I really don’t know where to begin with my review of 2016. To a lot of people this year has been terrible, what with all the deaths of famous people they don’t personally know and political events that probably wont significantly change anything. For me this year has been a watershed moment where I proved to myself what I was capable of, lost some friends to death and one of my most meaningful relationships to time. I traveled to more countries in the last half of they year then I have in the last 10 years of my life and clocked up 8 festivals to boot. But overall and at the risk of sounding gay I think I finally became confident with the person that I am, or at least more so then I ever have before. I’ve covered quite a lot of this year in previous blogs and I know you’ll be reading plenty of ‘2016’ themed articles online so don’t expect this one to be it’s usual epic 15,000 word read. Here we go….
I’ve got up to so much shit this year thinking back over some of it I get stunned by some of it and think ‘wow! Was that really only a year ago?’ I remember I completed a successful dry January without any temptation what so ever and then had a long weekend away with the lads to the German city of Leipzig in February. Just typing that makes it feel like a decade ago now.
I guess some of you may have noticed that the name of the blog has completely changed to that of my alias. The reason behind this being that when I was solely writing about sex the ‘adventures of a young pervert’ title seemed totally apt. But this year I noticed that I don’t really have sexcapades anymore, I don’t really have that much sex. What’s more its not something I really miss that much for that matter. Also for some time I haven’t really wanted to be remembered as a one trick pony who only ever writes about his grotty sex life – especially when the excitement of that once colourful time has come to an end. All things must change eventually.
I spent the majority of this year coasting along in a blind focus. The job I was in was a pleasure to show up to every day – the people loved me and everyone was grateful for the work I enjoyed doing for them. I was exploiting a few of the scams that come with agency work and they were paying me a wage that was high for the menial tasks that I was doing. My outgoings at home were very few and because of this I was saving plenty of money each month. I already had my list of festivals I was attending that year booked up and was slowly but surely getting all the other expenses covered. Things were going so well I almost felt like this was all too easy.
I’d managed to get myself into a money saving mindset where I was constantly looking at the bigger picture. An invite to the pub on a Friday night was all well and good but that was a potential 30-50 quid night out, that wasn’t taking into account the likely matter of said night turning into a few bags of gear back someone’s house. There is nothing exciting about these kind of nights out for me anymore, if anything I find them really rather boring, I knew that the money invested in them would be much better spent later on in the year. I was able to so say no to a lot of things that usually I would have done just to cure my boredom.
I was also able to tune myself into a cheaper and healthier lifestyle. I’d cut out drinking without a purpose mid week – again with the mindset that the £10-15 a week spent on a few cans after work would come in better handy at some festival later in the year. I’d do weekly shops that would feed me through the working week meaning that I wouldn’t spend any money at work and would often put myself on diets to save further dosh. My favourite and most effective being a vegetarian diet I went on for a couple of months.
The Festival Odyssey as it’s now known started unofficially back in April with my beloved Bangface weekender. It was a festival that the year previous I remember not having the best of times at. It was just after I’d returned from travelling and I spent a lot of my time there in a state of mind thinking ‘whats is life? Is it this?’ I was disillusioned by the most influential thing in my life and because of my epic summer ahead I thought it be best for finances if I didn’t attend this years festival…
However I managed to get my own chalet for an irresistible price and the festival ended up being a religious experience similar to that of what I felt back in 2008 at the infamous first edition. I remember walking from Al Zebbadiah’s lively set from the pub soaring on acid. I strolled through the crowded corridors giving hi-fives to all the fella’s I knew and kisses from all the birds, getting complimented on my performance on an episode of blind date that I appeared on on Bangface TV earlier that day. I stuck my head into the main arena and found the arm of James the organiser embraced around me. With a kick in my step I skipped further into the crowd and was met by about half a dozen of my closest friends who roared with excitement to see me, covering me in a barrage of kisses and hugs. It was then that I had my transcendent experience where I thought to myself ‘This is it! These are my people! I am home here, I am loved here’. Next year will mark my personal 10th anniversary of attending Bangface. My entire adult life devoted to a club night where I have met all my best friends and had some of my fondest memories. The most important thing that ever happened to me was walking into to the Electrowerkz all those years ago.
The comedown to the weekender was one of my worst ever. Made ever the more terrible by my own concoction of high doses of valium and Xanax which would lead to he marathon sleeps plagued by Inception style dreams that when I finally awoke from them I felt even more exhausted then when I went to sleep. One episode was so bad that when I eventually made it down stair I had to ask Jem to confirm that I was actually awake. I managed to find a magazine that would publish my review of the Weekender but it took me over a week to get into the right mind frame and when I did eventually get my piece in I wasn’t proud of it and never told anyone when it was published. This was also around the time when I tried to get an article I’d spent months writing published in Vice magazine. They very enthusiastically lead me around the garden path before palming me off. I was starting to realise that although I loved writing I don’t think I could ever do it to a deadline and I have to be in the correct head space for it. I stopped dreaming about one day being a culture and lifestyle journalist of sorts but I still hope that one day I’ll publish a novel.
But with writing for an open public comes great power. Once again this year my humble blog has had the power to piss a few people off. Most notably my former lovers the Clapton Ultra’s who kicked me out of their tree house for finding my ramblings sexist and offensive. At first I was quite upset with their decision to ban me not only because had I enjoyed the weekly football but because what they were saying just aint true. Then when I woke up I snapped back into my mode of ‘fuck them they don’t know me!’ If I get banned from somewhere due to the holier then thou opinions of a few bleached arse faggets sat round in their safe space committee then it’s probably for the best I don’t show up. I wouldn’t want to be part of a club that would allow me in it anyway. I know by now I’d probably get away with returning to games, I’m sure not enough people there give that much of a shit to have my face remembered by memory to have me extradited once more but regardless I don’t think it’s a good idea I surround myself with people so over encumbered by such strict Dogma. I just don’t get on well with them, or that is to say they don’t get on with me. I’ll accept anyone into my friendship group regardless of what their beliefs are because you never know we might learn from someone with a completely different set of beliefs, I really don’t understand the mentality of shutting people off because they think differently to you. How is that going to change anything? Living in a bubble is what caused some of the political events this year anyway.
I don’t have any active contempt for the fans of their club what they’re doing is a good thing really and I do wish them all the best, it’s just that now the dust has settled I have no intention of ever returning. They were like a good fuck who at one time I would have liked to have made more permanent but after a bitter row where they accused me of some nasty things and were really rather rude, all I now do is wish them well for the future.
As my summer adventure drew closer I thought it be a good idea to move out of my current digs in Woolwich and spend about 6 weeks sofa surfing and saving an extra bit of cash for my tour. Lily very kindly offered me her sofa for that entire time. Then I decided to spend this extra dosh on weekly therapy sessions. There was a few things in my life that I wanted to understand a bit better and if nothing else I thought it be healthy to talk about a few things that I never even reflect on with myself personally. You can find a link to the blog on the menu up there somewhere, but in short my experience from it was very positive. Just being in an environment where you verbally discuss all the shit aspects of your childhood and how it makes you feel was very liberating. Annoyingly though I was only able to get in about a dozen sessions, in which time it only really felt like we were getting just started. My therapist even left me on a few cliff hangers asking me 3 game changing questions in my last session that left me thinking ‘aaahhh yea never thought of it like that’ I should really have returned to do more sessions when I got back from traveling. But you know how it is?
So come the summer Glastonbury came and went and with that was the news of the passing of a friend of mine. Adam Pritchard – who was part of the crew of friends I had made at my first Bangface Weekender and played a significant part of my formative years as being my first set of adult friends. I wasn’t as close to Pritchard as I was to some of the others but I had enough fond memories with him to declare him a friend. A fan of this blog since the old days, he would always encourage many of my ideas and we’d sometimes randomly end up chatting online. He was a character as much as he was a good man and he’ll be missed the most by a great bunch of people. I don’t see as much of his crew as I’d like to anymore but they still have huge amount of love for every one of them as they have played a significant role in the early stages of my adult life. I hope to catch up with them all again very soon.
And then it was time for the big one. My epic journey across Europe climaxing in Montreal. All of the last years worth of saving up and longing off social occasion had lead up to this. There’s a whole section of this site devoted to The Odyssey if you want to read about it. To be honest with you I’m not really proud of the end result of my writing, especially when I consider just how awesome and challenging the whole 3 months were. Hitchiking across borders, getting scammed in brothels, surviving in desserts, getting by with no money and no food in Poland, going on a 15K pilgrimage with a vomiting virus in the Portuguese out back, and living a lot of it on hard floors in shit tents and over crowded hostels. Each challenge that crossed my path I smashed to the ground without merely batting an eyelid. The one challenge that did nearly break me though came when I got to Montreal and Deirdre announced that our relationship was now a platonic one…
I’ve covered the whole situation in my Montreal entry so go read that if you want to know the whole story or my side of it at least. But one significant thing that upset about the whole ordeal was how if experience taught me anything it’s that was probably going to be the end of me and Deirdre entirely. The added irony being that once more like I’d done with so many people before it was just after I’d laid my emotional hand to Deirdre back in Berlin a few weeks earlier she was to potentially go on and fulfill the prophecy. A few months earlier when my therapist asked me what exactly it was I loved about Deirdre I said it was because despite the fact that in her life she has had many more important men take centre stage in her life, she’s never got bored of me. For the last 4 and a half years regardless of the other boyfriends in her life she has listened to all my bollocks regardless of how mundane it is and has always been there check up on me to see how its all going and this was all the evidence I needed in the proving that she loved me too. I recited this to Deirdre, then just weeks later when she announced things were being devolved between the two of us, I made her promise that she wouldn’t get bored of me… Probably shouldn’t have done that. Since leaving there I aint really heard from her much
But despite being a bit pissed off with the timing of it all I found that it had nothing on previous experiences such as this when a bird had longed me off. In fact by coincidence it was about the same time 2 years ago when things went wrong with a bird and I really hit a dark period, I know this because on one of those facebook memory things up popped a picture of me sat in the dark on my own drinking a can of Special Brew. Back when the only reason I was going to work was so that I could pay for booze and drugs to distract me from how shitty the things were around me and also sooth the seething pain of the regret of a bird. Then I noticed that was the difference this time, my life weren’t shit! Things have been pretty fucking sweet for quite a while and what I also think was a huge factor this time was that I didn’t regret anything. In the past my regrets with women have been that I did either too much or not enough, with Deirdre I put a lot of effort into making things work at all times and in return I got a lot of loyalty and love.
I didn’t suffer the usual mental torture after mine and Deirdr’ ‘breakup’ as it were in the following months after my visit to Montreal. Which is strange because I still never got the answers to the questions I was itching to ask her and I still to this day don’t have know. Don’t get me wrong there would be some times where I would be in the supermarket idling over which type of onions to buy when I’d get blindsided by the fact that I don’t have her in my life anymore, then all of a sudden my mind would pull out a memory of the two of us from the archive and I’d realise just how much I took our relationship for granted. One of these memories in particular was when she came to visit London back in the summer of 2013. We’d had a lovely day walking around London’s art galleries, visited a family friend of hers, went for lunch in Exmouth market, browsed the shops, met another friend for a drink in Soho the whole time chatting away about everything that popped into our heads, never a quiet moment between the two of us. Then as we walked out of the station to go home a brief pause did come over us, then when she took my hand as we got through the barriers she turned to me and said ‘You know I really fucking like you!’ At the time I never embraced the true meaning of that statement.
Then over time as these memories would play randomly in my mind it hit me! The whole time I’ve been writing these blogs I’ve constantly referenced my loneliness, my lack of luck with women, how they’ve fucked me over, my lack of anything resembling a relationship and how I feel like I’m looking for a bird that doesn’t actually exist. When in fact for the last 4 and half years in its own unique way I had this person in my life the whole time. I had the outgoing, kinky bird who didn’t give a fuck what people thought of her and did what she wanted the whole time. I had the person who’d listen to all my shit and boost my confidence and self esteem when I needed it most but just took it all for granted until it came to an abrupt end. That being said one of my most burning questions I have for her is, did that time we had together means as much for her as it did for me?
But like I say I don’t regret anything. I’d tell Deirdre how much I loved her on a daily basis. I think my role in her life has run its course now and although that makes me sad it’s something I can come to terms with. From what I heard she’s happy at the moment so what more can I do? I think what I find most annoying is that this has been one of those things thats just run its course and not because I’ve done anything in particular wrong to justify her not wanting me anymore. I don’t think I’ll see her again anytime soon, I’m not sure what her plans for visiting Europe are anytime soon. Personally I dont know how long I’ll be around here anymore, and I don’t think I’m going to have the opportunity to be visiting Canada in the near future. I may have scoured off the feelings I have for her with a cognitive wire brush and the love that I have for her may one day fade to memory. There may be a time in a few years when I’m culling my Facebook friends and I stumble across her and have a moment of conflict as to whether to click the delete button or not. Regardless of whether this happens or not I know for certain that whether she likes it or not, because of everything she’s done for me over the years I will hold nothing but tenderness towards her for the rest of my life.
So I returned from the Odyssey 5 grand lighter with a whole load of memories and new experiences. I felt like I could accomplish anything, but mostly I realized just how little desire I had to remain in Britain. My blog has never been used as a political platform and I wont bore you with my political beliefs, if you want to read about that there’s been about 10 million different opinion pieces written this year that you can browse at your leisure online, but lets just say things aint looking great for the immediate future and I want off this sinking ship more then ever! I dunno if 2017 will be the year this happens, but then again Leicester City are the Premier League Champions and Donald Trump is the next American president…
‘But what about the women?’ I hear you ask, well once again my year has been punctuated with a few chances and several one off fucks that didn’t really mean anything and even the one I had that was on paper really, really good don’t particularly do much for me on reflection. Although now days when I do really need sex Grindr can be pretty good if I just fancy getting fucked. I was hoping that the Odyssey would return in terms of pussy but my conquests there were so tragic they were comical. Then when I was in America the only Tinder date I went on ended up being so good it lead me wondering why I couldn’t attract birds like that here in the UK – which again gave more pause for thought on what I’m really doing here.
I do remember one glaring miss I had at the start of the year when I’d come out of a Q&A screening of High Rise. I was cycling up Shaftesbury avenue when my back light came off, this just happened to be where a very pretty bird around my age was looking about in the road for something. I managed to find my light and when I asked her what she was looking for she said it was a battery that had fallen out of her light when it had also came off at that part of the road. I did give her a hand at looking for a few minutes but the task was admittedly always going to be fruitless. So just like that I wished her good luck and sped off on my bike and then wanted to launch myself in front of an oncoming bus as I’d just realised the opportunity I’d just wasted. If I’d have found the missing battery I would have been the hero, but if I’d have stayed and helped until she got bored I still would have been the good guy, we could have cycled off together and I could have made conversation, she was already a cyclist so we had something in common, I’d just come out buzzing from a film premier and could have used that as a conversation starter to she if she bit, also there’s nothing wrong with putting it out there and asking for a birds number even in this day and age where I worry that even smiling at someone is considered chauvinist.
That missed opportunity although incredibly vague really pissed me off. I fired up my old online dating account and chatted up some of the fattest birds I could find and fucked one the next night in a scrappy unsatisfying one night stand that made me notice just how bored of them arrangements I have been for ages. I go into 2017 knowing just like every other year it’s unlikely that a meaningful relationship will fall at my feet. But then again Leicester City are the Champions of England and Donald Trump is the next US president.
No year would be complete without acknowledging those around you who helped you through it. My friends are a wonderful bunch, I may have got bored of some of their shit by the time I left to conquer Europe but I returned realising how much I love them all and appreciate just how much I mean to them. For alot of my life I’ve noticed that I’ve always been too square to be weird and too weird to be square and I’ve never adhered to any social stereotypes so sometimes felling comfortable in circles of friends could be a challenge, but with the bunch I have now they know what I’m about and I appreciate that.
One bloke in particular though has had my back for the last 10 years. This year in particular whenever times got tough on the road, or if I was just bored I knew if I called him he would answer every time and that applies too all other times in the 10 years I’ve known him. I’d call him when I’d be down and I’d tell him my problems, then he’d call me a cunt, then I’d call him a cunt, then we’d both call each other cunts and come to an agreement that we’re both useless cunts. I am of course referring to my illusive friend Jack ‘Del Boy’ Sparling. It’s one of those relationships that the outsider would ponder why we’re actually friends. We never see each other, all we do is insult one another and we both live completely different lives with not a lot in common but despite this we talk every day and have each others back no matter what. I love that cunt and this year he’s been especially good to me. That’s why he’s my ‘2016 friend of the year’
So now as I come to the end of 2016 I find myself in a job where my role has changed and my scams have been clamped down on, leading me think that the next year I’ll probably have to look for a job where I may actually have to do proper work. I’ve loved my current place but always saw it as a means to an end for when I decided what I want to do next. I’ve been looking into out reach work with homeless junkies; I reckon I’d enjoy the challenge and the rewards a lot.
My current living situation is fucking sweet. I live for cheap with both my gobshite best friend and my nerd best friend in a little house in a suburb in Essex. I like it, we all work well together. Being in the middle of nowhere pisses me off sometimes but it keeps me out of trouble. The cats do my head in off but if that’s all I have to complain about then I must be doing something right. I like my set up here and have no real reason to change unless I get kicked out.
In terms of where I am mentally and spiritually I am at my highest point ever. I’m confident in my abilities and know that no challenge is greater then me. I know what kind of people to trust and who to stay away from. I abandoned my faith at Boom and now consider myself completely free of Dogma but am tolerant to all those around me to believe whatever it is they believe. I claim to be have no particular religion, sexuality, political belief or social status I am who I am and those who turn against me because there’s one small factor of my personality that they don’t like or they’ve perceived to be in anyway against their moral code then well I need them in my life as much as they need me in theirs. On my travels I took gratitude in just how lucky I have been to lead such a privileged and interesting life filled with amazing people whose wisdom I have been able to learn from. I feel like I’m running up the wing with ball just about to shoot for something great.
So where do I go from here? How do I top a year where I travel the world, MOT’d my mind, got a clearer perspective on who I was as a person and generally faced life knowing that I’d only regret the things I didn’t do. I dunno what my plans are for traveling next but that is my top priority from now on. Apart of me says see all of Asia for a year but then my recent American holiday has curveballed that decision to just drive the southern states next autumn, then I think maybe I should wait and see how well the pound recovers. I’ve had a few debts come back to haunt me too so will spend the first few months of 2017 paying them off. Aside from that I’m very much aware that this winning streak I’m on must come to an end soon, it’s been going on so long that I’ve actually realised just how well I’ve been doing recently. Everything is set up to crumble into potential existential crisis… I’m growing tired of my job and am about to make a gamble on a career change, the only person in my life who stopped me from feeling completely lonely is fading out of my life with every passing week, events in the country are pissing me off more every day, the world is getting warmer, Britain are leaving he EU and the economy is on the verge of crumbling. I predict a 2017 full of challenges and some dark periods but have sharpened my weapons and am more ready then I’ve ever been to take on everything it can throw at me. But I expect nothing – after all Leicester City are the Champions of England and Donald Trump is the next president of the United States.
2017 – Come get some!
Happy New Year – Play me out Mozzer!