Feeling Od
And Alexander wept, for there were no stone butts left to take selfies with
Hey everyone, here’s a thing I wrote today because I was in the mood to, and I haven’t been in the mood to very often so I figured I better make the most of it. It’s about Ancient Greece, longing for a purpose, and the dangers of mesh-lining. I hope you like it and I’ll be back with a regular issue of LOTD (whatever that is) towards the end of this month/start of next.
It started with Disney’s Hercules, I think, this weird escapist-reflex I’ve had with ancient Greece since I was a kid. At the risk of sounding like one of those lunatics with an adult Disney obsession, there’s actual magic in that movie.
Released when I was four years old, my memories around discovering it are foggy but I have a bunch of happy meal toys from the movie’s promo run in a box somewhere and I know I had it on videotape, eventually multiple times from wearing the tape out. I’m not sure what caught me about it - whether it was Danny DeVito cracking wise as Phil, the brilliant slapstick of James Woods’ Hades and his minions, the pure fire on the soundtrack courtesy of Michael Bolton and co., or that Herc’s anti-damsel love interest Meg stirred feelings in me as a child that I’d later come to know scientifically as ‘a boner’.But I loved it. And the movie, playing as loud as I could get the TV, became a frequent refuge during a tumultuous childhood.
Ultimately though, it’s story about a kid searching for his place in the world and there’s lots of fighting with swords. Of course I loved it. To some extent, both of those things still resonate with me today - as does the key change in ‘Go The Distance’. Take a bow, Micky B.
From then on, the setting of ancient Greece and all its myths and legends fascinated me from a distance limited by cartoons not as good as Hercules, super hammy old movies like the 1963 Jason & The Argonauts, and whatever kid’s history books could be found by my family around Christmas time. Right up until the day when my mum won money appearing on Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway (true story, somehow) meaning that we (temporarily) weren’t broke for the first time in our lives and my mum, grandma and I could leave this miserable country for a holiday.
As an only child with an incredible capacity for a tantrum, there was only one destination I’d allow for without them having to put up with an entire holiday’s worth of a chubby boy’s moodiest possible face: Ancient Greece.
We settled on just Greece, after some tough but in-hindsight fair negotiation, and went to Crete (because the Minotaur, obviously) later that summer. It was lit. Or as lit a time as you can have as a maybe seven or eight year old. So many firsts on that holiday: First sunburn after sneaking out to the pool on my own for 6 hours in 35 degree heat while they slept off the flight, first (and sadly still only) gun ever confiscated by police after my grandma bought me a ‘toy gun’ that was made of metal and fired metal pellets and looked to the local guard that I was waving a potentially loaded Berretta through a beach town (god I miss her so much), and I learned first hand, bloody and brutally, multiple times, of the vendetta that the inner-mesh of swim shorts has against dick skin (I cut them out to this day). Just the best time.
Sadly, there wasn’t much for me to slay either with that replica gun I shouldn’t have had nor the much more acceptable toy sword I made my consolation armament, other than a cricket I got my mum to drown in the shower before I’d go into the bathroom. I of course would’ve handled the beast myself, I’m sure, if not for the aforementioned sunburn and weakened peen. But I saw some cool ruins, I swam in Poseidon’s clear-blue waters, and drank Pepsi out of glass bottles for two weeks straight. Aside from my gun back, I couldn’t have asked for a lot more.
I’ve been thinking about those trips a lot recently (we went to another island, Kalymnos, the next year - also lit - then it was back to UK ‘holiday parks’ and early onset ennui) because I recently came across the collection of Greek Mythology books my grandma had got for me to read on the plane back. These were from a real life greek airport souvenir shop so they were obviously more legit than the texts at home. At least one fewer degree of separation from Homer anyway. Hilariously, I found that the page where Aphrodite has her boobs out in the Gods & Goddesses one still had its corner folded. Shoutout lil me.
So recently, in severe need of something to fill that same escapism void in the face of openly corrupt governments, a global pandemic, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s run of dodgy form, I picked up Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in the hopes that virtually stabbing some things surrounded by columns and philosophers and temples and loads and loads of relentlessly aggressive boar for some reason might help. And to save you an entire review of a years-old videogame, it did. I’m playing it and having a lovely time sending my lil dude Alexios around doing said stabbings, listening to my boat crew singing greek sea shanties, and climbing up statues then using photo mode to shitpost pictures of me hanging from a god’s genitals onto the game’s servers.
Playing the game has created a longing in me, though. Partially just to be in a sunny climate, writing this as I am in the middle of grey London during the bleakest, emptiest winter that hopefully any of us will ever know, but mostly for the sense of purpose that comes so easily to the heroes of such media. I know, in the logical part of my brain, that none of this was real and that if I’m being honest with myself me living in that time would’ve likely been much like this one just with different tools; wasting a decade carving reviews of local lyre players into the rocks opposite their houses. And I know that these stories whether they’re in videogames, Disney movies, or whatever else are very much highlight packages and that even though no one was ever going to paint the day Achilles called in sick to the battle of Troy to stay in bed all day jacking off and consuming the 1200 BC equivalent of a multipack of Oreos (probably, I dunno, figs… wait, they had bread too… did the ancient greeks have Fig Rolls - maybe we’re not so different after all), it must have happened at least once.
But still, I can’t help wondering what the modern equivalent of an 'Odyssey’ even is? What heroism is there to be displayed by the average person today? Sure, there are good deeds, personal growth, charity and things like that, but what is there left to explore when you can look up the answer to pretty much anything? Where can you go to try and find a place you belong at a time when travel is restricted, everything is shut, and everyone hates each other? In 2021, Odysseus would’ve given up halfway home to Ithaca after finding out he’d been cancelled for owning a collection of vases made by a disgraced potter and returned to war for a quieter life.
You get heroes of a sort, for sure. The Marcus Rashford types doing their part to try and make the world a better, or at least less pointedly cruel, place. And those people are 100% to be commended and remembered as just that. But for the most part, the chance to become a hero comes with the prerequisite of having a large platform on which to speak your message. There’s just not much for the average person to actually do in the world - living in a time of work taken away or reduced for so many and the onslaught of creative content best described as a collection public breakdowns (such as this here newsletter, in fact) filling all our timelines in its wake has shown us that.
I know from experience that to seek narrative or a sense of destiny in life can be dangerous as it doesn’t allow for much planning for alternative outcomes to your actions than the ones you had in mind, but there’s not much I wouldn’t give right now for some tropey generic stranger to turn up like the virtual farmers and merchants of ancient Greece I’ve been running errands for and give me a quest to complete. About once a week my mum calls me to pick her up some cigs and Rizla cause she’s shielding and my brother still isn’t old enough, but that’s not quite what I mean somehow.
By the time you next hear from me like this, I’ll probably have finished Assassin’s Creed and be in even more of a state of yearning for something to occupy myself with. More because I’m nearly done with it than because it’s going to take ages again, I promise. I’ve been thinking about learning woodworking, lately, since my mum’s a carpenter so has all the tools and can teach me. So maybe I’ll be trying to sell you tables soon, and maybe making things with my hands and turning it into the money that buys more Oreo multipacks will bring me the sense of purpose and achievement I need. Or maybe I’ll dedicate my life to inventing a new type of swimming short that already comes with the mesh cut out. That’d be something worth being remembered for. The muses would sing songs of my deeds then, I’m sure of it.
Either way, talk to you soon. x