Progressive Thoughts - Day 23

Today’s song is a beautiful and unusually short song from Dream Theater, a band who are infamous for writing epic long songs.  A lot of their songs are lengthy, some reaching the dizzy heights of more than twenty minutes. This song, called Wait For Sleep, is usual because it is only two and a half minutes long.

Dream Theater fall into the progressive metal category, yet a number of their songs are what you would call mellow and beautiful, featuring deep and profound lyrics accompanied by exquisite piano, mild guitars and a powerful voice.

Their songs are intelligent and I love that.

This is one of the reasons I love progressive rock generally. The genre is fundamentally rock but is largely experimental and includes other genres from jazz to classical music, from heavy metal to dance music and is full of amazing technically challenging experimentation with time signature shifts and interesting subject matter.

There are a lot of people who mock progressive rock and label it as weird.

And that’s one of the reasons I like it. I think I am drawn to weirdness and I guess that’s why some people may think that I, too, am weird.

I don’t mind that. In fact I am fascinated by it. As I said in yesterday’s post, I find myself drawn to strange conspiracy theories and people who believe in bizarre things. I love the supernatural, the idea that there are aliens out there.

Most of all I love people who simply refuse to change their principles despite the colossal amount of evidence that shoots their belief system down in flames. Such people argue that the evidence is fabricated by the government and that the rest of us are the brainwashed majority and gullible fools.

I can spend hours listening to people like this. The only problem I have is that I don’t want to offend them and sometimes I struggle to keep a straight face.

My first real encounter with such a person was, unsurprisingly, at university. I studied computer science, which involved statistics and mathematics, and, as you can imagine, my course was full of geeks. I was surrounded by intelligent people who loved science fiction and the same weird shit that I liked. I was at home. There was one guy on my course who was, like the rest of us, an intelligent geek who loved a bit of science fiction – except he took this further – he was a strange conspiracy theorist.

He was utterly convinced that UFOs were real and that the governments of the world were covering this up from the rest of us. He studied maths and had a total grasp of logic yet when he talked about his passion, that logic disappeared completely to be replaced by irrationality and paranoia.

I loved it.

Now I could provide mathematical proof to you all that the number one equals the number two. You may scoff at this but I can provide convincing proof. Of course, my proof is utterly flawed and if you apply constraints then my proof is shown up for what it is – total misdirection that was exposed by logic.

In a conversation with my wacky friend, I brought this up and he knew what I was talking about because we had both learned about this mathematical misdirection. My argument was that all of his evidence of conspiracy theory was misdirection and that when you applied logic to the proof of conspiracy then the truth was exposed and the conspiracy shattered.

And he disagreed vehemently calling me a misguided gullible fool.

I asked for his evidence that UFOs and aliens exist and, of course he could provide nothing. His argument was bizarre because he claimed he had seen UFOs in the sky himself and the fact that there was no other proof was in fact proof that the government was hiding it.

In the end I gave up arguing with him and satisfied myself from that point on with just listening to his madcap theories. I knew that he took it seriously because he had a telescope and actually spent some evenings every week scanning the night sky for unidentified lights and odd movement.

He was a magnificent crackpot and I loved him for it.

By the way, if you want me to prove that 1=2 then let me know (if I can remember that is)!

Who Stole My Milk??????

When I think back to the period of my life between 1981 and 1984, I feel a deep sense of fierce nostalgia and excitement. It was the period of my life when I evolved from a spotty naïve little kid into a more focussed young adult.

That was the time I was a student at the University of Liverpool.

So many things happened during that time that I could almost write a book about them all. However, the lifestyle was something that stands out.

At the time, there was a TV comedy series called The Young Ones about four students sharing a house. While it was a rather extreme portrayal of life as a student with extreme and unbelievably anarchic storylines, there were some scenes that reflected my life as a student enjoying communal living.

Scenes like this:

I had a taste of university life again a couple of years ago when I visited my eldest lad at university in Newcastle. He lived with a few other students and they shared a communal kitchen and bathroom. I looked around the place with a smile because the place looked like a bomb had gone off in it. The bathroom was disgusting and the kitchen had a “lived in” feel about it. It looked like neither had been cleaned for ages.

The memories came flooding back, particularly when he told me that he had made an effort to “tidy up the kitchen” for our visit.

Life was the same for me back in the 1980’s. Communal living with seven other students was an unlikely fusion of entertainment and disgustingness, an amalgam of comradeship and deviousness.

Some of these guys were my best friends and remain so after all these years. Nevertheless, at the time, we had a love/hate relationship with each other due to the pressures of communal living.

Each person had different levels of tolerance when it came to cleanliness, trust and expected behaviour.

Here are some examples (with the names changed to protect the guilty!).

Peter decided that he wanted to entertain a young woman and impress her by making a Spanish omelette. Sadly, he didn’t have a frying pan so he thought to himself “I’ll just use Dave’s”.

He didn’t ask me or tell me.

 I would have said yes, of course, and asked him to clean it afterwards, something I always do. I have a bugbear about dirty plates and will always wash up as soon as I can after eating.

Two days after Peter had entertained his young lady friend, I wanted to use my frying pan. I kept my pots in a cupboard, clearly labelled “Dave” and I knew that my clean pan would be in there because I hadn’t used it. I couldn’t find it.

“Has anyone seen my frying pan?” I asked.

Nobody had seen it and Peter wasn’t around. In the sink, there was a huge pile of dirty washing up (not mine I hasten to add). With my heart sinking, I systematically deconstructed the foul mass of plates, cutlery and pots. When I reached the bottom, I found my pan. At first I didn’t recognise it as it was covered in the burnt remains of a two day old Spanish omelette.

My pan was WORSE than this!

Peter had started the omelette, returned to his room and forgotten about it. When he remembered, he returned to the kitchen to discover that his delicious meal had been incinerated. Rather than cleaning up the mess, he simply threw the pan in the sink, without disposing of the scorched contents, and taken the woman out instead.

I was livid. It took me hours to clean it up and when he eventually returned, I was tempted to either use the pan on Peter as a weapon or a suppository.

I can’t claim to be innocent. Once, I started cooking bacon on a grill that was full of hardened fat (it had never been cleaned to that point). I popped to the toilet and when I returned, I found that the fat had caught fire, cremating my bacon and threatening to burn down the kitchen. With another student’s help and using a fire blanket, we managed to put the fire out but not before the entire flat was full of smoke and every single surface covered in a fine black soot.

Unlike Peter, I was filled with remorse and spent the next few hours cleaning the entire kitchen and washing everything up. When I had finished the only trace of my disaster were a few scorch marks on the cooker.

Sadly, however, another flatmate wasn’t as anal about cleanliness as I am. Months later, the exact same thing happened to him but rather than cleaning everything, he simply put out the fire and went back to his room as if nothing had happened. The timing of this accident was terrible because later that day, the landlady popped around and witnessed the carnage in the kitchen. We were all threatened with eviction as a result but managed to avoid this drastic action by performing the same decontamination operation that I had done.

The fridge was another source of pain. Some of us clearly labelled our food because although we were good mates, we had made an unwritten pact never to have communal food – including milk and bread. Sadly this led to numerous arguments. We all labelled our own items as if this act would protect our food.

It didn’t.

I lost count of the number of times one of my so-called mates had “borrowed” my food. Even that phrase “borrowed my food” makes me laugh because we never paid it back. I was so fed up of my food disappearing that I stooped to their depths of criminality and started stealing their food instead.

The result was total mistrust.

This was aggravated by the fact that we were all absolutely skint, and when our food vanished it was almost as if we had been robbed of what little money we owned. I started storing all my food in my room and I even considered buying my own fridge.

I’ll leave you with the most disgusting thing that happened in my final year. I have a phobia for mouldy food. If I open a packet of cheese and find a little tiny bit of mould on it, the whole thing goes in the bin. Some deranged people will simply cut off the mould and carry on eating it. These people are either aliens or just plain sick (Of course, I realise that I may have insulted you, dear reader, but please be aware that when confronted with mould, I myself mutate into a deranged subhuman monster, lashing out at any other human being in the vicinity for not having spotted the mould and disposed of the cheese in the first place).

During my last year, we opened a cupboard that none of my flatmates claimed to have used. In that cupboard was a loaf of bread. That loaf of bread had been living in that cupboard for months. It’s original colour (which may have been white or brown) had vanished and been replaced by the sickest green I had ever seen.

It was almost alive!!

One brave soul lifted it out and put it in an already overflowing bin in the kitchen. I ran out of the kitchen screaming and locked myself in my room for four days until all traces of the loaf had been disposed of.

Those memories sound quite bad but I still recall them with fondness. Next month we are having a reunion in Liverpool where I am sure we will reminisce about some of the pain of communal living.

Hopefully, by then, I may just have forgiven Peter.