Disappointment.

We've all been there. You eagerly anticipate a new album after hearing a killer single, only to find the same killer single, surrounded by deeply unpleasant noise on either side. You think you've found the girl of your dreams, and it turns out she's actually a bit of a racist with a slight moustache. You stockpile mephedrone, and the government makes it illegal. You make a new friend on the train, and it turns out he's trying to recruit you for Al Quaeda.

Some of these examples might seem a little extreme to the average Joe, but if I've learnt anything it is that my name is not Joe. Disappointment is everywhere. It is part of our everyday lives. Some feel it more than others, some have more reason to feel it but don't, some have less reason to feel it but do.

Disappointment often comes from great expectations. For children, it is the guilty feeling of anti-climax after you've opened your presents on Christmas morning. For young adults, it is the realisation that perhaps you're not guaranteed a place at the university of your choice. It is the the sinking feeling when you open your envelope on results day. For adults it is not getting the job you said would never happen, but secretly felt just a little bit of hope. Disappointment is infectious and it is powerful. It plays and frolics in our deepest psyche, because it shatters our highest hopes and builds resentment for our loss of naivety. It can be disappointment in something, or worse, in someone.

The most soul destroying blend of disappointment is disappointment in oneself. When you make a mistake that you can't quite believe, and that you don't quite understand. The disappointment that leads to regret. The regret that makes you want to hit your head on something repeatedly, but you don't, because you feel too sick and empty. Disappointment is the kind of feeling that holds hands with guilt and fear and anger.

The ability to cope with disappointment can shape a person. It reflects their character, their stability, their maturity. It has become an obsession for motivational speakers, and the subject of historic utterances.

Disappointment makes the news. We were disappointed with our MPs. We're disappointed with the Catholic Church. We'll be disappointed when England are inevitably knocked out of the World Cup. It's everywhere, but we don't really understand it. To be disappointed in oneself is to feel guilt. Sometimes we need to feel guilty. Sometimes we can feel too much.

To put it simply, disappointment is when things aren't quite what you hoped for. But as with most feelings, it is difficult to truly define. And as with most feelings, disappointment will pass.

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a Chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm near-sighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.


Allen Ginsberg

Ode

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

Meant to be my status but turned out to be much too long

Labour...

Scrapped section 28 and introduced civil partnerships.

Brought overall crime down by 45%.

Put more people into college and university than ever in history.

Introduced the smoking ban, banned tobacco advertising and raised the smoking age to 18.

Equalised the age of consent.

Introduced devolution to Scotland and Wales.

Created NHS direct.

Introduced stricter standards on school meals and banned junk food from school vending machines.

Helped secure the 2012 Olympics.

Banned hunting, the 'sport' of watching animals gore each other to death for kicks.

Introduced the UK Film Council, which funded films like Oscar-winning Man on Wire as well as In the Loop and This is England.

Invested over £20 billion in social housing.

Reduced teenage pregnancy rates by over 13%.

Signed up to the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, guaranteeing workers' rights.

Introduced free TV licenses for over 75s and free bus services for over 60s.

Introduced Armed Forces Day to pay tribute to British servicemen and women.

Decreased homelessness by 73%.

Introduced freedom of information act and data.gov.uk, allowing unprecedented levels of information and records to be shared with the public.

Introduced the young person's job guarantee.

Increased health spending per person in the UK.

Halved the number of households without a bank account in just 4 years.

Narrowed the gap between the richest and poorest through tax benefits for those on the lowest income.

Introduced EMA.

Increased the number of university places.

Introduced the car scrappage scheme.

Extended opening hours for GPs.

Introduced 16,000 new police officers and 16,000 CSOs.

Removed most hereditary peers, with a plan for a completely elected House of Lords.

Helped hugely in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Guaranteed a free nursery place for every 3 and 4 year old, extending this to 2 year olds.

Made us the first country to have legally binding commitments to challenging climate change and carbon emissions....



It's nothing really.