Game Still Has A Winner In It

A year ago I’d have said no to this.

A Bruno Mars concert. A silly stadium pop show, not for me. And I’d have been right in a way that made sure I didn’t enjoy it.

Last weekend I went anyway. Had a couple of drinks first. Sat in Wembley Stadium feeling my soul about as heavily as I’ve felt it in years.

Here’s the embarrassing part.

In June I published a post about brainwashing myself. I built a belief system, wrote it into a hypnotic script, cloned my own voice, and recorded the thing so I could be tucked into bed by a personalised rinse cycle.

The belief I was trying hardest to install, in those actual words, was: to play it. To dance through it.

It’s also written down as a value in a file on my laptop. Life is a game to play, not a test to pass.

Nicely worded. Numbered and everything. And still carrying a word I hadn’t looked at properly.

So I had it. In writing. Twice. For seven weeks.

And I clearly did not have it at all, because what happened at Wembley Stadium was not a reminder. It was the first time it had gone all the way in.

Which doesn’t mean the laundrette did nothing. I’m lighter than I was, and it’s still in the wash.

But there’s a difference between a belief going quiet and a belief landing in the body, and I had been counting the first as the second.

Reading about swimming, basically.

The belief sat in the file being correct. What actually put it in my body was a stadium, a support act, some alcohol, and ninety thousand people shouting the same words at once.

That is not a method.

I can’t write “attend a pop concert in a mildly suggestible state” into the operating manual. And I don’t fully trust the data either, because a stadium is a machine purpose-built to produce that feeling, and I paid it to.

But one thing came out of it that wasn’t chemistry.

I used to have a subconscious notion that life was an exam.

At some point I upgraded that to life is a game, and felt pretty pleased with myself.

Sitting there, I noticed the upgrade was fake.

Game still has a winner in it. Game still says I must win, I must win, I must win.

The exam had survived the rewrite by putting on better clothes.

A dance doesn’t have a score. Neither does a song. There’s a performance level to both, but nobody comes off the floor to check their position.

I’d read up on Bruno Mars before the show, and his story corrects me in the direction I didn’t want.

His parents split when he was twelve. He and his brother went with their dad, who had lost the family act and the income with it.

For a stretch that meant rooftops. The back of a car. Eventually one room in a bird zoo that had closed down, where their dad had a job.

The three of them in one bed.

He says those were the best memories of his childhood.

Not Wembley Stadium. The bird zoo.

Then Motown signed him at eighteen and dropped him inside a year. He kept writing songs anyway, mostly for other people, for years before anyone let him sing them.

So the soul isn’t downstream of the stadium.

The stadium is downstream of the soul in the bird zoo.

Ninety thousand people are what happened later, and by his own account they are not the good bit.

My conclusion in the moment was: I want more of this feeling, so I should generate my own version of it. Build the thing that produces it.

Which is the exam getting back in wearing a wristband.

Give me one afternoon of feeling alive and I’ll have it scoped, targeted and on a board by Tuesday.

I don’t need to build a stadium.

I don’t need the band either, which is the part of his story I was quietly shopping for. My version doesn’t look like that at all.

My best guess is it’s me, in the state, with a laptop or a phone, talking to it.

Which sounds considerably worse out loud than it feels. And the guess may well be wrong, since I have had it for about a week. But whatever it turns out to be, it’s available on a normal Wednesday morning at my kitchen table, for free, and I have spent most of a year waiting for a grander version of it to show up.

There is no score. I keep bringing my own.