A Very Merry Lo! To you All!
Let’s keep this short and sweet - thanks for reading all this year and for coming out to my tour in the autumn, folks! Wishing you all a quiet and beautiful Christmas 🙂 Cartoons and quibbles below, as ever, plus a brand new show…
See you in 2024!
How do you rest? You specifically, but also you in general. How does one rest?
The year is coming to an end, I am fraying at the edges and I think I need to know how to relax before New Years comes round and beats me with 2024 like a cricket bat.
I imagine we would all call this feeling ‘burn-out’, and unlike a lot of millenial ex-Buzzfeed Gen Y jargon we were all obsessed with in 2014, I think that word is actually a useful addition to the lexicon. Burn-out is a great term because it describes the sensation exactly. It isn’t just a tiredness, something you can nap away in an afternoon. You are actually burned out, like a charred Peugeot stranded in a storage complex car park. The blackened structure of the car remains, but the plush interior, the lining, the Now That’s What I Call Music 4 CD Christmas Mega Mix, are pure barbecue. You are a silhouette of yourself, a cipher, a blank, an automated chatbot wearing your own face, a HumanTM accidentally restored to factory settings.
It also reconfigures your personality in strange and frustrating ways. Most days this month, I seem to have been irritable at a core level. The other day I lit a scented candle (yes, I have scented candles - no further questions*), the pinnacle of mindfulness, the very logo of self-care, and I had to blow it out because, in my own words, it was ‘sputtering too loudly’. I keep getting colds and stomach aches, presumably because the chassis of my immune system is just battered out, a wagon with one remaining tottering wheel. And I am desperately anxious to get something done. But I don’t know what that thing is. Some days I feel perfectly like a dog, hurtling into the bushes to fetch a stick that no one threw.
Some of it is certainly my fault. In my spare time, I have stupidly fallen into the hole of watching an endless series of TikToks about how rest is good for you. A perfect spiral of self-defeat this is, as the message to rest comes in the form of restless eight second videos made of pure, itchy blue UV light. Not only does the light keep you awake, the length of the videos makes you watch twenty minutes’ worth of them, all repeating roughly the same thing, just with different women in peach sportswear doing yoga in the background. What a perfectly neat Hell. The only consolation is that I’m not trapped in the infernal Möbius Strip circling the wellness TikTok artists themselves - who despite imparting wisdom about how we must rest, take uninterrupted time, not constantly seek validation and crucially not monetise our hobbies, must themselves never stop spritzing us all, at regular and yet just slightly irregular intervals, with this content, delivered with curated zen-like calm, ad infinitum, forever, in case their revenue stream (inevitably sponsorship fees from a wellness app called something like MindMe or HeadBoy) dries up.
But despite scrolling ceaselessly through the endless ticker tape of the mindful internet, I have not absorbed any of the advice. I have monetised my hobbies.The things I used to do to slow down my brain and chill out (reading, writing, chatting with friends) are now my jobs (bookseller, writing jokes, MCing gigs). Inevitably, they have started leaking into each other.
I find myself having conversations with friends and involuntarily compering myself through it, searching for exciting questions to ask that will yield hilarious moments, shiny memories, hither-to-unremembered gossip. Obviously being good company does require some attention and effort, and the hormonal release of a good conversation is not dissimilar to the satisfaction of completing a task well. But the murky osmotic valve between those two subtly different states of obligation are confusing, and in their confusion, exhausting, and in their exhaustion, numbing. Life can begin to feel like a dirty dishbowl of reality and performance, script and adlib, doing and having done.
I used to read in order to, well, read. And now I read in order to have read. Every time I finish a book at the moment it is with the satisfying flourish of a pigeon shot out of the sky. I power through the last sentence, slam the back cover closed**, toss it onto the thick, stained, oaken pub table in my mind, and skewer it to the wood with a flick knife. I then, promptly, forget the whole thing.
Watching TV shows feels similar, always with the tinge of homework to it. I found a literal To Do list of TV shows that I wrote at the beginning of the year in my diary last week. Some scratched out (for reference: The Bear, House of the Dragon, How To with John Wilson), many remaining intact (for further reference: the final season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, The Americans, the final episode of The Rings of Power - the latter I think I really will never watch, for the crime of being exceptionally boring and still so visibly costing a billion dollars). I saw a trailer for a new season of House of the Dragon yesterday and it made me sad on impact, as I realised I’ll have to add it to the list again. But what did I expect? That they would never make any more TV again? When will all the TV be finished? And when it is, once the millisecond of relief has coursed through my body, won’t I be bored again? What is wrong with me?
Meanwhile, not even music is safe. I’ve taken to listening to Spotify in the most alcoholic way imaginable. This is quite embarrassing to admit, but instead of listening to whole songs, I have regularly been isolating ten second chunks of funk keyboard solos and listening to them on repeat because they so reliably perk up my mood. I originally started doing this to pump myself before gigs, but have slowly found myself doing it to pump myself up for, well, anything. Just walking down the street, clawing the tiny digital song toggle back a few seconds, so I can feel the keychange hit my spinal column again. This is objectively sociopathic behaviour. What occurred in the recording booth as a passing instinctive virtuosic flourish in a four minute song that was meant to be heard as part of a twelve song album, I’ve surgically removed and co-opted to artificially top up my adrenalin levels, a cheat code for a more frenetic version of Ben.
Urgh. So what does feel good? Well, there is one thing I am doing more often that does seem to help. And that thing is: nothing. Like, actually nothing. Not yoga. Not meditating. Not reading a book about rest as a radical act. Nothing. My flatmate found me sitting on the sofa the other day just staring out the window. Just brain at half-mast, eyes set to vague middle distance, parked in neutral like an idle robot. She asked if I was ok. In truth, I was better than ok. I was great. I could feel my body repairing itself in real time. Just letting everything in my brain settle, with the hope that, like a curry left overnight, the flavours will compact and impress on themselves and it’ll just intangibly become better. My mind as overnight oats. Doing nothing, actually resting, in the truest sense of the word, you can sometimes just feel yourself coming back to you. Time and silence sometimes a crucially forgotten ingredient in a personality.
I hope we all get to do nothing, more, in 2024. If less is more, maybe nothing is the most.
*infused bergamot, ok! Leave me alone.
**let’s be honest, you can’t slam a book cover - but I don’t think there currently exists a good verb for that action yet. I’d petition for the new word ‘flamp’. ‘I flamped it closed’. I think that could be the one.
Ben’s Gigs
Having said all that…
2024 is all about NEW THINGS. I’m gonna be tinkering with new material in various different forms all next year. First up, my buddy and gangly musical comedy virtuoso Alex MacKeith and I are putting together an hour of embryonic bits and bobs in February. It’ll be similar but subtly different from our seasonal shows for Halloween/Valentines etc. Come help us work it out…
Alex & Ben Make Art
Feb 5th @ 6.30pm @ The Bill Murray
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
Médecins Sans Frontières - always fatuous to say ‘there’s a lot going on in the world’, always cynical to use that cliche to excuse not doing anything about it. Doctors Without Borders are a safe bet in donating to a cause that will genuinely help in areas of conflict across the globe. I’m donating this Christmas - you should too!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! People with Parkinson’s tend to be 50+ and depend on regular contact with others, so have been hit really hard this year. Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here {or you wanna get in touch for whatever reason!} - just send us an email benpope86@gmail.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail
burnout got me feeling like a chicken dipper left on the top shelf of a fan-assisted oven at 200 degrees for nine months and eight days x i'm raising a glass to sitting and doing nothing