A few thoughts on signalling, with a poem at the end, called Weak Walking Shoes, originally uploaded on my Substack page, Lager Time, where you can listen to it as an audio piece
Mirror Movements by Paul Cree 2.11.21
Including the poem Weak Walking Shoes, at the very end of this
One of the many reasons I enjoy writing, to borrow a cliché, is that it allows me to hold up a mirror to my own behaviour and by extension, others too, hopefully. When I think about this, there is one image that often flashes up in my mind, over and over again, reminding me of that particular reason.
It’s probably a compound of many memories, spent working in Waitrose as a teenager (and any other customer service type job I had, there was a few!) and witnessing some customer going ape-shit, at me, or some other hapless part-timer on the checkouts, over the condition of something relatively minor, like a tin of soup and inevitably demanding something in return for the pain of it; the attention of the senior management, a reduction in price etc. I call it the mirror moment.
Back then, I always used to think, that if you could pause-time in that moment, unfreeze that customer, like a drama improv-exercise and hand that angry customer, one of those little rectangular mirrors we used to use in school, l to measure light-angles or whatever, they could look at themselves in that moment, take a moment and hopefully think ‘yea, maybe I’m being a bit of prick here.’
There are many more of these memories, people having overly-loud telephone barneys in pub lic, hyper-devout church attendees, out-singing everyone else and of course, the over-whelming vast array of behaviour-questioning memories that scrutinise my own actions, hence the poem in this post but for some reason, it’s always that Waitrose one I return too; I don’t know why but I don’t suppose it matters all that much, it does the required job and encourages me to question to my own motivations.
I guess where all this is leading too, is that in each of these examples, my amateur psychological guess, is that each person is signalling something, which may not exactly correlate with what they’re presenting, almost like they’re misleading us, the public, the audience, the viewers etc and it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like it, it’s dis-honest. Maybe honesty is in itself, a signalling thing but I still don’t like it.
In an age of social-media, this goes on a lot and yep, I’ve most certainly done it myself. I can’t turn on the telly, without some huge mutli-national corporate entity encouraging me to take up whatever moral-crusade they’re promoting, or more simply, some poet who just so happened to pen a poem on the day of some huge tragedy and immediately stuck it up on line and encouraged everyone to share it. I don’t like it.
Mirror moment, why are we doing this? And if we really knew why we were doing this, would we still be doing this? Mirror moment, why am I doing this? See below
Weak Walking Shoes
Back then I didn’t know many people into people into
outdoor pursuits, certainly not outside Ikon-Diva
Crawley’s premier late-night go-to in 01
gone 2am with a curb-side-view, scuffles on the
pavement, arguments in the kebab que
couple of times I put on a pair of clumpy walking
shoes, zipped up the ugly- fleece and attempted to
scale the moral high ground, preaching to my mates
below that fighting was an immature thing to do
Now I’m at an age, where, keep it down, yea but
I might actually enjoying walking and I might-possibly-
have considered purchasing a pair of ugly-arse walking
shoes, because they’re water-proof and comfy and …
listen, that kid my mates mate slapped that time, probably deserved it
mouthed off unprovoked, squared up, probably shirtless
and when push came to shove, I was probably deserting
knowing deep down, I lacked the right gear for that sort of pursuit
wrong sort of shoes
so I ascended hilly peaks and preached my views
convinced I was on higher ground like a
champagne-socialist one windfall
away from a super yacht cruise
