I Wanna Be Adored

Sometimes you need to be angry. 

Wrath pays. In life, like in writing. And in running too. This is not what I’m thinking as I start jogging this morning. But it will be what I’m thinking by the time the run is over. 

The run begins with the iconic opening track of The Stone Roses debut album. The sound of Manchester in the nineties (though the album actually came out in 1989). The song creeps into your soul. You don’t hear the bass or guitars until forty seconds in. Drums take well over a minute to announce themselves. Just under the two-minute mark and Ian Brown croons about not needing to sell his soul because he’s already in him. He’s talking about the devil. And he’s not just talking about himself. He’s talking about me and you. About the insidious evil of ego. The need for adoration is an expression of Satan. And it gets me thinking.

My good friend, a man well invested in the Talmudic tradition, informs me that the Hebrew word for Satan is “accuser”. Isn’t that so true? Evil is the one that blames, that points the finger, that accuses. And what happens when we’re not adored, when we don’t have people falling and fawning at our feet, when we don’t receive our participation trophy, when the world doesn’t bow down and defer to us as the Almighty? We start pointing fingers. We start laying blame. We start hurling insults and throwing around accusations. 

So I’m thinking all of this while I’m having a particularly bad run. I’m running on empty. Feeling gassed out straight from the starting line. I didn’t have my morning cannoli. That’s why I’m feeling heavy and empty at the same time. And then I start wondering about the impetus for my literary podcast. Is it because I crave adoration?

I’ve turned The Stone Roses off and start listening to a lecture – one that I paid good money for – on masterpieces of short fiction. The lecturer is picking apart, analysing, studying a story that I recently fell in love with: D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’. Except he’s not really doing any of that. There’s no nuanced analysis. There’s no thought-provoking probing. There’s no heartbeat or love of life in this lecture. It is simply a regurgitation of the story, badly retold. Anyone listening to this lecture would have been better served with a Wikipedia summary of the short story. They’d have got the same result for free without the pompous blather. And then I start getting angry. This is why I’m starting my own lecture series, book podcast, and literary analyses. I don’t give a single shit about adoration. The people who adore are the people who abhor. Who needs them? But the world certainly does need critical commentary that cares. And sometimes you care so much, sometimes empathy wounds you, slices your innards sideways, that you end up bleeding out in a pool of rage. 

I reach the part of St. James’ Park with the little bridge. I’ve stopped running and wait at the side of the bridge for a couple to pass. It’s considerate to give a wide birth in these times of corona. But here’s where I really get angry. The lady locks eyes with me, territorially, shit-eating you’re-my-bitch smirk on her face, sticks her arms out from her sides as she slowly ambles across the bridge, and proclaims sharply:

‘Two metres! Two metres! Stay back!’

Her husband follows dutifully in tow. I’d given these two right of way, but it wasn’t good enough. In an instant, I’m thinking of all the bad behaviour I’ve witnessed recently in this Nietzschean cave of tarantulas we call London. The self-righteous queue-jumping, the two-meter-enforcement civilian police patrols, the rise of humans taking their shit lives out on strangers in the guise of concerned social distancing. I’m not having this. I decide that the arms out is actually a middle finger. I decide that social niceties exist because I buy into them. I also decide that social niceties are reserved for those that give them, and I will not take disrespect as a person who gives those he does not know all due respect. I stop waiting and walk across the bridge. As her husband passes me, he mutters under his breath just loud enough to make it clear he wanted to be heard without taking full responsibility:

‘Idiot.’

I stop, turn, and wait. This bitch – and I don’t mean the woman – does not look back. I’m waiting, hoping, praying he does turn back. I want him to own his words. I want him to escalate things. He knows I’ve stopped, so he speeds up, gaining significant distance from me and his wife who at least has the stones to explain why she put her arms out like that. Apparently it’s not because she thought she owned the bridge and no one else matters but her. It’s “for her health”. Interesting how such people can swagger around town without masks and still feel self-righteous enough to claim their disrespect is a health-and-safety measure. I’d have more respect if people just admitted they don’t like the look of me and fancied being a dick out of the blue. 

So the man doesn’t turn to look back once. And I’m thinking how he made the deliberate decision to choose me to be the recipient of his vehemence. Of course, he regretted it the moment he said it because he didn’t anticipate that I’d be the kind to stop and hold him to his words. Weak people feel safe talking shit in England, Canada, America, Australia. But I’ve lived in Varna, the only English expat among Bulgarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, and Russians. People don’t talk shit there. There’s no passive-aggression. There’s no shoulder-chicken where real men walk the streets. The men there know that if you’re going to disrespect someone, you better be prepared to back it up with extreme violence. So people largely remain civil. Talk shit to a Russian and he will not spend the night in a cell for smacking you righteously upside the head. People die from disrespect on certain streets of New York City, Sofia, Moscow. And I think about how this coward, who could not even look into the eyes of the man he was disrespecting, chose a victim that he knew in his heart would spare him. If I were not a ginger-bearded white man, and I were half my age and twice my height, with two of my friends in tow and we were walking through an estate or project in Kilburn or Harlem or Inglewood, would this loser have played so fast and loose with his words? 

I end up turning a bad run into a great run. Adrenaline that would have been put to good use had that man stood by his words fuelled me well. I listen to the fourth track on Jack Johnson’s In Between Dreams, one of those rare perfect albums you can listen all the way through, and wonder if the man who had made me so angry was half as angry as me. If so, did he put his anger to good use? Did he get a good run in? Did he write an essay, a letter, an article, and a new chapter of his book before midday on a Sunday? Will he share my sentiment and hope he runs into me again? And does anger, directed productively into creativity, make me a bad person? All I know is I feel Jack Johnson’s words run through the very fibres of my quarantined soul: ‘Where’d all the good people go?’