Awake photos on Flickr

I'm fully awake, now. It might not seem that way, partly because of, for example, how I've been expressing myself at times, partly because of how I build on stuff after I post it and then approach feedback, and also partly because waking up has been such a long, drawn out process. But the approach has finally worked.

The weekend that's just passed was a big one for me. I popped to Birmingham, I popped to Worcester and I got some feedback from a few people that got me thinking broadly about stuff. Here's a video I did in Worcester's city centre, which says a few quite important things, I think:

I am awake and I'm not going back to sleep

My Number One Fans on Flickr who, let's hope, can finally move on now and enjoy life more, are the type of people you can sometimes come across who hype themselves up about nothing much, but seem to have an inability to really understand where they're at, what they're on about or how to deal with their own impulses, while trying to get you to join their club.

In the end (if there's ever an end with such people), they did remind me of Kathy Bates when she was kicking off in 'Misery', but that was pretty predictable all along. They do have a tendency, people like this, to get carried away to such an extent that anything's possible. I suppose the best approach in that context is to just leave them to it and hope they pull out of it, someday. It was brilliant to read their comments, though - different way of life - and see them play out what, like I say, they were always going to play out, come what may. It all suggested a lot to me about what mainstream culture can do to some people made vulnerable to it and what social media could do for them.

Like I said in the comments to a previous post, I've often found it tough to get out of conversations with insistent mad types, but I hope they can find their own inner peace one day, somehow. I'm sure there's a way to reach such people, but how? It's not my bag to reach them directly, for what should be obvious reasons. I think a gradual approach, looking at a lot of things, is required, which is maybe something worth thinking about.

I'm pretty sure I know how, already, in a way that would protect people like me from becoming assimilated into their club and their quite apparent conservative and limiting approaches to people and the world, but I've already hinted at that elsewhere, although I may do again, but not in this post. How to break through that conservative, limited and limiting stuff, without adopting the methods of mainstream culture, which would be a bad start, is something else that makes me wonder.

This picture is from yesterday. Me in a coffee shop in Worcester, a shop where seeing really is believing that such places exist. I hated the place for all the right reasons, even though the mocha wasn't bad. Worcester is the power centre of Worcestershire, the county which hosts Kidderminster - quite possibly the Animal County of Britain. This was pretty much the moment where I first realised that I won't ever be going to Worcester again, unless it's under some form of unavoidable duress. There's absolutely no need. There's no enjoyment for me to be had in that place - it's essentially the opposite of what I'm about. I don't think there's anything to discover there that I haven't already found in Kidderminster, the place is certainly not my scene and I can't see anything substantial ever being achieved in the place without a massive struggle that I'm just not up for. Not there, at least.

This weekend really has been massive. An old way of life, and all the costume dramas it'd become surrounded by, have been dealt with, once and for all, in a gradual approach that's freed me up so that I can start to look ahead, helped with the insight I've picked up along the way. This life's always a learning process, though, so there'll always be more to do, but the essentials are now in there to build an approach to living that I like and which is cool.

I may be doing fewer of these posts, now. I may shift to YouTube for at least a while. I may do many things, but I'm also thinking about the Smartphone Era, a place I'm not leaving, now. The mainstream's shit - it makes too many people dumb, at the very best - and I'm not going back. As people in the Occupy Movement say: 'I have woken up and I'm not going back to sleep'.

There's people out there who've done similar to me in having a more authentic sense of self and context, although maybe with more emphasis on politics, rather than focusing more on cultural and psychosocial factors. If you haven't done either, when you, too, wake up and get out of bed (if you do), gimme a shout and we'll do coffee, we'll chill and we'll figure out how to get more people to at least appreciate that the option's there. In the meantime, I'm going to work on how to bottle this potion for distribution and further development.

Speak soon...

Awake by andreiaamorim