Use a previous version

One of my favourite metrics to use is a previous version of myself, and how amazed he would be at any number of things I have been fortunate enough to do.

It provides such a broad scope that it allows a level of success that I don’t get through anything else. Nothing can touch it. 

I can tell you want an example.

A version of me from a decade ago would be amazed that I am working with an agent on my debut novel. 

The child version of me would be amazed that I am able to hold down a job, that I have so many friends who truly care for me and that I still try to look after my brothers in the way he would have done. He would also love being able to walk into a corner shop and buy whatever we want, even booze.

This week, it was a sixteen year old Paul Schiernecker who would have been impressed as I headed to Chinnerys to see Electric Six. When their debut album dropped, my brothers and I thought they were absolutely crazy and we couldn’t get enough. Everyone tried to learn the riff to Gay Bar and we argued over whether the old lady in the video for High Voltage was actually Jack White singing (it is, it really is!)

It gave me so much joy to revel in that music in a venue that has come to mean so much to me. It’s the first place that my friends and I got into underage and a place we were regularly denied service. A lot of my friends played gigs there and eventually I had the opportunity to do so as well. It was the best gig that Negative Panda Society ever played and it meant a lot to have shared the stage with the greats – Arctic Monkeys, Nothing But Thieves and Toploader are still on the posters outside advertising shows for local bands. 

On this hideous June night, the place had an average punter age of twenty years over what I imagine it normally would. Dripping with sweat, we danced along to songs from their mammoth twenty studio album discography, everyone knew what they were waiting for. When those songs came, the room was alive, screaming, feral and joyous. Cresting the wave, screaming to the painted black ceiling. It was the truest  show I have been to since the much discussed VID ruined the arts for a while. 

To dance, to drink, to sweat and to hold hands with someone in the bouncing darkness of a club, that is what it means to have perspective.