AMKent books

When I was younger and worked as a sales assistant at a store that housed just about every product you could think of, an old woman entered. The woman busily shopped around, collecting item after item and asking me the prices on various electronics and if they were to be reduced soon. This was not entirely untypical, as the store was one step above a charity shop, however, her child-like demeanour struck me. Eventually she came to the till with a basket full of goods, I refrained from making any comments as this was good for business and merely engaged in jovial small talk. She was quick to tell me during our idle chit chat that she felt free, that she had worried about excess her whole life and now it was no longer of concern. The conversation progressed as the store was quiet that day, and she informed me that she knew she did not have long left to live due to a terminal illness. I never saw her again after this, but her need for excess in the face of an often stowed away universally known inevitability stuck with me. As morbid as such a subject is, especially on Christmas day ! The excessive gifts, advertising, and general generic clockwork orange-esque forcing of consumerism reminded me of that lady I had met.

There is no real answer to this, everyone is different, and I guess for her she had supressed her appetite for materialism for the majority of her life. Now, in the face of mortality (and her late husbands inheritance apparently!) she could indulge her taboo and revel in what excess she could. In fact, I have found through many conversations that when asked the question “if you only had 1 week left to live, what would you do?” The answer is often some form of indulgence in personal taboos and excess. Try asking yourself, maybe you will uncover something supressed within yourself, for some the answers have even been dark. Fantasy and reality are notably (and sometimes unfortunately) different, and what we would actually do with an impending bus of doom coming to take us away could be wildly different. I often think life can be excessive, just not in the ways we like, or maybe capitalism has programmed us all to crave shiny new objects. Christmas itself is a day of release from excess, unfortunately not for all of us, just the privileged ones. Even media such as pornography is an excess of dopamine, and for some, arguably, this excess can turn into an addiction.

I am not sure if trying to live your entire life in a short amount of time is a climax worth making the cherry on the top of your existence. In reality we are all trying to fit our entire lives in an obscure amount of allotted time, we just know that the longest we may possible get is around 120 years. This was something I deeply considered when writing the first three chapters of ‘The Glass Moon’. As the protagonist is dying of an incurable illness with only months on the clock, he has to try and make sense of his short time on Earth before he is offered an alternative, to live on the moon. Such things bring out the rawness of human nature, and highlight our need for extremes. So to end this on a positive note, I hope your Christmas has been extremely good, and the same to your new year. If you have anything to add to this blog, feel free to write a comment ! Also, let me know if you have any cool new years resolutions. Mine is to read 150 books this year, publish my new novel ‘ The Void Around Sunlight’ and start my PhD. Many thanks for taking the time to read this, may an excess of positivity enter your life !