I Am Exiting My Villain Era

A bit of bonus content for all…

Earlier this week, I found and shared this picture. “I’m entering my villain era”. I popped the picture on my Instagram, left a wee comment/title: “Exiting mine, but still a good pin”.

For anyone else, proudly wearing a pin saying they’re entering their villain era would not (necessarily) mean they were planning to be a cunt; were stoked to identify with being the worst kind of badass. Instead, they would likely be signposting something strong, a little bit naughty (a wee giggle). They might be saying they’d ’had enough’ on some level and were “going rogue” in the most low-key, pin-wearing of ways.

But I could never pull that off.

Or, um, put that on.

You see, I was something of a villain. In the eyes of many, anyway. I have friends that ask if people still think I’m a cunt. They laugh as they say it. I have newer friends that are baffled to know I was thought of that way, or had heard stories but couldn’t ever quite line it up. “What did you do that was so bad?” A friend asked recently.

I told them I wrote a lot of music reviews, and commentary. Which meant I couldn’t like every band ever. And also meant that some people took intended jokes very seriously, or missed jokes entirely, or thought there should be no place for jokes in the writing I was doing. But it also meant I legitimately said some cruel things about some people — or the music they loved — I couldn’t hide it all behind ‘banter’.

I’ve written, often, about the death of music journalism. I even wrote a book called that. One of the very best things about the erosion of what I thought was my craft, and my place, of my audience, and my stepping back from social media (Twitter/Facebook) is that I no longer have the horrible element of an audience egging me on. (I never needed any encouragement by the way). And I’ll take full responsibility for anything I ever wrote, and anything I ever did. But it’s nice to not have the tire kickers and fuckwits. The popcorn eaters…To instead have a genuine audience of readers. People that follow out of kindness and curiosity. Out of genuine interest.

It certainly helped me start to exit my villain era.

I found this poem (below) I wrote late last year. It’s the beginning of something. It doesn’t quite get to where I would have liked it to go. But then again, maybe it pulls up at exactly the right place.

Writing is funny like that. Part of why I just like chipping away. Revisiting. Having further attempts. Clarifying, trying to improve on it, or just allowing, with the passing of time, something to sit for what it is.

It will take me a lifetime to exit my villain era. Just like it took half a lifetime to climb right into it. Many of the very worst things I ever did — as a human being — have nothing to do with flimsy, nearly meaningless things I wrote. There were actions I took, or decisions I made, or actions I did not take but should have, that were far worse and borderline catastrophic. Hopefully, the person I hurt, in the main, was myself. Writing was only one small thing really. Even if the writing felt so all encompassing for a time. Even if the writing weighed down heavier on others, from time to time. Writing is funny like that. I guess another way of saying this all is to think that it might take me a lot longer to write my way out of trouble than it ever took to write myself right into it.

I’m going to honour that challenge.

***

I hope I don’t disappoint too many of you
too often. You know it’s not my plan.

If anything, I’m trying to be better than
I am. If I’m bad now, be glad you didn’t

see me when I shat on someone’s lawn,
put my shorts through the flap of the

post-box; rode bareback down the hill to
home. It’s fair to say back then I was alone.

In oh, so many many ways…but now I’m
not alone. I never want to go back to that.

Gosh, even then the saddest part, was I
always tried to be better than I was.