Nicholas Cage and Unemployment

This is a tricky place to start. It's the part where I have to explain to you that rather than a grand thesis on how the subjects of the title intertwine in some glorious synthesis, well, it won't be. They don't and they never will. No matter how grand a thesis, it would only be vainly coaxed dishonesty. Nicholas Cage loves to work. Almost as much as Kerry Katona. One in often oddball Hollywood and Independent film numbers, one in television adverts and trash reality shows. But she does do a lot of them, especially when one can easily be considered too many.

I don't love to work. No wait, that's not true. I do. I also love to work, like Nicholas Cage, however I am currently unemployed. As such, unemployed and therefore with vast swathes of time to occupy (when not jobhunting... the walls have ears in these parts) I have a swelling bloggeristic urge to deconstruct the idea of what employment means and claim that I am somehow doing it.

Principally through blogging, would be the obvious candidate for this fantastical scenario - me working presently, thus confounding the DSS into not giving me money anymore. Super. If this were a world where the things I idly speculate were to somehow come true, that is what would happen. Thankfully it is not, and I'm not even going to do the thing I said I wasn't going to do, and then slightly did a bit. The deconstruction thing. Anymore. That'd be boring.

I'm writing today because I am a little detached from reality in my unemployed state. At least, a certain kind of reality. The one where you read the metro on the way to work, or a different and less tatty paper when you get there over a coffee when you should be grafting. The one where someone talks to you about what events have happened in the world today or more likely some gossip and prattle about who did what, when and how many with. I think I kind of miss it... But there are three kinds of topics to discuss, some more rewarding than others. About people, about events, about ideas. You'll be hard pressed to find the latter at work. Seriously. Me at home alone on a Tuesday? Nothing BUT the stuff.

I have filled the day learning about Nicholas Cage. Ok, I've been doing other stuff too. You know, eating breakfast, that kind of thing. All sorts. But my little occupations did keep me from leaving the house - a luxury not many have I guiltily confess - and it was left to me to fill the time. Productively or otherwise. Well I've already told you what happened. I swear there were ideas there.

I didn't want to watch the news, what possible pleasure would I find there? The toryish free paper on the morning bus functions as a rich distraction from half an hours ride to the 9-5, all pictures and words and stuff. Information too, that's ok. It's light as well, though you do find out of some important events, which help us place our present in context. But you wouldn't read it if you didn't have to. I didn't see the metro today, and the BBC is, ooh, gosh, too serious. News? Pass.

And that to me seems the most important thing I'm missing. Perhaps. Contextualizing the day in the present. Meh. Not leaving the telly off and getting lost in a world of dreams stretching down through the outposts of art and entertainment, easily located. Double meh. This stuff is alright. It's a bit rich to describe youtube as an outpost though, isn't it? But I do find new music, film, comic entertainment, and other, there. And for what takes my fancy as it turns out, it feels like an outpost. A nice one.

Like a mishmash of your thoughts and feelings, mirrored back from your chosen searches, it is ideas filling the time out of mind, without the daily drip-feed, the stream of chattel from the world. It localizes experience in a more eternal place. I swear! Preaching, yes but... um... You'll find comment and opinion and thought online too if you search for it, but you don't have to. Even if you do, you can find grass roots in the masses of vloggers, with no paymaster's agenda but the truth and how they see it. This stuff seems so much better, for some reason.

I'm not hiding from the world. I can handle the horrors the planet seems to enjoy perpetrating (make that the denizens of the world seem to enjoy... sadly) but I have spent a day thus unmoved to find out what they might be lately. This other stuff, the things we like, the things that prompt our emotions and salve our souls, that inspire us to achievement and further. Well it's much better isn't it? I must be a lucky boy, living this way.

The jobhunt will come, and yield fruit eventually, unless my today-indulged dreams yield it fresher and riper from the unwieldy metaphorical tree. Before and/or sooner. In that meantime, prior to this episode of blog which of course feels like achievement, I will enjoy watching Nicholas Cage Lose His Shit (a term I urge you to search on youtube) and then reading an interview with him explaining how and why he does it so well, and then watch one of his various excellent or not-so-excellent films. Nicholas Cage. The man of the day. Perhaps of tomorrow, who knows?

Perhaps I need a hero for the long day. That's it, take away all that worldly ugly for me, gimme a laugh and a friendly thought, his mega-acting will do till sundown. Though, I never much thought I dealt in them. Heros that is. Maybe I do, secretly. Heroines is maybe a different matter, and certainly one for another time. This is Employment and Nicholas Cage. Unemployment I mean. I don't know, I certainly feel kinda employed by this point. So the blog has served it's purpose.

If you lack closure, the blog was about Kerry Katona being poor fare and the fact I quite like being unemployed, and Nicholas Cage now. Sorry about that. I do feel the keen sting of 'unemployment's' shame though, if that is consolation. I need a little jobette, because life is quick to remind you of your stereotype. But it's dreaming big or bust for me. Or at least dreaming. (With Nicholas Cage.) And there is plenty of work to be done in that. Ideas are inspiration and it all plays its small part in keeping those dreams alive, in an otherwise tricksy world. (Nicholas Cage Losing His Shit) And again, don't watch trash TV, it's bollocks.

Here is the link for those too lazy to do the reccommended search: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP1-oquwoL8
with many thanks to Dan for pointing me to it.

thanks,
TBDASOAJ or Gavin, if you prefer.