and ruthless bunch that will tear you into bits and think nothing of it at all. I’m an utter bastard, but come off looking like a poodle in comparison to this lot. So it should come as no surprise that if you let them loose in the most liberal city in Europe, all hell will break loose. And it has.

Nothing says opportunity for chaos like a business trip to Amsterdam. For some reason the destination itself is a green light for open season on reasonable behaviour. In the last 24 hours, we’ve truly outdone ourselves. Last time it took days, this time it was a matter of hours. I somehow managed to escape and get back to my hotel this evening, albeit worse for wear. If they’d all had their way, I would be in canal boat somewhere, half-naked, baked off my tits and surrounded by women of ill repute. I should know better by now.

I touched down early Sunday evening and got a series of text messages from different people inviting me over for drinks, including a very beautiful married lady I work with quite often which was intriguing and very tempting. Naturally, I ignored all the flight crew’s instructions to turn off my Walkman so was already getting shit by the time I’d arrived in the country. Something just seemed astray, and I knew this year was going to be a good one.

I tend to avoid Amsterdam if I can. Underneath it all I’m actually pretty reserved and reticent, so a little culture is quite my style despite being such a philistine in most ways. Clubs, loud pubs and really hectic shitholes aren’t my thing and although I can get along in them, I prefer a more chilled and cosy environment with less people. Put me in a coffee bar, dinner party, jazz café, local pub or alfresco restaurant and I’m in my element. People are what are important to me, not the noise or place. Conversation, laughter and magical atmosphere are what make me sparkle and smile.

And the city is quite a dirty shitehole. Don’t come here looking for culture, as its full of drunken English football hooligans, drug dealers, weirdo European drug tourists and crazy fuckers who don’t appear to be speaking a discernable human language. So I stay up North in Alkmaar, which is a lot nicer. I have a 5* hotel at 2* prices, authentic Dutch town life and a peaceful environment that means I don’t have to suffer the madness of the main city and can commute in from easily in less than 30mins.

So the journey was easy and I checked into my hotel. The reception desk casually ended our conversation with “oh, and your guests have arrived”. Guests? What guests? Suddenly I was a little unsettled. I hadn’t organised any guests, and hardly anyone knew where I was staying. I put it to the back of my mind and assumed they had made a mistake. I popped my bags in the open glass elevator and slowly made my way up to my floor, looking forward to chilling for a few minutes and smoking a well-earned cigarette.

As I was walking to my room, I heard the sound of music and voices. As I got closer to my room, it got louder. The astute reading this will know what is coming next. Slowly it was dawning on me that the screaming and music was coming from my room. I was more than a little confused and stood outside for a few seconds to try and work out what the hell was going on.

Those seconds past, and I decided to bite the bullet and slide the card into the door slot, and just as I was doing it, the door opened to reveal a very beautiful blonde girl wearing just a long white t-shirt. Quite a movie moment, you could say.

“Hello. Who are you?” (huge smile)
“Err I’m Alex, and this is my room.”
“‘I’m Christina. This is the party room! So you are the Alex they talk about?”
“Yep. Hi Christina. When did it become the party room, and who is they?”
“We are having a party! We are going to party all night!”
“Right. What the fuck is going on in here?”

I walked in and put my bags in, and the full extent of the chaos came into view. There were 6 girls running around screaming and laughing, all with hardly any clothes on, all spilling drinks from the mini-bar everywhere. Beautiful girls. Incredibly beautiful. It was a man’s dream. A few of them were giggling and pointing at the bathroom. I was wondering exactly who was responsible and had a few ideas on likely suspects.

There was only one choice, and that was to look in the bathroom. God I wish I hadn’t now as what I saw can only be described as depraved. The CEO of a very well known networking brokerage we work with very closely was with 2 more girls, indulging in something I can only put as utterly perverse. I slid the door back closed, until he eventually made his way out a few minutes later, clearly trashed and dishevelled and with a huge grin on his face.

“Ah you made it then!”
“You could say that. I thought you lot were staying in the city?”
“Jon is, but we booked last minute and decided to stay with you.”
“So where is everyone else?”
“They’re all doing the phone-the-wife thing quickly, but we’ve ordered a taxi for half 9 to go into town. We’re going to get fucked up in a big way this evening.”
“Why didn’t I see this coming?”
“We have X grand to blow from a shareholder over-subscription, and we’re going to fucking blow it man.”
“Oh my fucking God.”

We only had a few minutes, so I frantically got my laptop running and logged on to MySpace to see if Emma had left me a message. She had. Huge smile. It’s funny how the smallest things can make the whole world seem brighter.

Thankfully, the people carrier / minibus taxi arrived quite quickly, and took the whole fucking lot of us to the Café Grande for a nice meal, which ended up with me playing “Hotel California” on a classical acoustic guitar for an entire alfresco diner audience of 30 or 40 drunk, tone-deaf Germans when the entertainer singer guy couldn’t quite master it for the obligatory singalong. You’ve couldn’t have written a better script if you tried.

Quote of the night was Jon’s, as usual. When we had got out of the taxi outside the restaurant, there were a load of drives touting for business:

“Taxi? You want taxi?”
“No we don’t want taxi. We just got out of one you useless tit.”

We got back to the hotel, and my room was the party room once again, as I had to talk to reception about my stay and didn’t have the time to have any say in whether I’d like it that way or not. There was no choice but to just get on with, despite the sheer onslaught of ridicule I got for switching on the PC to pick up emails (”We’re not here to fucking work Alex, get off that thing”, “We’ve got live porn right here, no need to look it up on the internet” etc).

Offline messages from Em. Kick ass. And there she was online and I just couldn’t help myself. She was the only person I wanted to speak to right then, and the whole madness just faded into the background. I’d only been away a few hours and I thought I’d speak to her in the week. But Em is not someone I can resist or be away from. The pull I feel to her is just too violent and intense. And she makes me laugh and makes me happy in a strange way. She’s everything I want really. She’s just so incredibly adorable that I can’t help wanting to crash into her at a million miles an hour all the time and tell her how fucking amazing I think she is.

All the fucking people in the room were beginning to drive me mad as all I wanted to do was talk to her. Every other guy probably would have been like a rabbit in the headlights, but I just wasn’t interested. Don’t get me wrong, I love my indulgences, but I’m a quiet guy and it’s not really my bag. It wasn’t fitting my mood. They got thrown out in the end so I could concentrate on my girl.

Its not really fair to go into what happened afterwards, other than to say I made a few trips next door to see what the hell was going on in my absence since I had to turn the TV and music up more than a few times to get away from the sound of the amor.

Somehow there were now twice the amount of people, including the female biz dev manager from a client of ours who was in the party spirit in a big way with one of our guys, horizontally. Suffice to say I won’t be looking at her in the same way again, as what the chaos descended into can’t be described in rational terms. Half orgy, half drunken brat-fest. I thought I’d seen it all up until that point, but I had to salute the sheer depravity and hedonism of it.

I didn’t get a whole load of sleep, as you can imagine, which didn’t help today.

I woke up, and there were people all over my room, including 2 on my bed. I have no idea how they got in there. All I knew was I somehow managed to get through it unscathed and with a clear conscience. It was time to get the conference centre and do something useful.

The coolest start to the day was a text from Em. That just kicked me into gear. Again, something so small, but so cool. I texted her back a million times but only realised too late that they weren’t getting through because the number I had stored didn’t include the UK dialling code.

It was then that fun really began.

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to top this year’s antics. We’re becoming legendary here, as everyone was talking about what happened in Alkmaar the night before, when a whole load of people went missing from their Amsterdam hotels for the night that their companies had paid for. I so desperately wanted to tell them, but that would have been one more PR disaster that our PR girls just don’t need right now as they have enough to deal with when it’s just me making the mess on my own.

1pm and our guys were drunk. Not just tipsy, but roaring drunk. And they brought girls to the conference. Yes, you read that correctly, they brought fucking girls to a business conference, steaming drunk. Un-fucking-believable.

“How did you get so drunk for fucks sake? The IBC pub isn’t even open yet.”
“Oh, MSA are sponsoring, so we said they could have an extra 2.5% of shares if they opened the doors for us a little early.”
“YOU FUCKING WHAT??????”

I walked off to calm down for a bit, and headed over the screen hall to dive into some technology to clear my head.

But it wasn’t to last. Paul had just got thrown out and banned from the conference centre for “vandalising” the stand of the company that make a model helicopter “Flying Cam”. The flying cam is a helicopter about 2 or 3 metres long that has a broadcast camera on the front of it that you can pilot remotely like a model to cover news events from the air. It’s a very cool thing.

Apparently dismayed that it wasn’t turned on and flying around, two of our guys walked round the back of the display, fired up the control system, nicked the remote control handset and somehow managed to get the blades swinging round at full speed. They were trying to get it to take off so they could pilot it around the arena.

Thankfully, it was strapped down, and by the time security had arrived, they’d managed to turn it off again and repair some of the damage. To give you an idea of the potential problem, each one of these things is worth $500k. But it didn’t stop there. More of our guys had heard about it and spent 20mins beforehand harassing the stand staff to sell them one, saying it would be useful for our company and that one of us would pay up. They wanted it delivered to the hotel.

The afternoon passed relatively peacefully, save for a small incident at the Dipcom booth where the small Korean guy manning the stand didn’t speak any English and had everyone in giggling fits when we spent half an hour asking him for directions to the zoo (”Zoo?”, “Yes, Zoo”, “You go to zoo?”, “yes, you know the way to zoo?” etc).

But before too long, the MySpace bug bit hard and I had to check my email and see if Em was back from work. I sent her a message as I was worried that she might think I was ignoring her. Nads messaged me to say hi and tell Em and me to get a room so we could stop messing up her profile. Job done, itch scratched and feeling better, I edged on with the business of the day. Namely, charming people into submission.

One of the funniest bits came at the end of the afternoon. Traditionally, the night before the conference closes is the most energetic one as the last day is reserved for cleaning up. It’s the night when all the parties happen and everyone is in full celebration swing. Being a network slut, I was being quite the social butterfly and putting myself around a bit to catch up with friends and colleagues at the respective shindigs.

Whilst I was at the stall of a French encryption company, I was asked to stand up and give a few closing remarks to the 40 or so people gathered round, as my reputation had got around and for some unknown reason people wanted to hear what I had to say about the industry that year. The fools. After I managed to get up onto a decidedly rickety old product stand, I was standing there like a twat making sarcastic remarks and buying time to work out what I was going to say. It was embarrassing but very flattering too, but my feet were hurting so much by that point that it was difficult to concentrate.

But what made it even more difficult to concentrate were the 2 fucking idiots at the back giggling like school kids, throwing things at me constantly and bending over in hysterics. Guess who? That’s right. The one that got banned, who had somehow made his way in again, and Mr Where Is The Zoo. They were shuffling around and laughing so much I thought we were going to get security again. What I found out later was they were trying to get their boxers off without anyone noticing, so they could throw them at me Tom Jones-style.

Yes, that is what it had come to. Our team trying to throw their panties at me in public whilst I was giving an ad-hoc street speech. We were past embarrassment by then.

The evening is just too much to go into. I’m still quite fucked up as it is, and I have no idea how we’re going to face half of the people we work with next week. Luckily I managed to escape in time again as it was just too much for me for one day, especially as I seem to be the only one intent on being remotely productive. There’s a part of me that’s angry, but another which is laughing hysterically as they are so fucking insane. Our stand next year is going to be beautiful. Playboy on TV, soft carpet, big-chested girls giving massages and a full-on rock band blasting the hall down. Rock on.

Two incidents this evening deserve special mention though, the first of which was when we were finding our way around the notorious red light district. Paul and Lucci are walking behind us as we go past a bunch of drug dealer scum on the canal side, when I hear:

“Dare you to call him a c**t”.
(Muffled sound of giggling, then the guy goes for Lucci to smack him)
(After a lull of a few seconds, in mock outrage and with a huge smile)
“Well that was a bit out of order of him to get that upset.”
“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT?????”

The second was a more exquisite encounter with the CEO of a Taiwanese manufacturing company who overhead us slagging off a lot of the companies who were exhibiting in Gauchos, one of the nicest restaurants in the city (”We don’t have a reservation, but we have lots of money. You have girls here?”). He was curious as to what we did, and wondered whether we could work together.

Bad move on his part. Very bad move.

“So what is your business model?”
“Make as much money as we can from as many people as we can find by doing as little work as we possibly can, and then spend it on ridiculous luxury items.”
“ha ha”
“Can we have your money please? Do you have lots of money that can have? Do you have girls?”

Childish, but fucking hilarious.

And so you have 24hrs in the life of our team when they have the weekend off to let off some steam. If they weren’t such a downright brilliant unit they would either be in prison or selling the Big Issue. Luckily for them, they are very good at what they do and can get away with it and even profit from it.

I’m slightly odd in the sense that I don’t really fit the mould, but they love me anyway as I just let them get on with it. I’m not into the same pleasures. I’m a one-woman man and I don’t cheat. Only ever done it once and it ruined me more than her. I don’t sleep with prostitutes, get so drunk I can’t stand up or fuck anything that moves. Sex for some people is about fulfilling natural urges with an object, but for me it’s about being with the one woman I love and sharing something spiritual. Maybe I’m weird that like, but it’s me. I can’t treat people like objects and I can’t understand how others can.

And what a way to end the day. A message from Em with one of the most incredible things anyone has ever said to me. She probably thinks nothing of it. Not sure how to tell her what it means to me, being the loved up puppy dog I am at the moment. Sad, but its true. It’s funny what stays in your mind when it’s supposed to be on something else.

Wheels up for the UK tomorrow lunchtime, which means I’ll be back for just after lunchtime. A flying visit as usual, so let’s just hope we don’t have to bail anyone out of jail or pick them up from the hospital. I’ll enjoy my 5 star room in the bliss of ignorance.

03
Sep

Thought For The Week - Paedos And Aliases

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: Misc and MySpace

There’s something i never considered before about the internet, and virtual life.

How many times did we hear about paedophiles before the advent of the web? I’ve argued that they have always existed and the internet has allowed us to bring them into the light when they group and congregate. A bit like laying bait for and not shooting the first animal that comes along, rather waiting for the whole herd.

The net is an amazing of force of democratisation and neutrality, and allows equality on a par thats unprecedented. The tiny shopkeeper can compete with the giant supermarket store on an equal footing on a truly international scale for the first time in history.

So something i heard said last week struck me quite hard, and that was someone was afraid their friend was worried the other person wouldn’t like them in real life as they are so different to how they are on the net.

I think that’s true of all of us, so i leave you with a though for the week.

Isn’t it just the case that who we are online is who we want to be in real life, but can’t be? Isn’t it that in some ways our online persona is closer to who we are than the way we are every day?

The difference is that in real life we wouldn’t get to see who we wanted to be, like we do on the net. We never get that contrast because we’re always so tied up in being who we are right then. We get to be them, act as them and almost live vicariously.

There are fewer consequences, more places to hide and less inhibitions about being the person we want to be. We can say what we really mean and meet others we wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to. In a weird way, its a very positive thing.

Is that so bad?

03
Sep

Peace Inside The Storm

By Alex Cameron 0 Comments
Categories: Life and MySpace

There was a cold Sunday afternoon in Kenya when someone told me a home truth that I never learnt the lesson from. We were travelling south on the Nairobi-Mombasa overnight express and I was ready to pack up my stuff and leave. The world was bearing down and I had reached escape velocity.

Her name was Claire, and her and I had never seen eye to eye, despite the fact that in a weird way, we understood each other. Shed never really seemed interested in who I was or what I had to say, so it surprised me when she was so incisive. I had just assumed we were two radically different people who just didn’t get each other at all.

So I was staring out the window into the grassy savannah plain wondering how such a beautiful place could be so tragically ruined when she dropped the bomb.

You’re always running away, aren’t you Alex?

A movie-like silence ensued as I looked at her, unable to think of anything to say back.

Sometimes people just say things that knock you over even though you don’t expect them to. For me it was more a case that someone had even taken the time to think about me. For someone with the amount of friends and public face as me, youd be surprised how few people take those precious minutes to think about who you are underneath.

But she was right. I scuttle to protect myself very quickly and leave the crash site as fast as I can. Im no good with separation, upsetting moments in time or any kind of discomfort. Running is the easy thing to do, and its an effective short-term countermeasure for avoiding the pain.

I write these things because it helps. Its therapy. All my successes and failures are public and the pains and the joys are for everyone to share in should they choose to. In a way its me trying to reach out and be a little better; be a little more open as Im so guarded. Tear me up if you will, damn me if you wish. My truth may be your lies. But it is mine. What I write may be dramatised sometimes, but it comes from my heart, my mind and my soul. Words are like art to me as they are greater than the sword and more deadly than poison. They can inspire and crush in equal measure.

People often ask me if I’ll regret publishing what Ive written, and whether ill come unstuck when my thoughts are a little too loud when they need to fade into the quiet. As much of a fool as I look, Ill never regret it. I make mistakes and mess up like everyone else. You see me fall and you see my arrogant recklessness in the face of the obvious. Entertainment for some, frustration for others. My belief that we can do anything is usually is my undoing because so few others share the light I see or feel the energy drive thats at the core of who I am.

It can seem strange when I explain how I go about deciding who my friends are and who I will let into my life. Despite being a very polarising person, I make friends very quickly and I often find I have more than is practical to deal with. I have 5000 contacts in my Outlook right now, and thats about a third of the people I know. I cant deal with them all, and my public face tends to make the problem worse.

Im not someone who stands still and continuing the status quo. I need to be moving forward all the time as I dont want to get stuck in the quicksand of indifference, irrelevance and indecision. I clear out regularly to prune and trim, as it helps me to focus on, and give the time to, those who I love most and am closest to.

Structure is important to me. It makes me feel safe and that I have taken the time to make sure I protect all the relationships I have. My life is such chaos that its essential. I hate planning, and I hate schedules. But the sad truth is that everything would fall apart without them. And for me it extends past my business life into my personal world.

I never have enough of anything, let alone time. Im not obsessive about it, but Id be spinning around wildly if I didn’t try to organise some of it. The benefit is mostly to my sanity. The only other thing that keeps me alive in spontaneity, which is why I crave it. That mindless indulgence helps to balance out the bookings chart.

We all run away as its the easiest thing to do. Turning your back seems like the only way to kill the pain. Its always the cold-blooded animals whose bite is the most poisonous. Cutting the situation out like a cancer is hard, but its often the best way to detach. Ive spent 27 years doing it. Ive broken hearts, brought on tears, broken people in half, and in one case, ruined someones very promising career. Im a master when it comes to letting people rot.

I once wrote to an ex (Jemima) that I was happy she now hated me as I knew that she would never have the peace and forgiveness she would need to heal. As long s she felt that hate, she would suffer. Closure was the last thing I wouldnt offer because I knew how much she needed it.

And theres no doubt my bite can be deadly. I don’t say that in a macho way. In fact, its something Ive come to think about very differently over the years. There is a dark and evil place in me that enjoys punishing those who have hurt me and denying them what they need. I watch my dad suffer now and I smile. I smile for all the times I suffered at his hands and the times where he took what he wanted whilst I was left there in hell. Schadenfreude doesnt quite do it justice.

I always assume rather cynically that your intentions are bad. Its an automatic reflex. I fight myself to believe the best when I only ever expect the worse. Its not out of fear, its out of raw experience and pre-emptive defensiveness.

But lately the physician has had to heal himself, because he is a hypocrite and a fool. The books title says it all in one line. The struggle in my life has never been anything that anyone would expect it to be. I know I can do anything if my will is strong enough. I know how to make money, persuade, fight, protect, analyse, share and inspire. The real war is inside me, just like its inside all of us. The battle is against me. What tears me apart and is like a never-ending rage inside is a battle against the very despotic and vile part of me. The side thats ruthless, violent, defiant and likes to punish.

Every day I have to resist that person and fight to be a better human being. Ironically its the conflict that provides the creativity that fuels my success. Its a blessing and a curse. Its one of the things that makes me feel very alone.

Youll notice it most prominently in how I seethe and when I debate. It’s how i can argue both sides in an argument and win either that I choose. I can flip a switch if I need to as Im always seeing both sides of the situation. It can create a crippling inertia when you need to make a decision. I often wonder what I would be like if the balance had shifted in the early years. I learned to punish when I was young, in the same way they punished me. Its a template, and its one thats going to have to go. I wont be like them. That evil in me comes from fear, like it does in all people. I shudder when I think about it, as its not someone I want to be. Its who I fight every day as its impossible to escape. Its a very big reason why Im scared of obtaining power, because its a responsibility that I could abuse.

As they say in AA, its all about coming to terms with, and dealing with your feelings I wonder why they don’t teach it in school. I often say to my sister that my father doesn’t have a problem with love; he has a problem with expressing it. I wonder why I feel so dirty and ashamed. I wonder why I feel guilty every time Im angry, and why I cant control myself. I wonder why I carry so much of someone else’s baggage in the sack of bricks on my back. I wonder why I cant sleep at night and why at the happiest times the excitement makes me want to flatten everything in sight and declare my kingdom. But most importantly, I wonder why its so hard for me to face my feelings.

So when I cut them out, Im actually cutting the feelings out. Its a surgical procedure to remove the source of the pain so I can carry on, like if you removed a bullet from your flesh that you knew would get infected if you left it. Im a fighter, not a lover. When things get tough, I slap on the bulletproof shell and start slitting throats. When I feel vulnerable, I act to protect myself from further harm. I learnt to do it a long time ago and it became a habit for life which you see in a lot of men. .

If you hurt me or look like you’re going to, Ill get to you first or deliver a more violent blow in return. For me its not a petty vengeance or a small dose of despite, it’s a strike against you and meant to disable the source of the pain long enough for me to pick up the pieces and move on. As long as you’re not moving I’m safe.

And the storm has always encircled my life; it began a long time ago when every day was a brutal and emotionally crippling day of arguments and bad feeling that we all got so numb to that the malignancy became routine. Indeed, I often wonder if thats all my life is and I have seen, survived and lived through more than most. There is no problem too insurmountable, no situation that cant be changed and no wall that cant be punched through. My instant reaction is to break it down in whatever way is easiest. Its the way I survived through everything that tried to kill me.

But running from the storm is not the answer, and Im beginning to learn that. The storm is faster than you and will outrun or follow you until you learn to live within it. There will always be problems, inconveniences, pain and things that hold you back from what you want. The more you run, the more tired you get as the storm only gets more vicious. To deal with something, you have to face it. The longer you put it to the side, the more it grows and more infectious it becomes. Eventually you end up trying to avoid it altogether rather than wait for the day when you are ready.

Thats why procrastination is an insidious disease, not just a self-destructive circular habit. And it is a disease just like any other. A highly infectious one that kills in its silence, in the same way the misery and apathy of those around us brings us down. Its like a drug that it takes away anxiety temporarily, and thats why we use it as a tool for helping us cope with the worry and fear we feel. We learn it when were young and assume its normal as everyone else does the same.

Its like lepers nodding at each other in approval whilst walking around a leper colony thats been the only world they’ve known. Putting it off will steal the most precious things from you, and you’ll smile as it robs you and tells you its doing you the favour.

We live our lives in expectation that there will be plateaus, or peaceful moments when things are in harmony, we are happy with our lot and we rely on ourselves to recognise it when it appears. When we get to that point, well do it. There is always another day and better opportunities later. We tell ourselves that something has to happen, someone has to do something or be a certain way before we can do what we want or need to.

We put a barrier in front of us to hide behind rather than facing the road earnestly. That barrier we use is a way of avoiding the pain thats associated with facing up to the thing we have to do because the fear and risk that we feel leading up to it is unbearable. The other side to the problem is that we are always optimistic and assume things will take a third of the time they actually will. We do that simply to avoid dealing with the reality of how long they will take. And we fall every time.

Put simply, its buy now, pay later, with interest. Your credit limit is only so high before the debts are called in.

Alfred Hitchcock, the master of fear, famously said there is no terror in the bang, only the moment of anticipation before the bang itself. Those emancipated and fearless souls we all admire and aspire to be are the ones that have realised that the storm will never leave. Life doesnt work in plateaus, it is a rollercoaster where we have choice as to which rails coming up that we switch onto. Those moments are fools gold and a lost cause. The trick to balance is being able to deal with the good and bad simultaneously.

The secret is not the absence of the storm, but the freedom of peace within it. In plain English, that means that problems will always be there, and if you decide to wait for the world to be OK, you will be waiting forever because thousands of years of human wisdom tell us all that youre kidding yourself. It’s never happened to you before, or anyone else. But it makes you feel better as you dont have to be blinded by the lightning or feel the cold rain on your freezing skin.

And Ive always run away, despite knowing that the storm will always be there. Ive listened patiently to those who are being thrown around in it as they stand around and wait. As they are thrashed around they become more and more stubbornly resolved to stay there as time passes because they’ve been in the storm so long that they believe it has to end soon. And they’re afraid of where they will land because theyre used to the thrashing. But it will never end because it is part of the random complexity that is life.

The clouds will break to let the sunshine through at times, and the wind will calm into a warm breeze at times we dont expect. But the storm will resume in a flash, and beat you more violently than the last time.

When the clouds clear, we remember the numb bliss of our plateau were hoping will appear soon. But even then everything’s not clear like we thought it would be if we held on as the waves crashed against us. The storm has blown us somewhere else we didn’t expect to be. Everything around us has changed and we don’t remember when the change happened. Bridges are burning, the people we know are farther away and we have no map to get us back to where we were as we are too far to go back.

Ghandi’s answer to how we stayed so calm was that he never left his place of meditation. He never ignored the plight of those around him and never failed to fight what was crashing in everywhere he went. But he was wise and saw the calm in the middle of the violence. For him, God was in the darkest places because it was in him wherever he went. Most religions have at their centre the idea that suffering is caused by desire, and to cease suffering one must cease to desire.

The storm is a spiritual one, and to live within it we must cease to give it power and become its master rather than its servant. Problems must become opportunities and pain must become lessons. Frustration must become acceptance and fear must become courage.

Its terrifying to try and overcome fear or to sacrifice. And the storm is a very scary place to be. The hardest part of a bungy jump is standing on the edge of the cage and finding the will to overcome your survival instinct to dive off. If you’re scared of heights like me, its four times as bad. Living at peace means giving up and letting go, and letting the storm do its worst. It’s standing up in the midst of chaos and staring the madness down.

Fighting only makes the virulence more profound with all the energy you provide it with in as you writhe to address the discomfort. When youve been at war your whole life, you never truly come back. Peace is harder than fighting because you are powerless. A weapon in the hand is safer than a kiss, and screaming is more familiar than a gentle whisper.

So where does that leave me? The storm gathers over me every day, and a lot of the time I walk into it deliberately. Ive been known to walk into traffic just to stop the cars. I know my peace is in the middle of it, but all I want to do is trash the weather, for which Im never wearing the right clothes. Nads taught me the lesson of forgiveness, and that it not only closes doors, but opens them.

Emma is teaching me the lesson of understanding, as I struggle to fit into the place she has ask