Duty to Care (AKA Giving a Shit) is very underground

I think a lot about just how the hell I ended up working in government. I also ran into someone who just joined the fray at a recent Quicksand show, the first time I’d seen them in 20 some years in fact, and came to a startling realisation.

I’ve been involved in, or otherwise varying waist to shoulder deep in, various counter or sub cultural things since I could remember. Whether it is skateboarding, various obscure sub-genres of heavy music, art, or whatever, it was always generally about being upset at things not being the way you thought they should be.

Funnily enough, what I’m doing now is no different really because working in government is ultimately about giving a shit and this, in our in teasingly cynical, swirling, cannibal-blogosphere world, is as counter to the mainstream as you could get.

It’s actually quite hard to give a shit. Its exhausting. Ultimately though I do this because it matters and it matters to real people in real life today, and I suppose this is the thing I realised my work is supposed to be about recently. That, and its about as anti-futurist as you can get, which I’m also signed up for.

Needless to say in the end I did get a bit of lager-ing and ended up shouting about Gorilla Biscuits at the guitarist of Gallows who we were sitting with. I guess I cared then as well.

Full caveat, I’m probably the worst person to be talking to you about working for the government, especially the British government. I’m not from here. I’ve lived here for a while but there’s plenty I still don’t understand about how things work and how people here work. Its damn complicated and no neat heirarchal org chart between branches of government like with the US.