Ich Bin Ein Sitzpinkler

People-pleasing: a guide for the anxious high functioner. Three lanes, two red kites, one button mushroom penis and zero f**ks given

I don’t normally do combative or critical in my Substack posts. The Internet is already an endless wall for us to dash ourselves against, so why keep adding bricks? Well, bear with me; I’m going to spend a sentence or five doing just that… BUT, there is a point to my petty snarking. I think.

Here’s a list of actions enacted by humans that cause me to mutter to myself while shaking my head a bit.

• Adults on scooters. Motorised or manual - don’t care. Tracksuit and bumbag; suit jacket and leather satchel - I give not a tinker’s cuss. Get off my road. No, now get off my pavement. Grow up and buy a bike.

• Writers who use arcane idioms like they have any meaning in 2024. Grow up and smell the coffee, beardy.

• Ugh, writers who misquote idioms.

• Cinema-goers who eat a meal (burgers; nachos) during a film screening. It smells like farts, dude. Grow up, chow down and then go to the cinema.

• Cinema-goers who buy snacks that - in attempting ingress to the packaging - sound like a curious orang-utan opening all of the presents under the Christmas tree while you’re trying to watch something with lots of meaningful extended pauses. Buy some (near-silent) popcorn and grow up, Rustle Hearty.

• Cinemas that sell cooked food and noisy snacks. Why not provide audiences party poppers for when there’s a happy ending? (note: this might actually work in porn theatres). A chatty parrot for people who have come on their own, perhaps. Bongos! Yes sir, these have been provided especially for this screening of Sophie’s Choice. Grow up, cinemas!

• Men (it’s always men) who make their car engines sound like a Tyrannosaurus Rex trying to pass a porcupine, overly-hastily ingested the day before. Come on. You know you’re basically shouting “I’VE GOT A BUTTON MUSHROOM FOR A PENIS,” on a busy street, right? So grow the fuck up, Greased Lightning.

• Musicians playing unamplified slap bass in shared spaces (I know - I chose to work in an educational setting with musicians). Imagine being surrounded by people flicking elastic bands at your ears while Red Hot Chili Peppers play all of the incidental music from Seinfeld. Oh god, imagine what happens if Red Hot Chili Peppers ever grow up.

• The middle lane of the M1 where all the drivers who refuse to grow up and drive like adults, huddle at 63 mph, air-drumming to Born to Run or Rebel Yell with no sense of irony at all.

• The genius who decided - rather than allowing some words to remain grown up - it was time to infantilise ‘overwhelm’ into its new noun status. So, now it’s a condition people can have in perpetuity, rather than one of those feelings that might just pass after a bit of daytime telly and a nice cup of tea.

• Chaps - let’s all grow up and sit down to wee. Unless it’s a urinal, obviously. Think of it as a Luxury Wee, if it helps. Yes, this does mean you’re statistically less likely to create the ‘piss rainbow’ of legend, but it also means no one has to paddle about in a scale model of Lake Windermere like a disgruntled Godzilla after you’ve been in there. The Germans even have a word for those who choose to take care of business sitting down: Sitzpinkler.

I know. I’m starting to sound like a chapter in one of those Grumpy Old Men books that make good Christmas presents for people who object to wind farms within ten miles of their holiday homes. I’ve also purposely left out all of the obvious Big World issues like Trump, Brexit, Israel / Palestine, Putin and immigration because they’re not petty, subjective niggles like my list. Growing up - in the small world sense that I’m driving at - needs more of a collective effort, especially from male politicians (and their button mushroom penises), to make a real difference here.

But growing up is hard. I want to give up smoking, and do you know what makes it most difficult? Embarrassing though it is to relate (and this is pathetic), it still makes me feel cool. It’s a one-way ticket to a horrible death, and I still think I’m Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle, rather than Pat Butcher.

Grow up, Tim.

We’ve long known that what irritates us about other people is that dark, penumbral reflection of something in ourselves; that tiny grain of recognition that gives us pause and makes us narrow our eyes and tip our heads to one side like a confused Labrador, before straightening up and showering that mirror with condemnation and spittle. Most of the examples in the list above this paragraph involve the people we experience in life who just don’t give a fuck. Once upon a time in their lives, they may have witnessed a proffered fuck, but they spectacularly and consistently failed to ever give one themselves.

My problem is that I give way too much of a fuck. I give so many fucks that I am probably the Ron Jeremy of overthinking. There are so many fucks emanating from over here that I am the Guy Ritchie - directing, from his own script, a scene in which Samuel Jackson and Danny Dyer buy some fucking drugs from Ray fucking Winstone in an East End pub - of fuck-giving.

I’m generally at least five moves ahead of any decision that might cast even the shadow of an inconvenience over anyone else. I’m so fantastically attuned to this that I can detect the merest whisper of annoyance borne up to my ears like a tiny dust mote on the faintest waft of a grievance, hours before it (n)ever happens. And if I’m not prepared, often through sheer fatigue or an inevitable and ill-timed moment of rebellion, it feels like I’ve accidentally injured a terminally ill child’s new puppy with a carelessly operated lawnmower, before equally accidentally setting it on fire and then killing it as I desperately try to stamp the flames out.

If my list sounds a little righteous; a bit superior, it comes - I’m pained to admit - from a bitter chamber in my heart. A shallow, writhing black pool of jealousy. How would it feel to not care? To consistently put my own needs first? To not be a people-pleaser? If I didn’t care like they don’t care, then these imaginary low-flying pigeons of responsibility (also my imaginary Noel Gallagher tribute band), and judgmental crows endlessly exploding from my peripheral vision in a blur of feathers, wouldn’t make me flinch like this.

But then, most frighteningly comes the thought…

Have I infected my music with this fucked up nonsense?

This is where it gets really confusing. Because - yes - I have. But I’m not sure if this is an entirely bad thing. Of all our albums, I’d say that Crown & Treaty gets the most love, but when I listen to it now, that album sounds like a fortress. It’s so tightly arranged; trying to crush out any openings vulnerable to the most tentative disparaging prod with a sharp stick. Each melody has been mapped and re-mapped, in every iteration I could think of, in an attempt to disrupt any critical reconnaissance. Every word has been drawn together into lines of chain mail, so that it’s hard to quote a lyric out of context with the intention of making it sound ridiculous.* You could say that you don’t like it, but I seem to be intent on depriving you of an easily-expressed reason why.

None of which sounds useful, healthy or much fun at all. But what about Dylan, Bowie and Prince, and that idea of hiding your heart in plain sight? What about refracting an audience’s comfortable expectations through prisms of personae and creative disruption; carefully placing what’s ‘real’ behind artifice and experimentation, but ultimately - and perhaps against their better judgement - illuminating their art and the hearts of their listeners, via the very apparatus that seeks to mask it? Because even methods of concealment can tell you an awful lot about someone.

eg. this guy might be a dick.

Crown & Treaty is an album about history; the growing weight we involuntarily carry when traumatic events pass unacknowledged and undealt-with; when the past punches you full in the face and then slips away to a safe distance shrugging apologetically, while the nice lady in Sainsburys cheerfully confirms that you’re over 25, and you laugh along, ignoring your bloody nose and buckling knees in case you make her feel awkward. The default state in ‘dealing’ with these ambushes is a state of hyper-vigilance. a defensiveness that might manifest itself as humour, aggression, perfectionism, emotional absolutes, overwork, overplanning and overthinking.

I think that the people who connected to that album recognised, innately, its tendency towards many of those states as way of exerting some kind of control over chaos; like a skydiver with a calculator trying to work out the optimum point at which to deploy their parachute, having already jumped out of the plane. In that way, Crown & Treaty is as unguarded a portrait of a state of mind as Blood on the Tracks or Unknown Pleasures (note: I am not comparing our album qualitatively with Blood on the Tracks or Unknown Pleasures).

I called that album a fortress a few paragraphs back, but humans only construct such things to protect something vulnerable. In the end, all art might be seen as an obsessive quest to impose some kind of structure around the known, the half-sensed and the unknowable, at the same time as creating doors and windows to let ghosts and stale air out, and light, a cool breeze and a shared understanding in. I didn’t, after all, say it was an impregnable fortress. As we know from film and TV, there’s always another way in via the sewers or a midnight parachute drop. Someone might even have left the drawbridge down.

Fortresses also need watchmen and guards with good eyesight and loud voices; brave soldiers prepared to fight for honour (or cash). I may have neglected to advertise these roles, so I suspect my fortress might be defended by some surprised employees of the National Trust, some of whom will be wearing cardigans and waving their pipe-stems at any invaders in lieu of a weapon. It might actually be more of a family day out (albeit for a quite a weird family) with free admission, a mostly-empty car park, an underwhelming gift shop and triangle-cut grated cheese sandwiches available for £4.80 from the café by the drawbridge.

But look at the architecture. The knotted shoulders of those imposing arches; muscular buttresses propping up a tower that sweeps a shadowy finger across the grounds below as the sun crosses the sky; gargoyles hunched defensively in dark corners. Now listen to the bells marking time that’s been lost, and - from the chapel, rising up - the choir’s plainsong chant lifting two circling red kites up over the ramparts. In my cultural life, I love exploring a good metaphorical fortress. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, and I’ll take the affection afforded to Crown & Treaty as confirmation that I’m not. This makes me happy.

I’m driving away from that fortress now, sitting calmly in the middle lane of the M1, casually throwing my Lion bar wrapper out of the window, before stopping at Toddington services to piss expansively over a cubicle toilet seat. Back in the car, I might rev my (1.6L Volvo) engine as I queue at the junction to leave the motorway, before winding down the windows, turning Bat Out of Hell up on the stereo and spitting something unspeakable onto the verge. Then it’s ski-shades down from the top of my head and a massive lug on my cherry and vanilla fizz vape as I jump the queue and hit the roundabout in the wrong lane, driving with one hand.

You can probably see through all the bravado and front, to the scared little boy pushing back at an indifferent world with apathy and an alarmingly comprehensive self-absorption, but let me tell you: in that moment, I do not give a fuck.

*Archaeology’s “milky radius and scattered vertebrae” might be the exception to this.