But there’s always someone out there to ruin the fun for everyone else, isn’t there? There is. And so it is in the case of pissing. No, I’m not talking here about sexual pissing; I’ve no gripe with what people, and Donald Trump, do in the privacy of their own hotel rooms. No: I’m talking about the fact that urine is the only one of the aforementioned fluids that, to my knowledge, has been adopted by fringe health groups as a source of personal enrichment and vitality if you let it back in yourself. There are, for example, as far as I know anyway, no Facebook groups about eating your own vomit – at least none that are not also groups about dogs. Piss, however? Everywhere. The so-called “natural cure” seems to be spreading like a natural disease. Yum yum.

The basic tenet of urine therapy is that the human body is nature’s best filter and that as a result the piss we pass is fizzing with health. This would be all very well and good except it operates under the misapprehension that this is how filters work. In the minds of these piss-brains, the body is like a juicer and all the fruits we put in come out through our genitals as a scrumptious juice. Except that it isn’t, is it? If the piss was the magic elixir, what do you think would get left behind in the body? That’s right, the rubbish. The dregs. And why would a body keep the stuff it doesn’t need? And why would – anyway, do I really need to explain this to you? Probably not. Unless you are one of those people who rubs piss inside their eyeballs, in which case send me a message and I’ll be happy to talk to you for hours about how to use even the most basic of Internet search functions, I beg of you.

These proponents of Urine Therapy, these advocates of literally taking human waste and putting it in and on your own body, seem to be gaining momentum in the same way that people who preach about anti-vaccination and flat earth do. And while it might be amusing to laugh at the groups of people who ingest spurious misinformation and also sometimes urine, at the end of the day, it’s the same logical – or illogical – processes that lead to people adopting more dangerous ideologies; bigotry and the like. After all, you can’t spell “prejudice” without almost all of the letters of “pee juice”. And while it might also be amusing to laugh at those people being led to hate and intolerance through ignorance and fear, it is also a little bit sad, and it would be good to understand why. So let’s walk through it.

The brain is designed to grab on to what’s easiest for it to continue and survive. As an example, language tends to evolve in a way that makes it easier to communicate – quite literally in the case of certain pronunciation changes that occur because the muscle of the tongue seeks out the least amount of movements it needs to make in order to utter a sound. Think “going to” becoming “gonna”, “February” becoming “Febbry” or “knife”, which used to be pronounced with the “k”. Or think of the case of words and phrases that pop up more frequently and therefore take up less mental capacity to parse. It’s almost like a self-sustaining process whereby the frequency of use determines the frequency of use. We say “food” and “magic” more often than “comestibles” and “prestidigitation” simply because we say the former two words more often than the latter two. And we do so unthinkingly; ‘“How are you going?” “Fine”’ is an exchange that occurs unaltered many times daily to the extent that we now utter it as a matter of habit. It’s also how slang proliferates but then also dies out: it begins through repeated input and output and we hear it so much it infiltrates our consciousness, and then after a while it hits a decline, and the less it gets used by others the less we want to use it ourselves, and so on until gradually it’s dissolved from existence. Yeet. Same with all of our language use, really. We learn to express certain things in certain ways because they simply take less effort to think or say. Lazy? Possibly. Efficient? More likely. Remember, we’re trying to survive here.

Much like these words, concepts you’re constantly exposed to grip onto the neural pathways in your brain and become the default pathways that your brain chooses – and, in turn, they become normalised. They become what you believe, and, in turn, what you live. We’re hardwired for survival and so brains are admirably adept at adapting; once the brain finds itself in a situation where it is at least relatively stable and without any threats, it will continue repeating the patterns it has taken to get to that place, and will establish within itself a new status quo. That’s why it takes so long to unlearn trauma and acquired behaviours and coping strategies, for example; they’re ways the brain has taught itself to protect you, and they exist well after those behaviours are needed, well after the threat itself is gone. Chances are they’re no longer useful, and yet you keep on using them because it’s what you know, and because at one point it was a matter of life and death, even if it isn’t anymore. You have forgotten what specific patterns led you to the stage you’re at now, but they’re now so entrenched in your existence that they become your life.

Taking one step back, we find that these same above mechanisms inform the way we create and stick with opinions and beliefs, and, more widely, entire worldviews. When we’re told something, and told it repeatedly, we’ll start to believe its legitimacy unless there’s some evidence to the contrary. It then gets to a stage when even if there is evidence to the contrary, you are so deeply embedded in what your brain has decided is reality that the evidence appears to be false and so you reject it. You have forgotten the patterns, but they are your life. And it’s especially true from childhood, when we’re still forming our grasp on the world, and when we unquestioningly accept something as true unless explicitly told otherwise. You’ll see that when kids “overgenerate” certain grammatical forms like plurals (“sheeps”) or past tenses (“I swimmed”); they find a pattern and stick with it until they’re told that’s not the case. So too with more abstract notions and social norms. We’re born naked and we’re taught to put on clothes.

As children we’re almost in the most vulnerable stage we can be, and consequently our brain is working overtime to survive and to grab any mechanism it can to convince itself that it is okay. It’s why so many of our personality traits are imprinted in these formative years; when we’re at risk is when our brains learn to live the most. It should be noted here that imprinting is never a one-way system; it necessarily has to come from someone or something, even if it may or may not be a conscious process – for either party. We learn to live from those around us and we absorb their knowledge, their views and their behaviours. And here we see the way social systems and ideologies flourish [2], the way they’re upheld intergenerationally, through family and community: those units that are most connected with protection and survival. From the way we sit and sleep to the way we think about other people to religions, philosophies and politics; so much of it comes down to things we pick up from living with others and explicitly or implicitly being taught how to do so. There’s a whole other treatise to be written about social constructs, so I won’t dwell on it too much more, although it goes to the very heart of what this post is about.

Despite their omnipresence, though, how much of these thoughts and practices do we ever question? How many times do we stop and ask, “Is this true? Is this thing I’ve been doing and saying my whole life inherently true, or even the only way to do and say it? Where did it come from? Where did it go? Is this actually Cotton-Eye Joe?”? We’ve already seen that it’s difficult to do so because of the way our brains operate and the way we’re designed to just take on board what we’ve been given and roll with it until it doesn’t work and even then to keep rolling with it because your internal reality is usually taken to be correct rather than the external reality which is so filtered by your internal reality that it’s hard to know what is or isn’t real anymore.

It’s so hard! Particularly now when information comes to us in a far greater and faster capacity than ever before through widespread technological advances. We simply don’t have time to stop and analyse; we just attach our realities to those around us and just try to survive. And so that’s why we increasingly see ideological bubbles, the triumphs of “truthiness”, and the thriving of fear-fuelled perceptions of the world. Especially when these concepts are rooted in what is, at their core, an appeal to self-preservation. That’s why now, when human progress is meant to be at such an advanced stage, when knowledge is available within milliseconds, we are getting more and more climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, fascists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers and, who could forget (though we rather would), people who treat maladies with their own piss.

Here’s the thing. Personally, I find the above pretty fascinating – most specifically, the fact that it was all written without any research whatsoever and was essentially cobbled together from vague thoughts I’ve had over the years. I literally don’t know if any of it is at all valid. But it’s convincing and plausible – and, frankly, that’s another reason not to trust it. And yes, it’s more or less grounded in reality and touches on things you may have experienced and thought and felt, but none of it was fact-checked and none of it was taken from any proper sources, just stuff I’ve heard somewhere and connected some dots. None of it has any proper merit, even if it may well be true – which it probably is, because, let’s face it, I’m a genius [3].

All I’m saying is: if you hear something, maybe take a minute or two to step back and think critically about it. Even if it’s something you’ve heard every day of your life. Who taught you? Why? What does it really mean? Are you literally pouring urine onto open wounds? If so, why? Or are you perhaps metaphorically pouring urine onto open wounds? If you stop and ask yourself questions like that, maybe you’ll be able to travel through life with a more open mind. Maybe then you’ll avoid situations where you think literally pouring urine onto open wounds is in any way a good idea. And maybe if more people did that, we’d have a bit more tolerance and understanding in the world.

Or maybe I’m just pissing in the wind.

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————————

[1] I have deliberately omitted farting, as this is a gas and not a liquid. When it is a liquid, this further proves my point of mess. However, as a gas, farting is also good ­– perhaps even as good as pissing. It would have also made for a fitting “wind” pun at the end. Please imagine your own.

[2] In a way, words and concepts have their own sort of meta-version of survival. As an aside, the film Pontypool (2006) explores when words and language turn into a zombie virus and it’s a fascinating and terrifying metaphor.

[3] Year 10 Spelling Champion (2006) – my winning word was “perestroika” [4].

[4] This fact is also a half-truth; I won because my last remaining opponent couldn’t spell “gypsophila”, which is a kind of flower and not an attraction to Romany people. As I type this, I realise that when the word was presented, it was pronounced as “gypsophilia”, which is an unfortunate turn of events in a spelling contest. What’s ironic now is that my spellchecker is underlining the word “gypsophila”, even though that’s the correct spelling, although “correct spelling” is also a social construct designed to standardise communication and I should probably use the term “accepted spelling”. All this from a flower!

This overabundance of televisual content, much like the overabundance of mostly everything in our society right now except for maybe food and shelter and general life security, has somehow convinced viewers that engaging with anything beyond a year ago is not worth their time. Since the 5th of June 1978 there haven’t been enough hours in the average lifetime to watch all the television produced, and yet that doesn’t stop people from ignoring the rich history of media and instead favouring this week’s episode of that show where people eat things badly for exposure.

Audiences want more content more often: when once upon a time releasing entire seasons before airing them would have been the subject of gross satirical ridicule, it has now become the norm. To further this trend, online services are now planning to put out feeds of shows as they’re being filmed, and in 2023 will live-stream pitch meetings and writers’ rooms so you don’t have to actually watch the finished product because, let’s face it, no one actually has time for that. By 2029, technology will have developed so far that you will be able to watch the ideas in creators’ heads before they’ve even written them down, and this will win an Emmy.

These sorts of advancements and changes in the world of television exploit not only recency biases but the kind of direct engagement we are seeing more and more of. Soon there will be so much content that not only will any one person not be able to watch all available content, but also all the people in the world combined won’t be able to watch everything ever produced – and, eventually, there will be enough content that no one will be watching the same thing as anyone else; not a single piece of content in people’s viewing schedules will overlap. When media reaches this level of saturation, TV will cease to exist as a filmed medium, looping back to acting shows out live, and providing private performances in individual audience members’ lounge rooms, as they’re the only ones who’ll be watching anyway.

Conveniently, that kind of liveness will complement the attempts made by production companies to reignite the spark of collective pleasure that television once had in the form of studio audiences. Previously, as we all know, studio audiences existed solely to harness the intense power of theatre, in order to engender a sort of “communal spirit” for those watching at home. More and more, however, this has been stripped back to focus on the individual. From sitting as a family to watch other people having fun we have now come to lying alone in a bed full of crumbs, crying in the dark. We still have, of course, the occasional programme with canned laughter, but we have long since given up the illusion that these are real people and not drugged robots emitting bleats of appreciation on cue.

To shake this up, and to re-engage with that long-lost sense of belonging, makers of television are planning to feed off the power of hate, rather than enjoyment, and have plans to introduce canned heckles. As early as next year you will now be able to watch The Big Bang Theory with extended moments of silence followed by boos and yells to “fuck off and make a real joke”. It won’t be difficult to produce these either, as most producers know they’re making atrocious content and as a result the scripted comments will be taken straight from how the writers and producers really feel about what they put out. In fact, instead of an audience taken from the public, it will be the writers and producers of these shows themselves who will be sitting in the studio and cathartically expleting at their own soulless cash grabs.

So that, in a nutshell, is the future of television. And, unless the lobbies and petitions are at all successful, exactly 90% of it will still, predictably, be racist - not that you'll be able to watch it all anyway.

It’s all too easy to judge pop music celebrities. Day after day, year after year, we are subjected to their songs, seemingly little more than vacuous refuse pumped out of a corporate machine. But it’s important to realise there’s more going on underneath their one surface. It’s not all money, glory and sexy. They, too, are people, and suffer just as much as we do, just that they do it in much bigger houses.

Think about it: who were these oversaturated puppets before they hit the big-time? Huh? That’s right. Just your average human person with the same old worries and desires as the ones you’ve got. Kylie Minogue was petrified of the dentist. Harry Styles stayed up nights because he couldn’t really get multiplication. Rihanna hated parsley. Do you think that stops as soon as they achieve worldwide fame and begin to live in the bubble of stardom? No chance. The existential terror never leaves. If anything, it grows larger the more disconnected they are from the rest of the world. And, of course, as their isolation increases, so too does their need to channel it into art.

True, the final product you hear – on the radio, in shopping centres and supermarkets, at cafes, parties, fairgrounds, office waiting rooms, when someone on the train doesn’t realise their headphones are turned up way too loud, and at the gym – may sound like empty, brain-bashing twaddle. True. That, at least, is not up for dispute. But – and this is of utmost significance – each of these final products once had an original, untouched version, brimming with angst and soul before the industry ripped away all meaning to leave an easily sellable skeleton.

Take, for example, this extract from the full first draft of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre [sic]”:

It’s getting hot in herre [sic]
So take off all your clothes.
I am getting so hot,
I wanna take my clothes off.
I’m intimidated by crowds,
And use nudity as a sort of coping mechanism.
It rarely works.

Or this, from the unedited lyrics of the dance classic “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred:

              I’m
              Too sexy for my car,
              Too sexy for my car;
              If I look in the rear-view mirror,
              I see the abyss,
              And the abyss is my face,
              And it stares straight back.

Right said, Fred. Right said.

Next time you hear “Tonight’s Gonna Be a Good Night etc” by The Black-Eyed Peas, remember that it’s not simply a glorified jingle designed to drown out ideas and emotions, but in actual fact a clinically-developed mantra designed to combat crippling social anxiety. It will be a good night, will.i.am asserts in his darkened room before yet another penthouse party. It will be a good, good night.

So don’t be so quick to dismiss pop music as ephemeral trash; even pop stars get alienated and psychologically afflicted. Behind every meaningless lyric is a meaningful subtext. Behind every ego is an id. Behind every inane commercial single is a fragile human voice with a bitter, yearning cry for help.

And we will all be forced to hear it.

Allergies are basically the world’s way of saying it doesn't like you in very specific ways. The narrower the allergy, the pettier fate seems. For example, I'm allergic to fava beans and moth balls, which is the allergy equivalent of someone making fun of your shoelaces. I envy people with more general allergies, like cats or bread. And although they're more likely to encounter the thing they're allergic to, it's almost as if the commonness of it counterbalances the nuisance. They're more used to avoiding cats or bread and thus desensitised to how annoying it is. Especially if they're allergic to cats and bread, and doubly so if the allergy only activates when encountered together, which is increasingly likely what with the recent rise in popularity of feline toast. Compare that to old Fava-Bean McNaphthalene over here who rarely ever faces my allergens in the wild but when I do it's a horrible, harmful surprise. Like ankle splinters. Or being bitten by a duck.

Medically speaking, the concept of an allergy has been traced back to the early days of life. Bacterial cells which split and formed more bacterial cells needed some way of being put in their place. From that point on, all new life-forms had some kind of allergic reaction to their surrounding environment. When fish first stepped foot on land, their newly-formed walking appendages were not yet calloused enough to deal with the harsh coastal sand grits. Though this was less of an allergy and more just plain-and-simple stubbornness relating to their feet, something I have retained to this day (a stubbornness relating to other people’s feet).

Moving on, one out of three proto-monkeys found themselves mildly vomiting when eating early versions of the banana, which was mauve and donut-shaped. Ironically, as bananas themselves evolved into the modern yellow stick we know and love, they developed their own sets of allergies to certain movements in the earth’s atmosphere, which, even more ironically, would have rendered them perfectly safe for those poor proto-monkeys, had the latter creatures not died out due to malnutrition.

And so we move on to today, when all creatures on this bright weird rock have their own particular allergies, far-reaching and abstruse. Tonight on the train there was a passenger who was allergic to singing. If she even so much as encountered a single note she would break out in an unpleasant rash on the side of her leg. Even humming aroused welts, and she was occasionally known to twitch at whistles. Broadway was right out. (Probably for the best.) It didn't stop at people singing: parrots and even dolphins were a real and unfortunate threat. If this woman were Odysseus floating past the sirens she would still survive but end up with a nasty fever in addition to the rope burn. Understandably, she was wary of all sounds, especially those produced by the human mouth. To combat the phenomenon she was advised by an aural psychiatrist to focus her mind on noises that weren't singing if she ever encountered singing.

This particular night on the train it so happened that another passenger began a low, murmuring aria. At once the first passenger sprang up to silence the melody but the vocalising offender would not budge. Again she implored the stony-faced serenader to stop, mate, for the love of god, oh please stop. Mate. Mate. Mate. Stop it. Eventually the passenger looked up and with a frown faded out and resumed scrolling through their phone. But it was too late. There was already singing that had happened. Panicking as she could feel her elbows burning, she ran to the other end of the carriage and opened a whitegoods catalogue to imagine the clunky, emphatically amelodic whir of a washing machine. Another allergy attack averted. Phew.

Curiously, the case of the woman on the train was not an isolated incident. All over the world examples of sound-based psychosomatic reactions have been popping up with alarming frequency. In Tashkent a man will cough at the letter “t”, which is unfortunate on account of the name of his city. In Acapulco there is a woman whose eyes bleed when in proximity to gasps. And just last week I saw a baby who screamed at other screams – though I've been told that's just what babies do and they'll grow out of it naturally. I guess what I'm trying to say is: be careful with noises. You never know what they might do.

Do you have an allergy? Statistically yes. If so, let me know what it is – unless, of course, you are allergic to telling people about your allergies. In which case just keep it bottled up until you die. And if you don’t have any allergies, please let me know what allergies you don’t have. Sometimes these are the most interesting of all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to eat a slice of feline toast – which I am thankfully definitely not allergic to.

They say, apocryphally, that the tongue is divided into five major segments, each with its own unique taste receptor: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the recently uncovered umami, from a Japanese word meaning savoury. When I licked time, what I tasted was death. I think that falls under salty.

Slurping away at individual hours, I felt them wash over the inside of my mouth and lips. Noon on the fourteenth of June, nineteen ninety-seven was particularly tangy. My tongue became overwhelmed with moments, like the sensation you get from a fizzy sherbet only more intense and less artificial.

Moments, devouring my tongue. Every globule of saliva encrusted with every minute of my childhood spent figuring out cheese (I did). Or the evening I rode a bicycle backwards to see if my thighs would hurt less (they didn’t). Or the weekend I did a jigsaw where every piece was identical. All of them like infinitesimal maggots crawling in the flesh of my tongue.

I imagined booths where the public could sit and lick a scientifically concentrated form of time by appointment. At first, entire calendars and diaries would be pulped and transformed into a lickable formula which would be pumped into the booths. Shortly after that, log books would be kept saying how long people licked for, and then that information would be fed back into the booths for the next person to lick, and so on. It would be the first ever self-sustaining time-based commodity.

Soon vending machines and vans would dispense time on a stick and replace ice-cream as the primary item designed for licking. The beauty of mass-produced time products, unlike ice-cream, would be that each person would take as long to lick them as the next, in accordance with the principles of relativity. Children, who have experienced almost no time at all due to not being alive for very long, would take more time to lick each fragment, while the elderly, who have experienced more time than they can handle, would spend hardly any time on their respective individual pieces of the frozen temporal substance.

Once time had been converted into a lickable state, it would be only a matter of itself that it would be used as fuel. The past is accelerating away from us at precisely the same speed as the future accelerates towards us, and so it made sense to put that in cars. As I licked and licked I imagined people driving their vehicles as the time they’d put in them would be gradually running out.

And of course, where there is fuel, there is war. At some point, The United States of America would try to invade the estate of Albert Einstein in order to gain a stranglehold on the source of our contemporary conception of time, but they would be too late.

It was all drawing me ever nearer to the realisation that change was irrevocable and inevitable and everything moves slowly forward and you can't go back and it doesn’t matter when our lives end because there will always be things you'll never do. The more I licked, the harder this epiphany flooded my mouth.

I kept it up for a while until, eventually, I looked down at my watch and saw that I had wasted yet another afternoon aimlessly pondering and also remembered my watch wasn't waterproof and so it shouldn't have been in my mouth that long. I guess that means it's time to get a new watch.

I only hope the new one tastes less salty.

The dark months. The dank moths. The cold, the shivers, the heating bills. The season of contracting diseases and metal. It’s the quarter of the year where we’re allowed to feel bad without a more reasonable excuse. “Oh, it’s winter,” we pout, “which is an unhappy time,” we pout, “therefore my unhappiness is inherently forgiven,” we pout once more, without stopping to consider the overarchingly dreary state of the other three quarters of our lives. Or maybe it’s a blood pressure thing, where the decrease in barometric pressure during winter plays havoc with your veins. I think I heard that on QI. However, chances are that you’re feeling miserable and lonely regardless of the weather. Though that could just be me.

If, like me, you are struggling to get through the wintriness of JunJulAug despite it barely having started, remind yourself that things can only get hotter (and then, again, colder). Yes, with the coldness of winter comes the dialectic counterpart of (a necessity for) heat. My favourite thing to do in winter is saw the legs off broken chairs and throw them in fireplaces, preferably burning ones. There’s nothing like the flammability of wooden furniture to instil in you a sense of your own eventual demise. At least the chair had two purposes - sitting and warmth - as opposed to you, who, meanwhile, seem to be stagnating in uselessness. Suddenly, you realise that the low temperatures of winter are just extra incentives to create your own warmth and your own energy, which are a clunky metaphor for self-fulfilment and personal meaning, and things are alright again. Then discard all that when it’s spring because it’s now irrelevant.

It’s far too easy to overromanticise the colder months. That brooding melancholy that accompanies storms and snow can too quickly be mistaken for depth when it’s really just the sky doing a piss. Winter is summer’s goth cousin - it’s not intrinsically more interesting, but at least it hides that beneath layers of darkness. But it’s important not to reject it, either. Is there really that much to dread about winter? A bit of dread can be good for your soul - it keeps you alive while wishing you weren’t. Winter is recognisably much maligned, usually by people who believe beaches are the pinnacle of modern entertainment and use tan as a form of currency. These people wish they were migratory birds, abandoning the cold to live in an eternal estival festival, forgetting that, unlike birds, we can put on more clothes and boil our own water.

Truly there is nothing better or worse about winter than there is about any other season, unless you particularly love or hate jackets. Personally, I love jackets, as they’re an easy way to make yourself look more stylish, though only if they’re not done up. Otherwise you just look cold. Of course, with fashion inevitably come fashions, which is why some jackets look nice and others are plastic and puffy. It’s also why you can still see shorter pants and ones with holes in them despite the freezing weather; I don’t know who convinced people to go round with their knees and ankles exposed during winter, but they’re surely working for Big Rheumatism. All of my pants are solid and full-length, as are my jackets. I own about seven jackets, although I think the actual amount is different. Some are thicker than others, and there’s at least three or four different colours they encompass. I realise I sound like I don’t know my own wardrobe; in fact I do, it’s just that the jackets I own are all made from chameleon skin and therefore change with my mood. Except one, which I lost in a cab ride home, and which, ironically, was made out of a car.

The one final thing I’ll say about winter is that, like summer, it’s the opposite in the other hemisphere. This can get confusing when you hear people from the other side of the world complaining about heat waves when you’re sitting there rubbing your nose on your gloves to make it feel. Until you realise they’re actually from Queensland where it’s always very hot. I think I heard that on QI. (Insert relevant local place name in that joke to make it work for where you live.)

In any case, winter shouldn’t be the time for despair. At least, not more than any other time of the year is anyway. So, then, what should it be the time for? Baths? Extra blankets? Making soup on purpose? No, you can do all of those things any other time as well. In fact, winter is the time for none of those things. Winter is the time for June, July and August. Unless you’re in the northern hemisphere, in which case it’s the time for December, January and February. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about winter.

Have fun and enjoy the cold.

— Ben