Tosh's Journal: August 9, 2023

Buzzcocks - Everybody's Happy Nowadays, 1979

It’s interesting to notice how many posts I have done for my Substack blog. When I look at the posts, I feel like I’m Time traveling to the past, which causes me some alarm. Even though the work was posted a few days ago, it feels like my body is dragged into an area where I find no comfort or sense of home. Yet, my Substack page is very much a home by all definitions of what a home is.

It is the one area where I can say this is me in various chapters or parts, and it has everything I’m obsessed with music, literature, cinema, and my role in those mediums. This is egotistical, but that is a plus in my department because everything else is a mega-minus. But I shouldn’t fret over small things. My physical health seems to be fine, but my mental issues feed my work and observations. So even that, I guess, is OK. Turning a minus into a positive is not a bad thing at all. Like the great Pete Shelley song “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays if one can zone out the negative, that leads one to …Negative.

I don’t think there is a proper way of eliminating negative aspects of one’s life. You can try, and that is the process that is perhaps healthy, but the truth is I think the negativity is part of the process of understanding what Pete Shelley called illusion and dream. The most positive people I know have strong streaks of negativity in their DNA, and although they never touch on the subject, one can feel the battle within their souls. Advertising and the Internet feed the difference between ultimate happiness and dismal failure. It’s a battle that can’t be won in the 21st Century.

I can’t speak for others, but I accept the negativity within me and make it somehow work in a positive light. The light switch was invented to quickly turn on and off electricity sources in a lighting system. We often think that there must be a similar system for our moods. I don’t think there is, and as they say, no pain, no gain; we’re into for the long haul.

In October, I will do a significant project which I think will be exciting but also very scary. It’s a high-wire act with no safety net underneath me and a do-or-die situation. If it works, I will write about it here; if I fail, I will give you, the reader, the bloody and shameful details of the depths of failure. That sounds like fun, right?