Hi guys, happy holidays.
I’m not religious but Christmas is kind of a culturally ingrained holiday in the UK - so, my family, like most families, does the whole thing about making a big dinner and exchanging (?) presents (I didn’t give anybody a single gift this year outside of obliged secret santas, which is sad because I love giving stuff. But we’re three months into no income). We even went away this year - in part because I can no longer stand being at home without my cat and with so much entirely familiar empty space around.
Thoughts. I’ve been having them all day, all week. Some of them have been optimistic or excited, most of them haven’t. I actually realised that most of my ideas can be tied to one of the presents I got today - all of which I asked for. Maybe on some level they reflect my internal desires, hopes, fears. Even if they don’t, I’ve managed to ascribe some to them anyway.
Gift number one: Nothing Ear (a) earbuds
My AirPods started dying a long time ago. For over a year I’ve been suffering with poor sound quality, unable to really rely on my AirPods for a sole sound source outside of falling asleep to podcasts at night.
I got into the habit of listening to podcasts to help me sleep because of an abusive relationship and a TV show called Brooklyn 99. One day, I lay on my friend’s sofa while we were hanging out, and fell asleep to the sounds of the show playing. This was pretty huge - I’d been completely unable to close my eyes the previous night because flashbacks were haunting me and keeping me in fight or flight.
The main problem was my earbuds, which were wired - it was then that I made the transition into wireless. And honestly, the AirPods hurt my ears a bit when I lay my head on the pillow (side sleeper, of course) but as long as I didn’t have to hear my own thoughts, see my own trauma playing out.
So when it came to try find some new ones, what could I try to do but find some replacement AirPods. They’re all the wireless earbuds I’ve ever really had, with maybe the last five years between two pairs. I sort of managed to gaslight myself into thinking no other companies had them.
I found them… expensive, and felt bad asking for them this year, so I looked on, of all things, the Telegraph’s list of best earbuds, and found these most of the way down the list. I don’t remember what they were supposed to be the best at according to the list, and at first I was unconvinced. They’re called… Nothing Ear?
Reviews looked good, and they were signficantly cheaper than anything else I’d looked at, so I bit the bullet and bought them (later reimbursed by my parents by way as a Christmas gift).
Today, as I’m writing this, I’m listening to Leonard & Marianne by Bastille with these new earbuds. They’re really, really good. They have amazing bass - I’ve started to notice low riffs I’d never heard or paid attention to before. They’re comfortable, cool and customisable. All that remains for me to establish is: why did I stick with Apple so long?
Here’s what I think the truth is: even if it sucks, I don’t know how to change my reality. The familiar, even when shitty, is preferable to us - it’s the Devil we know or the Heaven we don’t, isn’t it?
Is it a reach to say that this is why we commit ourselves to poor working conditions, devoted to being under the thumbs of our quasi-God leaders? Is it a reach to say that we’re scared to buy the Nothing Ears because our AirPods technically work, and a new product might be even worse? Yeah, probably.
But that’s where I’m at anyway, especially as we look to January and the swearing in of kind of new and yet ancient fascist ideology. The more we turn over in our pathetic beds, the sharper our earphones cut when we rest our head back onto the pillow. We’re afraid to take them out and listen to the noise of our minds.
Gift number two: Sentinels E-Sports authentic Jersey, customised with the word ‘johnqt’ on the back.
This was the gift I was by far the most excited about. Was it an £80 T-shirt? Yes, yes it was. I had to beg my parents to reconsider this one after they initially refused out of principle. It was my dad who eventually shrugged and said, ‘You should have what you want, it’s Christmas’.
Little did they understand that this shirt was the only thing I was looking forward to about Christmas. Some context, for the unaware: the shirt is the same that players from my favourite E-Sports team (Sentinels) wear on match days playing professional Valorant against other teams. Last year, my team won our first international tournament since the debut of the team in Valorant’s first year of competitive tournaments. ‘Johnqt’ is one of my favourite players - partly because he’s awesome at the game, and partly because he’s a sweetie pie. He’s the IGL (in-game leader), which is just like a team captain, the one responsible for directing the players’ general strategies and gameplay.
Anyway, the jersey.
Why did I want it? Well, watching Sentinels last year brought me the epic highs and lows of high school football (this is a dumb Riverdale reference for the uninitiated). I laughed, I cried, I cheered. I loved that team as though it were my own friends on it. When two of the players ‘retired’ at the end of the season in September, I grieved.
For the first time I understood what sports fans felt. Though not at all based in my town, country, continent (I have little to no conscious pride in these things), the team gave me a focal point, something to look forward to, something to feel part of. I met other fans online in Discords, and we shared pockets of hours cheering on the same thing - and it felt like a community.
What do we have that can give us this same feeling? What do we have now, in this age? Social media is an individualistic endeavour. Television mostly isn’t watched live anymore. It’s difficult for me to stay in contact with people, mostly only because I have no energy to do so over text. Reading books, listening to music, watching Youtube, writing, playing video games - all of these things - the things I spent most of my time doing - are done alone or with French boys calling you slurs (the last item on the list only, of course). I love telling my friends when I’ve consumed the same media as them so that we can talk about it, but we still consume separately. It’s fucking lonely. Everything I do is fucking lonely.
It isn’t the first time I’ve felt this during a sport (or esport). My archery club gave me a really great sense of community, with the club supporting each other and giving advice and hanging out - and it all felt like we had so much in common. This was until I found out everyone was secretly talking about how they wish I’d kill myself. That tends to sour the vibe a little bit.
I am committed to the Sentinels Valorant team because it provides a non-lethal archery: it is one of the only things that can pull me into something that is bigger than myself. This is why scores of British men go to football games, I guess, and I actually didn’t understand how important it was to them until this moment in time.
Gift number three: a copy of Gary Younge’s ‘Another Day in the Death of America’.
I recommended this book to someone a while ago as a great example of non-fiction, and at that moment in time I’d read exactly two pages in the back of a classroom while I was supposed be teaching. From those pages, I already knew that this was a book I wanted to read and wanted others to read.
This is the gift most obviously related to societal breakdown: Younge tells the story of ten young people shot and killed on 23rd of November 2013 all across the US.
I’ve gotten three chapters in already. The first chapter I finished just before my Christmas lunch was about to be served. I was sobbing quietly into the avocado and prawn, unwilling and unable to talk about what I’d read other than, '“This little boy got shot and he was only nine.”
Despite the anguish of the chapter - in his school uniform, Jaiden Dixon had opened the door to his mother’s ex partner, who shot him in the head and fled the scene, his mother and two brothers as witnesses - I felt like I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I needed to read the next part of the book. There were nine more kids whose stories I felt I needed to know.
Younge’s choice in the second chapter was to focus on a young man who - I suspect - he knows the least about of all of the ten. Kenneth Mills-Tucker’s chapter focused more on the idea of ‘perfect victims’ than on his story - partly because he was involved in gangs so he makes for a good point. It’s also his killer was never found, and none of his family members would speak to Younge.
The momentum was a little lost - and yet Younge did this deliberately. You cannot have your reader crying from start to finish. They will just stop reading the book.
In many ways, the points I could make about this book could mirror the AirPods: there may never be gun control to save children’s lives because it’s just the Devil they know.
However, I think this runs a little deeper, what with I consider to be ‘the Mangione exception’. Luigi Mangione, by now, is known to most as the UHC CEO shooter. The last thing I want to do is add to the trial by TikTok, but I will say this: Mangione has been charged both with a state level murder charge (probably fair enough) but also the federal charge of terrorism - which makes him eligible for the death penalty.
Mangione’s alleged crime is so, so bitterly tackled from my Younge-addled perspective. The ten young boys, nine of whom were children of colour, were murdered on one single day in the US and none of their killers received any such sentence (some of them even received no sentence) - Mangione has committed a crime against the ruling class, and for that his crime is much worse than those of child murderers. An example must be made.
Aside from the fact that I am completely and wholeheartedly against the death penalty, I do not believe Mangione should be judged more harshly than any of the killers in Younge’s book, nor do I believe this should be a controversial opinion. Brian Thompson directly contributed to thousands of deaths through his work. Jaiden Dixon was nine years old and opened the door to a man he trusted.
Black lives - especially black working class lives - matter less to the criminal justice system because the loss of them does not often cause a major political shift. This is way things have always been, all over the Western world. When a black child is murdered, it’s another Saturday. When a white CEO is murdered, it means impending class consciousness that must be quashed at all costs, Hunger Games style. And somehow it isn’t a gun control thing at all, it’s not the sign of a broken world, it’s actually a crazy once-in-a-blue-moon bad-egg Mangione exception.
Younge tells the story of a woman in China who stabbed twenty six children and a teacher. Every single person survived. Knives just can’t seriously injure or kill as many people as guns. Guns kill people, and they kill a lot of people. In no other developed nation does this level of violence occur - it is akin to Rwanda and Brazil.
Change comes slowly, and then all at once. To the seven young people killed by gun violence in America every day, it is not coming quickly enough. There is a rotten culture than can only be chipped away at - but how many more children have to die?
I love my American friends and, despite my frustration at the country, I respect that many of them love America. I just don’t know how they can bear the feeling of betrayal they must feel when they see their fifth mass shooting of the week - well, a couple of them live over here full time now, so maybe not all of them can.
That’s about it for Christmas day. I wish everyone a very lovely and hopeful beginning of 2025, in case I don’t the chance to be back here before then.
Yours,
Quinn