Hindsight

The week that my post on Jonathan Brandis made social media sit up. In other words, it was an unexpected success.

What is this obsession with dead guys?

I keep asking myself that question.

I’ve seen a lot of death.

Far more than anybody understands.

I’m not talking about family or friends. I’m talking about people I never knew.

It is an unhealthy addiction from which abstinence is not an option.

For a start, dead guys are more interesting than living ones.

I like researching their lives. Trying to piece together who they were, and form my own conclusions about how and why they died.

The strange thing is that I have this ridiculous notion that I might somehow have been able to save them.

It is a burden I shouldn’t have to carry.

There is a term for it.

Hindsight bias.

I’m looking at the past with information I only have now because the event has already happened. My brain rewrites history, convincing me that I should have seen the warning signs. That I should have known. That I might have done something.

But I couldn’t have done any of those things because I never knew them.

And often, they died before I was even born.

I explained all this to someone who asked about the increasing frequency of my ‘dead guy’ posts.

They didn’t understand.

They thought I was weird.

But in their attempt to get me committed to an asylum, they may also have stumbled upon something.

“It is a misplaced extension of your love and responsibility for them. You wish you could have been their protector, even against the odds.”

Byron

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Lord Byron has crept into my psyche.

Somewhere between Venice, poetry and beautiful young men, I find myself becoming rather too interested in a dead man. My loins have developed a historical imagination.

Byron embodied his own creations: brooding, melancholic, rebellious, mysterious. He turned his life into a kind of living poem — and surrounded himself with a close-knit circle of younger, adoring companions whom he likened to the Theban Band, the ancient Greek military unit composed of male lovers.

And then there were the boys.

John, the choirboy — “violent though pure love and passion.”

Eustathius, the volatile Greek youth.

Nicolo, the fourteen-year-old Franco-Greek beauty.

And Loukas, the agonising, unfulfilled love.

It all begins to feel less like biography and more like fever dream.

So here I am, wandering through Venice in search of Byron.

I’ve gone looking for Byron and discovered that Byron was looking for me.

Noctambulate

I like walking late at night.

Swallowing the shadows. The darkness.

Just gentle water and silence. A whole city asleep.

For a while, I become a ghost. An observer moving through streets that belong to no one.

The emptiness feels like a temporary pause from life. No demands. No noise. Nothing expected of you.

And strangely, you’re never afraid.

Not even when you turn a corner into a dark calle and suddenly find someone standing there.

You just keep walking.

Villain

I realised that more people don’t like me than do.

Lately, the air has shifted, and the echoes returning to me are all wrong.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the eyes of someone —a sudden, freezing clarity. They didn’t see a cautious soul trying to navigate a loud world. They saw something cold. They saw a calculated, arrogant silence. To them, my hesitation is a snub. My quietness is a judgmental withdrawal.

For years, I assumed the growing crowd of people who disliked me did so because I wasn’t enough—not funny enough, not present enough, not bright enough. Now, I see the truth is far more unsettling. They hate a version of me that I have never met. They are reacting to a loud, imposing stranger who wears my clothes and speaks with my voice, but possesses none of my intent.

They have already written the script, and I am the villain, completely unaware of my own lines.

Kid 90

Punky Brewster had hundreds of hours of personal and archival video footage, audio tapes and diaries from her teenage years. This documentary brings it all back: partying, friendships, adolescent romance — and the darker side of early notoriety. Substance abuse. Suicide. The unfiltered chaos of the 1990s set against stark, quiet interviews in the present day. Kid 90 is a jolting reminder that we could be bad in our youth. And some of us will get older.

Secret

That famous line from The Killers:

You had a boyfriend who looks like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year.

It makes me feel a bit guilty.

Maybe because it reminds me of the opening line of my favourite book:

Last night I fell out with Amy when she caught me sucking off her boyfriend under the table.

There’s a lot of sexual ambiguity going on here.

Who looks like whom? Who is doing what to whom? And, more importantly, why does all of this somehow feel completely normal?

It’s all very early-2000s indie boy meets literary sexual confusion.

I’m here for it.

Tease

Sometimes it feels like Venice is playing a game with you.

I’m not remotely interested in playing, but neither do I want to leave.

Perhaps that is the game.

It teases you with beauty, then hides it. Gives you a glimpse of something extraordinary, only to turn a corner and disappear.

You follow anyway.

You always follow.

Elsinore

I was fortunate enough to see Andrew Scott in the premiere of Elsinore.

For me, he’s one of those actors who has always been around. Never out of work. Consistently good. Completely underrated.

Is this the performance that finally earns him an Oscar?

Bloody hell, he was good!

I’ve read a few reviews, and there are some Nix Negatives out there. But if I’m glued to a film from start to finish, then it must be doing something right.

I don’t need a chorus of critics to tell me what I’ve just witnessed.

Sometimes, you just know.

On the Cute and the Willing