“Your blog has too many adjectives, metaphors, and political ponderings. How about you send me more mail with your blog entries tailored to my specifications? In these entries you shall: Tell me about the best and the worst days, about British ladies, and silly foreign observations. I want the dumbed-down sillies—that’s what summer’s all about!”
So, I will get the political ponderings out of the way. These ones are kind of important. (Don’t worry Tori, it all leads to sillies!)
London experienced its worst case of mass urban violence in decades with the recent riots that ignited in North London and spread not only to the rest of the city but to all of England as well. People died, people lost their homes and businesses, buildings were burnt down, millions of pounds of damages were reported, and England’s jails and justice system are clogged up at unprecedented levels after mass arrests and laid charges.
And this shit came out of fucking nowhere. Eat your heart out Toronto G20.
I won’t be taking sides on the ongoing argument trying to pinpoint the ambiguous, underlying catalysts to these riots that are undoubtedly symptomatic of deeper issues. Right-wingers argue that young people’s moral compasses are decaying, and that the violence is “meaningless.” Left-wingers say the blame should be directed at the lack of a “culture of responsibility” because of increasing privatisation or elimination of public-sector services and the subsequent destruction to community. One is more right than the other, but they’re both flawed. Without suggesting the violence was legitimate, because it clearly wasn’t, the former analysis neglects the bigger, hidden problems and trivializes rioters’ experiences, while the latter argument objectifies those experiences.
It was revolt without rebellion, seemingly meaningless but why? Because the rioters live in a world in which no meaning is defined for them—and that in itself is meaningful. Disenfranchised, alienated, and subconsciously at the breaking point, the rioters could either be British Tory capitalism’s casualties, or spontaneously take the opportunity for irresponsible violence to express their dissatisfaction. The City and Canary Wharf, London’s financial districts, remained unscathed. It was local, beat-down neighbourhoods, the rioters’ very own communities, that got it bad. Tube stations closed because of fires, local businesses destroyed and windows smashed, flats and shops burned to the ground. People beaten, mugged, and some even killed—murdered. Why did they attack their own communities? Because that choice they were given only had two options, not a third one. I saw it happen: The rioters hit my street, the very place where I lived. I saw them gather, throw rocks through windows, destroy all the stores I frequent, and run from the police. These riots are as such more meaningful to me than had I merely heard about them second hand on the other side of the Atlantic. Those fuckers even got my library. They saw “Books” and thought, “No, we don’t like those.”
The bankers and the politicians stayed out of the mess. It became a fight between minorities: Muslims and blacks either on one side or the other, and middle-class shop owners struggling to stay afloat versus teens living paycheque to paycheque in council homes (government-owned flats subsidized to low-income residents). I stood within 20 feet or so of about a dozen men, all dressed in black, none of them Caucasian, all of them young, and most of them wearing bandanas and holding weapons, such as bats, throwing rocks at a store-front window just around the corner from where I lived. They saw riot police approaching from the distance, dressed head to toe in armour, holding shields and batons, and ran across the street behind the area’s local council house, the building where they had previously been congregating in front of earlier. We walked by the riot police as they went to chase the men.
It was night, and there were only three riot police; resources, no matter how abundant, were simply spread too thin, mostly because the police had so little time to prepare. There was no crowd of people taking photos or videotaping the event, no nearby media or journalists, no feeling of “security” as long as you stayed off to the side and didn’t partake, a feeling that is usually prevalent in most traditional riots, which amount to nothing more than standoffs between upper-middle-class kids and hundreds of riot police. Fuck I’ll say it: I was legitimately afraid. I snapped less than five photos of nothing more than a collection of broken windows before my flatmates and I quickly headed inside following our encounter with the masked troublemakers. They weren’t fighting police and they weren’t attacking big businesses; they were attacking each other and their own. Fucking chaos. Reports of random beatings were popping up all over the city. Nothing was stopping the ones my flatmates and I encountered from beating our asses if they bothered to turn and see us—we were potential victims as much as anyone else.
Pointing the finger at “meaningless violence” and toughening up law and order, or making accusations at neoliberal-style politics, doesn’t change anything. What is needed is reflection. Look back and create a third option for the disenfranchised to turn illegitimate violence into legitimate action. Here we find a silver lining: What can the riots teach us about ourselves?
Ultimately none of us have walked in the shoes of the rioters, many of whom are struggling to navigate through an often already violent culture clash—and within hugely unfavourable economic circumstances. Although it’s probably too dismissive, it’s also probably not incorrect, as a generalization at least, that they attacked their own communities because they didn’t feel they were getting anything back. They couldn’t pursue that third option: hope.
This post isn’t meant to be a political essay on the riots. Instead, I want the preliminary analysis above to prelude my thoughts on “sillies.” If summer’s all about ’em, I want to explore why (besides the obvious reasons).
Throw around as much rhetoric as you want about a lack of a “culture of responsibility”—as much as we are all just mirror images of the environment around us, when that environment throws you in the trash, you can’t give in the towel. After all, you’ll need it to clean off your newfound shit jacket.
I spent the week prior to the riots in Paris, with my friends Andrew Basso and Connor Low, who I know from back home. For Basso and C. Low, travelling through continental Europe on a two-month bicycling trip, Paris was their last stop, and I was invited to join them for a week of hanging out before they headed back to Canada. We sublet a one-bedroom apartment in North Central Paris, biked everywhere in and around the city, including a 50-k.m. trek back and forth between Paris and Versailles, got awesome and matching friendship tattoos, that we’ll probably regret, to mark the experience, and would then spend our nights drinking wine while watching every episode of the first few seasons of Sex and the City. Intimate, eh?
This intimacy inevitably caused friction. One heated encounter between Basso and I had him accusing me of being too overbearing at times with my outgoing personality, while I fired back that such an accusation was both overcritical and unfair, the former because he has a judgemental tendency and the latter because I accept him despite his flaws. In the end, Basso was being reasonable to ask for compromise instead of perfection, and I was probably right in my assumption that he was being overcritical. We both had merits to our arguments, and we eventually reconciled, but I couldn’t help but wonder about my place amongst others. Even when we feel we belong, do we ever actually do? How secure is our place not only within friends, but within whole networks and communities? Are we more vulnerable than we ever think we are?
I don’t have it nearly as bad as the London rioters—nor am I pretending to—but the overarching principle is the same: Sometimes you think you belong, and then a backlash happens. Some days you find out you’re in a world without meaning, a nowhere land, a Beckett end game. Sartre said hell is other people. Well, I don’t want to live a life in which it’s fruitless to chase my other self. The truth is I’ll probably never properly fit into my group of friends the way I think I do in my head (the way we all think we do), but I’m okay with that because I’ll stick it out if only because I have hope for the impossible: Full inclusivity.
I hold onto this hope because of sillies. It’s the sillies that teach us how to live, how to chase our other selves. They are usually poetic, almost certainly fleeting; sillies are the unreality of the world we live in that keep us sane and provide us with the possibilities for our dreams. Without sillies we cannot learn how to live. That sounds so odd: learning how to live. Isn't living something one does already? Not without sillies.
Get ready for 'em:
They started off with bad Ray Romano impressions in front of Parisian beauties from whom I ordered baguettes. From there the three of us had our caricatures done in front of the Louvre. We looked funny. Where the Mona Lisa was robbed exactly a century ago yesterday, the thief returned to steal our aesthetic dignity. That silly man. We biked to Versailles and my lungs hurt because it was a lot of breathing. But it paid off in the end so that was nice. The French suburbs in between the cities were neat to bike through. Very pretty. We had Bordeaux, shiraz, and pastis every night while we watched Carrie oscillate between Big and Aidan, Charlotte try to have sex with a man who can’t have sex very well, Samantha have sex with lots of men who have sex very well, and booed Miranda for the times she didn’t give Steve a chance. I like Steve! The others say I was more of a Skipper, but they’re fools. I returned to England and British girls weren’t fooled by my fake British accent nor were they impressed by my real Canadian accent. Of course I try to charm them with my voice sounding like a defective dog whistle which Basso and C. Low had told me in Paris is only funny in small doses. Whatever, those boys didn’t even know when they had shit on their jackets. Some of those Brits are cute but they all think they’re smart. Most of them are because they avoided me. It was a beautiful Australian girl, however, that caught my attention on a dance floor in Oxford Circus. She was a model. She's from Babe City, Australia, which was nice because usually I have to settle for girls from Babe City’s suburbs. Anyways, “You have no idea what I’m going to do to you tonight,” she whispered in my ear. “OOhhh that’sss iinteeressting,” I responded like a puzzled puppy. Whatever, I was too drunk to pursue her and just grabbed her number instead. I then went to graveyards and visited some guy.
Had a time at Greenwich. I saw a clock and some line on the ground. I started talking to a beautiful English girl on a bench next to the clock but the lack of time zones must have done something to her internal clock. She was really cute and good conversation but had a boyfriend. No good.
I had an even better view at Hampstead Heath. I saw it all: Arsenal's stadium, the Gherkin, Canada Way, the Shard, the Eye. Woah.
Got together with a few friends from work during my last week on the job. We went to Millers, the local pub where we went after work at least three or four times a week. Rob was kind enough to buy me a really nice cocktail shaker as a going-away present. It was fun, although I don't think anything can top the night Rob, Ben, Simona, and I proceeded from Millers after work to go dancing at The Lexington, near Angel. I think Ellie was there too, and maybe Valeria and Kinza. In any event it was just the four of us that made it to Ben's apartment just south of Whitechapel at around 3 a.m., where we drank more and debated about whether the drugs we found in the cab were coke or heroin. Drunk and high, the only other thing I remembered was nearly passing out on the patio with Simona, while she was complaining I was too much of a romantic. That's okay, I ruled her out long ago after she refused to indulge me in a debate of the most awesome-est Disney movie. It worked on Australian girl so I was content enough.
Had a time at Greenwich. I saw a clock and some line on the ground. I started talking to a beautiful English girl on a bench next to the clock but the lack of time zones must have done something to her internal clock. She was really cute and good conversation but had a boyfriend. No good.
I had an even better view at Hampstead Heath. I saw it all: Arsenal's stadium, the Gherkin, Canada Way, the Shard, the Eye. Woah.
Got together with a few friends from work during my last week on the job. We went to Millers, the local pub where we went after work at least three or four times a week. Rob was kind enough to buy me a really nice cocktail shaker as a going-away present. It was fun, although I don't think anything can top the night Rob, Ben, Simona, and I proceeded from Millers after work to go dancing at The Lexington, near Angel. I think Ellie was there too, and maybe Valeria and Kinza. In any event it was just the four of us that made it to Ben's apartment just south of Whitechapel at around 3 a.m., where we drank more and debated about whether the drugs we found in the cab were coke or heroin. Drunk and high, the only other thing I remembered was nearly passing out on the patio with Simona, while she was complaining I was too much of a romantic. That's okay, I ruled her out long ago after she refused to indulge me in a debate of the most awesome-est Disney movie. It worked on Australian girl so I was content enough.
I went to a museum and met a funny-looking Japanese man dressed in torn clothes and was a few thousand-years-old. He didn't talk much. Then an exotic Latvian girl I started talking to at the National Gallery agreed to get drinks with me the next night, which was my last night in London. We went to a pub in Camden and we both ordered Lolitas, premium vodka cocktails. I know, right? Lolita: it was a sign. This girl was lyrical, after all. Then it was off to more drinks with Jackie, a uni friend, and her friends. Friend village. A bottle of wine at another Camden pub then I was back in Whitechapel. Georgie boy, flatmate extraordinaire, got me discounted drinks, along with good flat buddy Chicky (Mike!) and George’s mate Sam, at the pub Georgie works at near the Liverpool Tube. I had a lot of whiskey shoved in front of me. Too much. Back at the place, where engines roared, Georgie boy, his girl Georgia, Chicky, and I were joined by our flat besties Alice and Henry for an all-night session of drunk board games. I stumbled out of the toilet, struggling to hold it all in, passing in and out, and my packing became a group game of who can stuff my stuff in bags the fastest at 4 a.m. Easiest packing ever! Except for the next morning when my shit was being searched as the result of one of those chavs stuffing my corkscrew in my carry-on. Security had a laugh! And that was London.
See? Sillies. You have a smile on your face already. That’s how I navigate through my life. People, friends, times, alcohol, and loud, compensating behaviour with which I carry on because, well, it’s just how I do. It's probably also the reason I have committed to grad school as the next stage in my life. Absolutely poor decision making right there.
The rioters don’t have it easy, and their victims didn’t deserve the destruction and the agony they were given. Everybody lost something that night. People’s lives became destroyed because the rioters attacked their own communities—they were attacking a part of themselves. To reflect critically of the situation, both us and themselves need to present them with a third option, the choice that is neither sublimation or reckless revolt, but chasing hope, the impossible. Tomorrow.
Until then, sillies.
I had a time London. Russia, 2013, here I come! (I am determined to continue my tradition of visiting Olympic cities the summer before they host the Olympics because I go for the pre-party!)
See? Sillies. You have a smile on your face already. That’s how I navigate through my life. People, friends, times, alcohol, and loud, compensating behaviour with which I carry on because, well, it’s just how I do. It's probably also the reason I have committed to grad school as the next stage in my life. Absolutely poor decision making right there.
The rioters don’t have it easy, and their victims didn’t deserve the destruction and the agony they were given. Everybody lost something that night. People’s lives became destroyed because the rioters attacked their own communities—they were attacking a part of themselves. To reflect critically of the situation, both us and themselves need to present them with a third option, the choice that is neither sublimation or reckless revolt, but chasing hope, the impossible. Tomorrow.
Until then, sillies.
I had a time London. Russia, 2013, here I come! (I am determined to continue my tradition of visiting Olympic cities the summer before they host the Olympics because I go for the pre-party!)
