Hailing from the brutal streets of Swansea, Wales where he forged a fighting spirit to battle bullies & banality with a Blackbelt in Kung-Fu, to roaming and writing from around the world - USA/South Africa/ Southeast Asia/ Australia/ Japan - as a working-class warrior seeking wisdom in lived experience, to escaping face-masked Brexit Britain as Solid Snake did Shadow Moses for Barcelona's bastardised cultures & hedonistic vultures through to South Spain's crises of climate & common sense, to finally settling down in the up-north Utopia of Finland with his family....
Writer, Poet, Author, Fighter, Editor, dude always losing his lighter…
Vice of Violent Expression, The Man Who Told The World, one curiously creative bastard…
AARON 'FATALITY' FARRELL”
anti-social media
Aaron does not have it.
In short-to-medium, I think social media is akin to Mos Eisley Space Port Cantina: a wretched hive of scum and villainy featuring many mundane people pretending to be extra colourful, extra interesting, and have more tentacles than they normally would. Whenever I’ve had any of the unholy trinity (Facebook, Twitter & Instagram), I feel like a twat. Mindlessly scrolling through the day-to-day of friends-on-benefits, sighing at the first-thought-best-thought, soft-as-baby-shit idiotic quirk in 280 characters, or looking at people’s filtered faces, brunches, lunches and uncut hunches, I feel, is a waste of time. I don’t call myself an efficient stoner for nothing.
Social media has never not compounded my depression and anxiety. Shit, in the most holistic days of my life living in campervan trekking Australia, social media delivered not only the news of Brexit and a vapid reality-TV narcissist that looks like a Mars Attacks! version of a racist, perverted, mutant Uncle becoming president, but also the people that illiterately supported those vile things. At best it compounds my anxiety and negates my daily dosage of Sertraline, at worst it made me feel like the paradoxically named, sadistically sinister John Doe of Se7en; him being an individual in the nameless soaked city of the masses. Now, whilst I’ve never resorted to putting Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box, I have felt like sticking mine in an oven when I’ve subscribed to social media.
If the internet is the sharpest double-edged dildo (the modernist’s sword?) ever smithed, then what the fuck is social media? I’m not saying it hasn’t been used to slay dragon’s and blow whistles on those that detest the sound, but it is simply not for me. And when you are on the outside of something, you’re often more aware as to the dangerous effects it has. All of my friends and family are on it (of course), including my fiancée, so please don’t take this as me thinking I’m above you, I’m not. I’m simply parallel, trying to dedicate my time to reading for betterment and not rage. But if you ask me if I have social media, and I tell the truth and say no, please don’t start trying to sell me it (“if you’re in advertising or marketing… kill yourself”), convince me you don’t use it much when you have delivered more Posts than the Royal Mail, or get uppity at me and justify your usage – in the immortal words of Richard Jenkins disillusioned dad in Step Brothers: “I don’t giveeee a fucckkk”. My not having it is nothing against those with it, like my disdain for Britain – and living in it – doesn’t mean I think all British people should leave because where the fuck would I be happy then? That’s a joke. Kind of. In honesty, if I have any bigoted bio-molecular traits, it’s probably racism toward British people. That’s another joke. Queue the laugh track. The pomp, the privilege, the penis-pumped pride. Just not for me.
This has all got a bit serious hasn’t it? And so that’s a good example of the shadowy planes social media takes me – not necessarily you. It pisses me off that I’ve been told by friends, family, lecturers, and even revered writers that I NEED to have it. I’ve had three Facebook accounts and two Twitter pages, all in reluctant conformity to continually being told of the NEED. But no more, motherfuckers. I’ll either invent my career through cataclysmic creativity, or I won’t, and you’ll not have to search my name on Instagram to see my cat’s asshole or whether I drink cappuccino or americano because, like now, you don’t have a fucking clue who I am.
With all the time I save without social media, I read more books, write more words, get in additional drawing practice, smoke supplementary joints, bail more off my skateboard, suffer more blows to the head in Kung-Fu, and take part in the sadomasochistic schemes of Hidetaka Miyazaki via the SoulsBorneShadows videogames.