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It's two in the morning and I'm awake. Don't rush to comfort me. This is actually a good thing.

It's a good thing because the reason I'm awake is a burning need to write. To get something down. To express something I haven't felt in a long time. Anger. And that I feel angry is a good thing, because for far too long I've felt, if not exactly depressed, then certainly worn-out. Beaten down. Burnt out.

It started with a little local difficulty at work. I won't go into details here - this blog has always prided itself on being as unspecific as possible about where I toil to earn my handful of scraps from the capitalist table. Confidentiality is one reason for this, but another, very important reason, is universality. I believe the problems I encounter at work - the problems most of us encounter in the warped work culture of the kyriarchy - are pretty much the same anywhere. When I blog about some aspect of work, it isn't because I want to have a dig at a particular employer: it's because I'm painfully aware that the issues I deal with at work are the same or very similar to the issues others deal with. It's an entire culture we're dealing with, a sickness that has metastasized through the entire body politic: and I need to describe the symptoms of that sickness in a way that's as depersonalised as possible. It can never be fully depersonalised, because suffering under such a sick system wounds me, as it wounds so many others, as it causes such a terrible psychic cost to our society as a whole; but adopting a 'no names, no pack drill' position allows me to sidestep the accusations of sour grapes that would doubtless be forthcoming if I were to get more specific, while at the same time allowing what I say to resonate with others. And the fact that it does resonate - that the responses I get when I write a poem like, say, Employer of the Year or Collude to Exclude, are expressions of weary familiarity rather than shocked incomprehension - rather suggests that this is a universal experience I'm writing about. Yemaya knows I wish it wasn't.

So, reader, you will understand why I don't wish to dwell on the problems at work that started off my downturn. After a certain point they became immaterial anyway. If it wasn't work it might well have been something else: certainly the kyriarchy showed no inclination to soften up during my own period of relative inactivity. Trans women were still being murdered, and misgendered in newspaper headlines. Disabled people were still subject to the vilest witch-hunt we've seen in politics in recent times. The Coalition still seemed hell-bent on turning Britain into a third-world nation to satisfy their big financial backers. All was fucked, all was fucked, and all manner of things would be fucked. But I lacked the anger to effectively deal with this. I was, as I say, burnt out. Like many of us from time to time, I felt as if I was repeating the same things over and over, banging my head against a wall and achieving nothing beyond throwing up the tiniest scattering of brick-dust and giving myself a concussion.

In that kind of headspace it can be hard to see the signs of hope. I saw the news finally start paying attention to groups like UK Uncut and The Broken of Britain; I saw Transmediawatch make progress signing media organisations up to a Memorandum of Understanding about trans representation; I watched as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya did the impossible and stood up to their oppressive, western-backed elites. Intellectually, I could see that progress was being made; emotionally, it failed to register. I would see a story and think 'I should blog about that' or 'there might be a poem to be made about this' but beyond a sluggish recognition of that fact, I couldn't stir myself much further. Just this week, for example, I found myself moved by the plight of Rebekah Brewis, a trans woman being brutally treated by the Oregon authorities, whose case I learned about on the eve of International Women's Day, of all times, and thought that here was something I needed to speak out about, and here was a time when it mattered to say such things. But it didn't happen because, still, I lacked the fire.

To be fair, I was partly to blame for this lack. I had planned, during my week off in January, to take some time to simply relax. However, the discovery of a cheap rail ticket offer in a local paper set me off planning to do a gig in London, and then - since I had the week off - to do a bunch of other gigs elsewhere to take advantage of the situation. At a time when I should have been replenishing my strength, I pushed myself to my final reserves, desperate not to waste time, to get out there and get my message heard. And I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed those gigs and, without going to London, I'd never have encountered the brilliant work of Anna Chen, but the net result of all that gigging, all those late nights and long train rides, was that when I returned to my day job I was running on less than empty. I needed time out. I needed space to think. I needed to sleep in late and spend whole days doing nothing more strenuous than taking a shower and putting a DVD in the machine. I needed to fucking relax.

Fortunately, this past week, I've had that time. Another week off work coincided with a friend being away for a week and needing someone to look after her cats. This gave me the opportunity to take time off away from work, away from my parents and - because I couldn't travel - away from gigging. It was, in fact, a way to force myself to relax. I could go out during the day - and I have, to attend a fantastic gig by local women poets for International Women's Day, and to check out the John Martin exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, to acquire nice things using a money-off voucher for the Body Shop and to mark what seem the first tentative stirrings of spring by buying and drinking my first bottle of Rose of the year - but I had to be in by the evening to feed the kittehs. Wild nights were out of the question.

So, for a week, I've been forced to chill. And, tonight, my friend came back. And, lying in bed, I found myself turning things over in my head. Thinking about things like the March for the Alternative later this month. Thinking about what I'd say at the gigs I have lined up next month, when I'll have longer sets to work with and more time to make my points. Thinking about the government, reflecting on stories my friend had told me from the union conference she'd been on, pondering cases like that of Rebekah Brewis, mentioned above, and the shameful reporting of the changes to clothing regulations for trans women that I've seen in the papers this week, and the efforts I've made, and continue to make, to shift my own gender presentation to an identity with which I feel more comfortable, and the microaggressions (and, lets be frank, risk of macro-aggressions) I have to deal with as a result.

And suddenly I didn't feel burned-out. I didn't feel beaten-down. I didn't feel tired and weak and useless. I didn't feel spent. I felt a whirl of emotions racing through my brain. I felt a desire to engage with those emotions properly again. I felt my fingers twitch to touch the keyboard. I felt my synapses trying on sentences for size. I felt - for the first time in months - angry. And anger, as John Lydon once pointed out, is an energy.

So. I am angry. I am shouty. I am ranty. And I am going to be ranting about a lot more things on here in the weeks and months to come. If you're reading this and you like that - and I'm going to assume, if you've been reading this for a while, that you do - I'd like to bid you hello again. If you're new to this blog, I'd just like to bid you hello. And if you don't like the thought of being ranted at by an angry, poor, left-of-centre trans poet? Well, you could probably stand to learn the most of anyone from this blog but, y'know, if the thought of acknowledging the opinion of someone who lacks your privilege really makes your guts churn and your eyes bleed? The back button is your friend, chum. Jog right on.

I don't wanna holiday in the sun

I've began thinking about something I haven't done in quite a while, and that's taking a holiday. Going off somewhere for a couple of days to...well, I dunno really. Check things out. Soak up a different atmosphere. Be somewhere else. For a long time I've held off on this idea on the grounds that, wherever I go, I'll still be me. I'll still be alone and I'll still be a miserable git. But, there again, it occurs to me that there might at least be some sense of variety in being a miserable git in, say, Edinburgh or Manchester, rather than Newcastle. If nothing else I'll get the chance to feel lonely in different cafes and pubs.

Where to go, though? This is the question. It's probably best not to go somewhere I've been with my ex-wife recently: that leaves out London and York, say...and especially Paris, where we spent a truly wonderful holiday. Ditto Liverpool, though our visit there - a one-night stay for a gig I did at the City Library - can't really be called a holiday. All the places we went to for NASUWT conferences: Brighton, Birmingham and Bournemouth, are out too.

Trying to think of other places to go makes me realise that, of the many places in Britain I have been to without Michelle, many of them I haven't been to in years. Manchester I haven't been to since 2000. Edinburgh I haven't been to since 2003. Leeds I visited once, for a gig, in 2004, but haven't since. That's six years at the least - those places have probably changed immeasurably in that time. Is Affleck's Palace still there? Does Edinburgh still only have four fucking taxi ranks in the entire city? Does Leeds, while pleasant enough by day, still transform into a city-sized recreation of Newcastle's infamous Bigg Market come the night-time? Who knows?

And this is leaving out everywhere in Britain I haven't been. I've never been to Cornwall - though that's probably too far away for a weekend. I haven't been to Carlisle either, though. I haven friends who go to the Lakes on a regular basis, but I myself haven't been there since 1994, for Coleridge's sake. Speaking of literary locations, I haven't even been to Hull. Surely I should go there at least once, to see if it really is that bad?

Maybe big cities aren't the way to go. The way the holiday situation is set-up in my current workplace, all the summer weeks have been booked by the people with kids, to coincide with the school holidays. So I'm going to have to just skoosh off somewhere for a weekend. And, on weekends, most UK cities tend to be filled with heid-the-balls looking for a fuck or a fight, and I have no intention of providing them with either. Maybe I should go somewhere rural. Stay in a B&B (assuming, pace Chris Grayling, that one will have me) in some quiet little village, potter about, visit an old church and the local second-hand bookshop, watch the ducks on the pond...then go completely bugfuck around about four on the Saturday afternoon and slaughter the entire population. No, rural life is not entirely suited to me either. I need a lot of stimulation.

Added to all this is my hatred of the pointless, the random, the unscheduled. If I'm going to go somewhere, I like to be doing something, even if it's just visiting a friend. I like a trip to have a sense of mission, a purpose. This is why I like travelling to gigs so much: you get to go somewhere and do something, then you can knock off and relax. But going somewhere to relax seems kind of odd.

Relax I must though, I think. It's been a hard time lately, what with the demise of the bookshop, a month of unemployment (which, even for someone as well-supported as I, is not the cushy number Ian Duncan Smug seems to think it is), followed by settling into a new job and then being blindsided by the news of Michelle's breast cancer...It would be nice to come into work on Friday with a backpack of travelling gear, clock off at five, take a train somewhere, stow my goods in a hotel, then be somewhere different for Saturday, and have a late return home on sunday evening. Get away from it all, or at least as much as I can, for two nights at least.

But still I find myself thinking...where?

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

Realpolitik


I go stone in the chair I was safe in a second ago,
cringing inside at the joke you just told,
the one they all roared at. I watch you bask

in your cheaply-won laugh. Every high-five, each back-
slap when I want to punch you, reminds me
that I am alone in this room. Alone, and outnumbered,

so I keep my silence. Care must be taken,
boats left unrocked. I’m new here: no sense
in risking my neck,

so I bite my tongue, and watch
each creasing face, and tell myself
this is not cowardice.

This poem represents almost my total writing output for this week. The remainder of said output is a page and a half of, oddly enough, a short story which I started fooling around with on Sunday night and which, it became clear, will be absolute filth. Seriously, it's going to turn out to be full-on porn. A very odd story to run into but it seems very insistent on being written so I'm going along with it for the time being. My working title for the piece is currently 'What's so amazing about really deep thoughts?' but that's inevitably subject to change.
 
The poem above refers to two incidents I've seen in different places this week where I was pretty much a newbie, and so felt too socially awkward to cause a scene, but where I witnessed people using the idea of a female character 'really being a man' as a cheap pop to spice up their attempts at humour. The annoying thing is that both were actually funny enough not to have to resort to this shit. My reactions to all this were somewhat complex: anger, disappointment, sadness, fear, and a nice big helping of guilt about the fact I didn't have the guts to openly confront the transphobia inherent in the 'jokes'. The poem doesn't make up for that failure. But I hope that it does something. If nothing else, next time I'm ever at a gig and someone finishes with this kind of cheap gag, I'll know what poem to start my set with.
 
There isn't really time for a smart, witty sign-off. It's past eleven pm here, and I have to get up at six am for work tomorrow. I'll finish with this point: you remember, at school, how your teachers told you that if the other guy wasn't laughing it wasn't a joke? That still applies. If you've told a joke and most of the people in the room are laughing, but one person in the room isn't and is in fact looking extremely uncomfortable suddenly, you did not tell a very good joke, and you need to own that, and you need to try harder next time. And that isn't censorship, and that isn't 'people not having a sense of humour anymore', and it definitely isn't 'Political Correctness' gone mad. It's called growing up , and being better. Own it, people.

Gonna Be Some Changes...

I'm thinking of making a couple of alterations to this li'l old blog.

First of all, the title. The Fishblog originated as basically a review blog, a place where I could sharpen my critical muscles by writing (often essay-length) reviews of whatever books, film, music or other media had in some way got my dander up in any particular week. It's a cliche (and often untrue) that critics tend to be people who can't write themselves, but I admit in my case that that was part of the reason for setting up this blog: I was, at the time, lacking confidence in my original work, so decided to indulge myself in a spot of criticism to keep my hand in, so to speak, and to stop my aesthetic senses getting dull.

However, having allowed myself a space in which to express myself, I quickly reverted to my default state of using this opportunity to harangue the passerby. Very soon the idea that this was solely a review blog, or even a review blog at all, was abandoned, and I began using it to unburden myself of my opinions on the media, the BNP, gender issues, publishing, bookselling, gender issues, the problems of managerialism, kyriarchy, gender issues and why you shouldn't start fights with Tori Amos fans. I may also have written one or two posts about gender issues as well.

At the same time, largely following the senses-shattering announcement that I'd decided to cancel what was to be my second collection of poems, something seemed to free up in my writing and I found poems coming to me again, I started writing poetry again in earnest, I started performing again and I essentially got better in both senses of the word: I recovered from my writers' block, and I started writing better work than before. So part of the point of the blog became promoting my writing and the performances I was doing, especially around the time of my fourth plinth appearance and the recent Newcastle Human Rights Festival gig.

At some point during all of this gubbins, I jettisoned the name 'To Praise and Blame' and rechristened this as The Somewhat New and Allegedly Improved Fishblog, a title which is increasingly redundant really. I still think the blog has improved - and, while I still only have a small number of followers compared to the juggernauts of the blog world, the fact that that number has risen exponentially since this site stopped being a review blog is proof of that - but it's no longer really even somewhat new. So, I'm thinking we need a new title. This is where you come in.

If you're reading this, you've probably read this blog before. If someone asked you why you read it, you could probably sum it up for them in a sentence. You could tell them what interested you about the blog in the first place, what it is that makes it unique, and why you keep coming back. So - with all those things in mind - if you had the responsibility of thinking up a new title for this blog, one that reflects all of those things - what would you call it?

Answers on a metaphorical postcard please, either in the comments field below or via my Twitter or Facebook pages if you want. Best suggestion will be chosen as the new title for the blog. Get thinking!