Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures
I looked, I shuddered, I looked again.
Nothing matches in Kentish Town. On the high street, the neon lights of Creams cosy-up alongside Renoir’s muted, European palette, the faithful, glitching green letters of The Bengal Lancer flicker across its parallel pavements and pdsa stands in all its virtuous innocence, urging you to ‘help a vet help a pet’ before the garish clip art of Rio’s attempts to cover up the perversion that lies inside. The residents follow suit in incompatibility; old pass young, wealthy pass rock-bottom, best-dressed pass just-managed-to-get-dressed. The market prices will tell you that this, folks!, is one of the most desirable places to live in London – but really – it’s just a bed of stone-cold mundanity populated with a clash of people trying to get by. That’s its charm, I guess.
Walking in Kentish Town, I spend most of my time dodging the furrowed-brows of a man who’s convinced that I owe him 20p, or admiring the architectural skills of a woman who has made a roadside home out of waste, or wondering how much longer my unelected neighbours and I will be able to afford to live here. One day last week, however, something else interrupted my usual routine of local sightseeing when a man crossed the road and started to walk limply towards me. He was young, with a face that had lost its youth, and wore an oversized, faded orange hoodie with six piercing words plastered across it: DESPERATE TIMES CALL FOR DESPERATE MEASURES.
I looked, I shuddered, I looked again.
The phrase caught me off-guard, hitting my throat like the first sting of sour haribo or the sudden throb of biting your tongue. Maybe because it was so provocative, maybe because I felt a pang of empathy for him, maybe because it exposed an ugly truth about us all. I think it would be fair to say that we’re living in desperate times; the economy is failing, our capacity for intimacy is shrinking and the possibility of even more political conflict is looming. Sure, we’ve endured states like this before, but have you ever paused to take a look at your natural reflexes to the uncontrollable? It’s wildly uncomfortable, and seeing it worn as a public statement on that afternoon felt confronting.
When I think of ‘desperate measures’, my mind initially visits the scene of an addict, someone who can’t say no to something toxic or more exposingly, someone far removed from myself. But when I dig deeper, I realise that desperate measures are all around us; some open, some hidden, some surfacely pure, some laced with shame. Desperate measures reside in your fingertips as you reach for a session of late-night scrolling, they encourage the ache of your eyes as you escape to another Netflix episode, they whisper the lure of pornography as you try to bandage up your loneliness and they lay seductively at the bottom of your chosen nightcap. Desperate measures are fast yet mindless, they are accessible yet fleeting, they are alluring yet empty and they are promising yet deceitful. In the grip of desperate measures, our tenderness is directed into the wrong hands and our vulnerability hangs in the balance of “help me” without support. In this catalogue of reactions to hardship, we may have our preferences but, from shallow to sinking, we all respond to its call.
It’s unsurprising that in the whirlpools of not knowing what’s next, we medicate with doses of distraction. And, with western society’s aggressive offers of technology, alcohol, sex, food, clothes and entertainment – who can say no to a placebo hit of reassurance? Don’t get me wrong, I think distraction has its rightful place. We all benefit from the hug of a cinema screen’s gentle darkness, from the ease of a glass of nice wine, from the endorphins of a good meme run and it can be these intervals of light relief that power us forward to get up and go again, whatever you find yourself fighting at the time. But, when distractions become less of a choice and more of a compulsion, the sweetness soon and subtly tips from occasional to indulgent, from a taste to nausea, from delight to utter decay.
In the latest episode of my colourful journey with faith, God has been bollocking me about self-control. A comical concept, maybe, but as I turned to face the spiritual conviction, I couldn’t deny that my surrender to the transient is as habitual as it is insatiable. It will come as a surprise to no-one that my mind is continually whirring and in response to this saturation, it’s my phone screen that I elect as the saviour in both time and intensity. Of course, this only makes things worse, but while I accept the fraudulence of my phone’s supernormal stimuli, it’s still the first thing I reach for when insecurity gatecrashes my mornings or the fear of death creeps into my nights. This is raw to admit, even for me, but I trust that your own parallels are tapping in revelatory persistence at your mind as you read.
I wonder if my statement mate is still stomping the eccentric streets of Kentish Town in his logo hoodie, I wonder if his screaming sentiment made anyone else double-take and I wonder if at his angsty core, he’s okay. He’ll never know that his advertisement of emotion led to my self-scrutiny today or that as a result, you’re here opening the door on a part of your subconscious, too. Isn’t life funny?
We are human, not infallible. We are evolving, not evolved. We are hopeful, not invincible. We are trying, we are learning – and we are desperate.