1 2 3 4 daddy’s gone and fucked a whore
5 6 7 8 I can hear him ‘jaculate
9 10 11 12 will my daddy go to hell?
13 14 15 16 if he does then I’ll be leadin’
17 18 19 20 I’m'a make sure we got plenty
21 22 23 24 ain’t gonna need him no mo’
This is not going to be a depressing diatribe trying to state “no one understands me” or “if only they knew” or anything Sylvia Plath-ish at all. Really what it is is that these days there is a need to create an ‘other’ to deal with the day in day out of life, to handle the horrific falsities, transgressions and incongruence of modern life that would otherwise forbid you (the actual real You) from making any kind if nine to five money at all. These shadow monstrosities are perpetrated by humans (who are also pretending, acting, behaving) along with your own ‘other’ self and then, much more problematically, your ‘other’ self is to then go on and re-perpetrate atrocities onto other (hopefully also pretending) non-human ‘other’ types. The major problem with relying on us all to be on the same page with this terrible falsity is that not everyone is on the same page, some of us are actually really real (Them) humans and they are taking these blows quite personally and doing these horrible acts quite honestly. They are not pretending, this is their real actual self. They really think and feel the things they say out of their mouth and behind their eyes when you see them crushed a little or sad or depressed or worried about their position or the light in their eyes when they are rewarded for a mediocre achievement. All real. Sometimes the ‘you’ that they present is actually their real Them. The problem is that their reality is derived from the expectations of society, from role and behaviour. Yet, and here’s where it gets weird, that even though there are these precepts, and one could say clearly observable, recognisable and understood observable clichés, the majority actually strive to mimic and what’s more become these expected invented paid for humans, and even try hard to achieve the fulfilment of this goal by ticking every box that would make the, admittedly, poor assumption truer and truer as time goes on. Yet they continue in their endeavour to achieve the fulfilment of a ridiculed socio economic version of greatness that in their mind was assigned to them (and that they deserve). Class structure not withstanding, this self-perpetuating phenomena means that if you are within it you cannot see it, and, if you are criticised for being ‘within’ it, your innate sense of protection of it makes you forcibly sink deeper within as if the mere, actual honest helpful observation of the fact could make it worse (an affront/attack). I could say for example “do you really think you should give your four year old coca cola?” and they would say “fuck off cunt” which would actually in some twisted way in their minds confirm that giving coca cola to their kid is good because they would never want their kid to turn into a ‘cunt’ like I am for pointing that out. Here’s the conundrum, do they really think that or are they innately jealous of my schooling and advantages in life and, in being violently aggressive, show that they want their son/daughter to get out of the “shit” life they have?
Conundrum 1: do they think they have a shit life even thought they say all the time “out life is shit”?
Conundrum 2: do they want their child to have better schooling than they did i.e. do they admit that their schooling was bad?
Conundrum 3: do they admit that they do not have the means to raise a child ‘ideally’
Conundrum 4: do children who haven’t been to kindergarten understand ‘cunt’ ‘shit’ ‘fuck’ ‘asshole’?
What we have now is people striving to achieve the fulfilment of the false Them, mainly in order to gain financial rewards or any mix of power, responsibility or control (money basically, let’s face it). Trying to make it work, assembling a demi-god to aspire to, an epitome of what they know (at the start of this process) to be a false version of themselves or that this created person should want to be (outside of their own instinctive and initial values and beliefs, or worse, it then of course becomes their values and beliefs, replaces the original ingénue). Then, of course, judging themselves against this created-for-the-sake-of-getting-SOMETHING ‘straw man’ persona; am I behaving in accordance to the purposed entity I have created, and, how much of my real self, my reflection, my emotional response, is hindering my progression…that is, how much of my humanity (remember before the You you) is willing to die, be left behind or never existed in the first place. Now you may think this whole concept of You is laughable. When, for instance I ask; what about you? The only answer possible can be from the created You.
How do we now go with dualism? Namely: paid persona vs real persona. Mostly it’s fine, no one has a purpose, they post on facebook and twitter and everywhere because they are really the person they say they are, they really are one dimensional normal good proper society based controlled part-of-the-system types. Pejoratively there is a different kind of existent. Sure we are on the networks, sure we have jobs. Sure we are participating (because otherwise oh my god the world would be horrified or scared or curious to the degree that we may be reported for incongruent behaviour or more simply be de-integrated from the system! Luckily there is still a cultivation of admiration for outsiders as interesting or independent…) but the ways in which we do so are careful, sickeningly careful, even straight out false. In noticing the manufacture of a human and their instantaneous willingness to give away all semblance of ‘self’ to a process and procedure with real basic checks and follow ups and stalking and cross-checking, some have become naturally, um, suspicious? Jesus, yes! Suspicious. In the age of hyped schizophrenia and pervasive social media, we have forced well-thought, balance and aware humans to persist with a dual humanism. To create a hated twin. To live as that hated twin for certain times and in certain spaces.
Complete transparency is ok for those who are willing to be entirely, utterly and wholly (tautology aside) one dimensional. The breadth required for a working ‘person’ (remember, not really You) has grown to include all social engagements, all relationships, all family ties, all social movements full stop. Laying it all out, ‘becoming’ we will call it. It is known by many names within the world of laundered professionalism: achieving, progressing, promotion, growing etc[2]. The become the thing you are instructed to be, or, to become the thing that most benefits you financially, is to become a thing you have created, is to become the ideal that you have been paid to be externally. The ideal Person for the Job. Imagine spending hours honing your outwardly available persona in order to maximise the positive flow on effect that colleagues reading this so called ‘truth’ of your actual life just to get paid more or at least get more lee way in your nine to five day. The worse part is when you stop pretending or manipulating your supposed online persona, you start actually really being that. Another type of suicide, paid for this time, but worse than losing a real friend.
She bumps her can of coke into the back of a thin guy getting on to the train. Pushing against the people who are dressed and smell like they are ready to work eight hours, her and him, they don’t look like they are plausibly together, perhaps they think it too but there they are stuck together like that. Bound by an unseen thing, dependencies, clutching at each other for the very simple things that are needs. Is this so different from a successful neat clean union, is this more romantic, is this base need a proper strange strong reason to keep entwined? They smell like cigarettes already, wet clothes and stale cigarettes, the smell of old clothes that already smell like cigarettes and that usual smell of people who just have to smoke the cigarette right down to the butt seconds before getting on pubic transport. The threat of being imprisoned within public transport with its smoking restrictions is so hard to bear that in the outside world they must take every last type of freedom left and get that detested illegal cigarette in and out. When you have nothing these simple freedoms become everything. Your rights, your ability to choose, do what thou whilst. They sit there, staring, just staring at nothing and no one, open mouths. They have a backpack they seem to depend on. The guy goes straight to opening it and pulling out a jumper and reshuffling the contents and says something she doesn’t hear and she says “what” loudly, too loudly, open mouth and leans in and he says it right into her ear and she responds loudly again and he says something else right into her ear and goes back to the back. She says “yeah but that because we needed two fives remember that was the ten we had” and he ignores her and she says “remember?” then goes back to staring at nothing, mouth open. They are on a journey, they are starting a journey, they are together and going somewhere, he is still trying to be a man in control, panicked like a man on a mission, with tasks and responsibilities, she is trying to be damsel in distress with the crutch of a good man. They are lost souls struggling to regain the sentiment of the classic male female role of safety and purpose and life.
Two hours ago they woke up next to each other on a mattress in a corner of a room with two other mattresses one empty, the other with a half naked thin man covered in contusions with shoes on and a bunch of clothes next to his bed. They woke up again at the same time and looked at each other sober and waking up, the pains coming on straight away, the reality of their day flooding back. The child-like innocence of waking lasting only twenty seconds. Get up get dressed get out get money get back to Tom get some H. Get up first. He says something to her this morning that is new, not that he hasn’t said that type of thing every morning, or that she has cried at night saying the same thing but this morning he says it differently, he says “no more” and that’s all he says and he says something else “get dressed we are done. You know. We are done. Ok. Let’s get the fuck out of here” and she may be smiling but she doesn’t know because it hurts in her gut in her arms in her bones in her veins and her head and she may be smiling but she says ‘ok’ but she says it like a scream, like “yes!” but she can’t say that word. He is on his hands and knees pulling things from the floor into a backpack and she is trying to get her clothes on and the thin man with bruises doesn’t move. He goes over to the pile next to the half naked not moving bruised man and goes through his stuff and it is nothing but clothes and underwear and pieces of paper and nothing. “Fuck” he says for no reason or mainly because there is no money there and she is dressed now in jeans and a hoodie and sneakers with no socks and she is smoking half a cigarette she found there next to the bed. That’s all they do they have that and they walk down the stairs and out into the street and it’s daylight, around six in the morning and there are people and life and they are sick and in pain. They stand there a minute and he takes the cigarette from her and takes the last few drags. “Let’s go upstairs” he says and they do go back upstairs and sit back on the mattress. “Ok, let’s do this one last hit and we’ll go ok?” and she has heard it before but she doesn’t hear the promise of the plan, she just wants that shot now in the morning, the fact that they have something to shoot makes her fall in love with this guy straight away, just like that, this man who can manage things like two people. He pours the rest of the H into a blackened spoon (next to the mattress), puts a drop of water from a nearby bottle in and heats it up, drops a small piece of filter from a cigarette in, draws it all up into a fix and gets it ready. She holds his arm tight and he pumps his fist, pricks in the needle and starts injecting the light brown liquid. “Hey hey hey, stop” she says. He does and pulls it out, says “quick” and holds her bicep with his hand, “quick” he says again. She pumps her first twice and pricks the needle in “oh baby yess…come on” and she pulls the plunger back, the flash of blood, pushes it all the way in fast. “Damn baby you’re….haaaa…” and they relax and let it work in their body, no more headache.
They wake up too fast. It’s not enough, or not good enough. It’s all they have and it will do for now. He gets up slowly and kicks her and she rolls over and he says “get up lets go” and she does, after a while, after a few minutes after saying incoherent things and saying she wants a cigarette and a coke and he says “I’ll get you a coke”. Back down the stairs again, a backpack, a cigarette lit, in the street, maybe seven am this time, same types of people, less pain, more people. They are walking, trudging really, sliding their feet together, holding onto one another. Walking it’s called. Walking. “Hey, hold this” he says, giving her the bag. “Where you going?” she yells too loudly, he swings around and says shhhh also too loudly. People look and keep moving, used to it, seen it or even them before. Same two, in the morning, will they ask me for money again? She sits down on the street, opens the bag and gets the cigarettes out, lights one, picks at her face and the black stuff under her nails. Spits. Feels bad about it, feels like she should be in a hole. Feels safe in the hole, starts dreaming about being away in a hole and alone, feels her eyes shutting and her body falling back, resting on the stone wall behind her, a shop front. She open her eyes to hear him yelling and pulling her arm, pulling her onto her feet and swinging the backpack over his shoulder. “Lets go Christ come on man lets get the fuck to the station we gotta go” “huh?” “come on babe I just got money from that newsagent there come on we gotta go come on” and they are running sort of now, he has his arm under her and he is like a hero with his heroine, running and bumping through the people and getting them out of there, getting them away from the police sounds and the yelling and that bad feeling inside. Getting them down the stairs to the train station, being proper and buying tickets, real full priced tickets, getting her under his arm again and down to the train. Standing there and giving her another cigarette and lighting one for each. Smoking and watching and holding each other up and he is telling her to be quiet and all the other people, moral people, working people are looking at them and he is resisting the urge to yell at them like he normally would because his heart is beating fast and she is staring at the train tracks.
No one is following, no one is calling out to stop them. He has about eight hundred bucks in his pocket, a backpack full of clothes, half a packet of cigarettes, no more H and a girl he needs to take care of. He leaves here there and buys two cans of coke from the machine. He opens one for her and she takes it and drinks. They both do. Breakfast. He lets himself breath and relax, drinks a lot more. The train comes at last. The longest two minutes. She has forgotten what she is doing, she has started to think about getting the next fix. She is staring at nothing. He is starting to think about the next fix. Where the hell can you get it from? Immediately the list of places comes in his mind. He wants to kill those places, kill that knowledge. She looks at him and the train pulls up and the workers gather closer to the doors getting their position. The workers pile in, they finish their cigarettes and flick them in between the train carriage onto the tracks, pushing in against the other passengers and make their way downstairs. They sit for a moment not doing anything. The train tries to take them away.
[1] I get it, okay. I am not for one second being overly analytical because that is gross and intelligent for the sake of intelligence and not really that, it’s dull, unimportant and inconsequential, like analysing animals to see what they do and then simply recording it in a notebook. That is not awareness, that is note taking.
[2] i.e. to make what I am saying acceptable to you, digestible, lovable…able to be swallowed. Can you imagine? That’s how media is presented to us. Swallowable. We feel sick, mostly, when we see it.
[3] Are they touching you, are they looking into your eyes, are they wearing their ‘best clothes’
[4] always
“Did you leave the house today” I yell, first thing, spitting.
“No I didn’t fucking leave the house why the fuck would I leave the house, nothing out there nothing in her it’s all shit”
“You wouldn’t leave the house because where the fuck would you go. There is no place for you to go. Where you gonna go?”
“I’m not going anywhere. You get some smokes?”
And I did and I throw them at her and I take a cigarette from my own pack and we are in the place we live moving around smoking and not talking. I get a beer from the fridge, the last one and I open it a drink half of it and I open the fridge looking for another one that isn’t there.
“You can’t keep some fucking beer in here at least!” I yell across our home.
“What?” she yells back.
I walk back into the room, she is exhaling a plume into the open space.
“You are fucking useless”
“And who the fuck are you, huh? You walk in, throw my some cigarettes at me, now you’re gonna call me a piece of shit. Go get your own fucking beer you piece of shit”
“And what the fuck have you been drinking huh? You’re pissed already”
“Yeah well I’ve been drinking with Tommy today”
“Tommy is another fucking loser. You fuckers know how to get your hands on alcohol, right. You know what? Fuck this. Get the fuck out of there. Get your skanky ass clothes, shove them in a bunch of plastic bags and fuck off!”
“Yeah? Yeah? You want me to go? I will go if you want me to go”
“Get the fuck out!”
x x x
He was trying to get some work done after work, you know, real work. The stuff that keeps him going; to know He is still a person who has something beautiful to give that’s not bought and paid for by a bunch of moronic assholes (etc etc). Staring at the computer screen and the keyboard, screaming at him to create, make something, do something. The fucking world wide web has all of this shit on there come on and add to it. And then he added to it and it’s just some more shit into the pool.
x x x
There is no advertisement that can persuade you to purchase anything anymore. They all have the evil stink of self-interest. Worse; the advertising industry know this and have employed teams to get you to recommend products to your real-true-friends so that they buy what you have been convinced (by some means) to buy already. The fact that you genuinely tell someone about a product or service these days has been carefully calculated by ad agencies so that you are equipped to deliver the one line benefits straight to your nearest and dearest so that they too become purchasers (read: lifelong customers) of a particular brand or product (synonymous).
x x x
“Ah fuck you know I’m sixty now, sixty! and you know what I did love this girl, this one girl and she married my best friend, you know, what forty, fuck, forty years ago and, christ I was their first born’s godfather. And I still loved her. And I went there and did the thing in the church and I helped them paint their first house and still, still I loved her and I just wanted to be near her so I said ‘yes’ to being their kids godfather and I bought him presents and I was there on his birthdays and, and when he was a child they put him to bed so we stayed up drinking and it was always so close, the more I got drunk, so close to me telling her I loved her but that husband, my best friend, was there and it was so strange because I loved them both and I didn’t know how to say it and after more drinks it went away and it came to that thing again where I just talked about my life and how shit it was and they laughed because it was funny, really, and I made it all a joke but what I was really saying was how bad my life is because I was in love with a woman who was married and had kids and how fucking strange it is that I am one of those kids’ godfather, I mean go damn what the fuck happened to my life that this kind of shit would happen?”
x x x
I shouldn’t have given her my number, fuck, so I hang the phone up thinking thank fuck I have a phone you can hang up hard a proper with a handle not just a button. It rings again, so lovely to know someone wants you, or wants to tell you something that they have burning in their belly. I do it, I do, I pick it up.
“Fuck you don’t you fucking hang up on me”
“Sorry, ok? Sorry. But man you were talking all kings of made up imaginary bullshit there”
“What?! Yeah because you’ve worked it all out right, you already now what I’m gong to say”
“No, no I don’t but guess what I can probably work out why you’re bothering to say it”
“Oh fuck you”
“And, so, what’s up then? Hm?”
“I can’t event talk to you anymore”
“Really…really? And here we are on the phone. You know what I’m doing? Hm? I’m staring at a plain white wall, a cigarette in hand waiting to go outside and smoke it. That’s all. That’s what I can see and feel and I have a voice, you, on this thing. Okay? Too literal?”
“Christ you’re annoying”
“And you still aren’t saying anything interesting”
“I…I don’t want to see you this weekend. And…” long pause, me sitting there staring, holding back the urge to say anything, impatient, sure, “and I don’t want….this, anymore, this, thing we do, over the phone, this bullshit, text and call and…” and she exhales in an ‘urgh’ like that
“I get it ok, I get it. Guess what? That’s why we don’t talk. What are you bothering for?”
“Goodnight then”
“Okay”
And I hang up and get to feel horrible and cruel for the rest of the evening.
x x x
We, I, well we, I mean. Okay. It was one in the night and there was only that orange light that the council set up two weeks ago to stop all those junkies breaking into cars but what it did was give them all night to work and bathe our apartment in a sick glow that made us mad and crazy and awake too long. The baby was crying. We had a baby, we did that. We had a baby and it was weird. We didn’t really want a baby but we wanted a kid and we talked about how good it would be to have a good one, like, have a good kid that would grow up and be better than what we were and could be the best person ever and we talked about it and talked about what type and all of that and started having sex where I’d have to come inside of her to make a kid. It was funny because I’d say “what if I didn’t like it” or she’d say “what if it didn’t like us” and in these ways we’d laugh but now she was full of the thing and it was six months going and you could see it kicking and see its footprints pushing against her stomach skin and it’s like ‘whoa’ and I go back to my job and miss all those things and come home and want to watch TV but she wants a back rub and holy fuck of course there’s a thing inside you. I need to stop talking about it sooner or later. Can I skip ahead? We had the baby out of her and into our life and we did so well for so long, I mean we had a room next to ours, fuck the ‘lounge room” we never had a lounge anyway.
Look if I tell you now it’s going to sound…no, really, I wasn’t there for the high school reunion, and, as bullshity and improbable as it sounds YES I was there seeing a friend, yes also from high school, but it was coincidentally the time when he was moving interstate ok? So we had lunch and oh god what a bunch of unknown weirdos were congregated there that I had to sit near and because I was late I was at the crap ass end of the table where all the loser people who got pity invites were sat so I knew I was in for a bad hour or so but luckily being late meant lunch stuff was over and these morons where leaving. I only had to endure a few conversations like “what do you do” and I lied and they told me what they did and I said “that must be so boring” and like that until me and my friend and his now ex-girlfriend (thank god) were alone-ish to do the goodbye stuff you do but the real story lies ahead in that I was the same damn town that my high school reunion was in and for fucks sake the same old people I went to school with filed into the pub I was meeting my friend at so there we all were, me from the city back where I grew up and all of them touching me and drinking and being friendly so yeah sure I got caught up in it and yeah sure so I agreed to follow them down the road to the reunion.
High school reunions have all those people who come from your misty history and have maybe appeared as weird representations in your dreams where you forgot a whole bunch of information and you thought “I should have prepared, god damn it!” but of course you wake up and think fuck that I am glad I am not there anymore. That’s a reunion, being awake inside a dream and seeing pretty much the worst apparitions or reflections of your past because they are real and more horrific than you could have imagined. I walk around in the fog and every person I bump into has a big smile and so do I I feel and we say three lines and each one I can feel makes me seem so callous and theirs are so honest as if they are real people who actually live lives and believe the things they say. It happens so often that I end up sitting with those I have known for long time/were friends with in high school and they say “what’s wrong” and I answer “what the fuck is going on” and we laugh together.
It’s bad, straight away it’s bad, I mean the venue is bad to begin with, as if the pensioners have left because bingo is finished and there’s one middle aged woman behind the bar not knowing what the fuck is going on because there are people there after seven pee em and we want drinks. Oh god do we want drinks and after I’ve had maybe five glasses of wine she shows up. Oh man fuck I say in my head and I knew her and I can see what she looks like now and I think oh fuck that better not be my fault. She walks over and we see each other but she is hugged by some massively overweight ‘friend’ who I sort of remember but I guess they know each other since those days and I finish my drink and finish talking to this muscle bound moron who I used to know was ridiculed by everyone for being basically feeble and ugly so he pretty much found hid place bulking up and joining the army and I can only say over and over “you’re fucking HUGE” to my detriment.
She comes and sits with us because we are from the same clique, that’s how we met and in the most natural of implanted-in-our-psyche way we end up sitting next to each other, not listening to anyone else and talking. It is so lovely and we are smiling and it is as if the decade meant nothing. She had three kids and I have none. This doesn’t matter, I touch her knee and tell her she is so thin (we used to like being incredibly thin) and she says my face is chubby and I say ‘hey, I am healthy…fat and happy!’ but she reassures me in her way that I am not chubby and we laugh at ourselves now and how we used to be so incredibly insensitive to fat people. And we look over together at a fat woman we went to school with grotesquely kissing a much older beared male she brought with her and we screw up our faces and like “ewww gross” or similar and laugh and I light a cigarette and when she says ‘oh you still smoke’ I feel stupid. I try to make her see me as independent (i.e. different to her) so I say “Yeah” casually, blow out smoke and take another sip of wine.
Making my way though the idiots, trying to reminisce over things I could hardly care about anymore and some are really trying to sell me the idea of moving back and I can only say “Back? Doesn’t that sound bad to you? ‘Back’?” but they laugh because I have always been strange to them. I am next to her and she eventually finishes up the jargon to some other stranger and I say “Hey” and she says “Wow, you’re here. I didn’t think you’d come” “Why? Because I’ve always said reunions are stupid and weird and that I’d never come to my own?” “Well pretty much and also because why would you bother?” “Well that’s pretty complimentary, I mean, thinking I’d have way better things to do or even that I would b so occupied with my life that I wouldn’t even know about it or something” and she laughs dismissively remembering she knows what I’m like and all that so it goes on. I tell her I think about her every day and I can tell my her reaction that I need to finish off the sentiment by telling her “no not like that I mean you come up, you pass through, you are a thing that happens and, here’s the funny thing, as soon as you pop in I am forced to think of all the others, so funny, like a conga line, ha ha…her and then her and her, you know…it’s funny”.
It’s a weird moment, the end. We’re all getting up, finished reminiscing, finished watching and looking one another over. I am just looking at her. To girl I first loved. She is looking at me and we are smiling. I tell her I want to talk to her again and she promises me we will. I get an email address and I giver her my mobile phone number. It’s so terrible because we both know I will never write and she will never call. She has her family and her life and I have so much to write. I compose hundreds of emails every day, but to write her is something different. In the age of paperless transmissions, where we can communicate every five minutes or less, still there is something powerful in writing to someone who you used to love, and have seen them again, and have had that ting again where you remember what you had, and the beauty in knowing that you had to exchange something in order to let yourself go again, this time to a fate much different when you stupidly broke up over childish reasons twelve years before.
I get four more glasses of wine from the bar because I don’t want to go back there and I am sitting with them in front of me and she takes one and says “thanks” and I say “they’re all yours…”. She drinks half the glass down and says “Don’t worry. It’s ok.” “What?” “What you did to me” “Christ fuck, yes I know. That’s just so, oh man so fucking gross you know, I don’t mean you I mean me like, what the fuck kind of asshole juvenile dick was I?…thank you, thank you though for understanding…Christ I mean what has it been like, twelve years? Oh god its so,…I think about it every day. Really…every…day. I can’t even kiss a woman without thinking about it. And I wasn’t even drunk or anything!” “Okay okay calm down, geez. You’re acting all crazy” “Yeah? Ffff God okay I’m sorry. I guess, I’ve just been thinking about it, you know, in isolation, like, just my ideas and stuff. Can I say…I am so sorry for that, I mean, it was stupid and weird and wrong and…” “I get it, okay?…I was there you know, I was…pffft well, we were kids right, stupid little kids. I know, no.. I mean, I’ve been with a bunch of guys and you know, it’s always fucking weird, you know? It’s a fucking rape game this sex shit I tell you” and we laugh and chink glasses (plastic cups at this shit place) and we are smiling so it’s all good and I just needed to day it all out loud to her and it fades away; this sick feelings I’ve had.
The Westbury Academy Boys School (or WABS as it’s known) is like Hogwarts if you replaced wizards with cunts and it’s where I teach English to a bunch of boyishly haircutted, ugly smirking, future banker types whose fathers are all assholes and whose mothers are all whores. There is no exception, there is no scholarship student with redeeming qualities who over the years gains the respect and admiration of his peers. Just a school full of lucky pricks with huge flat screen HD LCD TVs in their rooms. Perhaps the worst subject to teach is the one I’m paid ridiculously large amounts to teach to these seething pubescent furious masturbators because deep within their brainwashed mind they have come to understand that ‘English’; words, poems, or more accurately made up fiction is (a) beneath them (b) of no consequence and (c) cannot possible make you ‘big’ money. While they may be right in all three cases, i.e. (a) not accessible to them (b) philosophically arguable but not in the context they mean and (c) 100% true, and that this explains their general moronic behaviour when attending my lectures, it still does not excuse them from inciting me to slit each and every one of their throats during the night and in doing so know that I have made the future I plan on living in marginally better. The first ‘house boy’ I killed was a fifteen your old podge-faced red head, a crown to sole freckled little asshole. Nothing worse than an ugly chubby ginger scoffing at Kafka, so naturally I made the clever, life affirming move to mix in some/a lot of granulated sulfuric acid in with his white sugar the fat fuck heaped liberally on his wheat bix every morning. He actually managed to get through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday like that, coughing and spluttering and otherwise woofing those bix down, not really caring that his insides were disintegrating and, god be praised, was too ashamed to tell anyone about the blood he was shitting out. Thursday was different, he didn’t feel like eating but, you know, the combination of peer pressure and general gluttony made him take that fourth and final bowl. Oh he got through it, sure, but lets just say I didn’t see him in fourth period English.
I just realised how horrible and animalistic and simple I must sound. Instead of going back and editing and perhaps all together deleting all of that I think it more pertinent to describe my situation more clearly. And again, no, I wasn’t harassed or had eggs thrown at me or whatever other horribly devastating things these low-level leaders of tomorrow could imagine would actually hurt a person, no, nothing like that. This is more of a…a…correction, to the world. I would be remiss in my duties as a teacher, a leader, a guide to these young men if I was to simply release these creatures into the world unschooled, unaware, unwittingly free to become the people we despise tens of years on throughout existence. And lets face it, if WABS, given its heritage, is in fact the breeding ground for future Ministers and Kings and CEOs then, yes, there should be some kind of test, some kind of conditions in which they are allowed to progress to such integral positions that affect all of everyone else. Right?
The term super hero has been, I mean, really misused and pretty much claimed by both the comic book kingdom and Neitzsche. Oh and god no I am not pretending I am a super hero, a regular hero? No not even. Let’s forget I opened with that. What I want you to understand is that, okay, imagine if there was a way to prevent the horrors of tomorrow’s bad decisions from every happening? Okay? And that’s what I’m doing. I’m stopping the worst people from progressing to their falsely pre-ordained if-the-shoe-fits roles that, ultimately, will end in the destruction of everyone/thing. Some part inside of you is agreeing I know, I know. I don’t like it either, hell, I strangled a thirteen year old down in the laundry room! How do you think I feel! It’s not about that though and I know, all you have to do is nod a tiny little bit and we can move on. Can I get a little nod? Not to killing children god no. I’m not about that at all. I just think you and I can agree that, hey, perhaps some of these undeserving close minded ‘borne to be leaders’ types, perhaps, maybe, actually don’t deserve to and worse shouldn’t ever be leaders.
Examples. Of course. Bradley McPherson (no relation to Elle). Oh my god you should have seen him (yes dead now). He looked forty five already, a nice round paunch, receding hairline, double chin! Really, a more suitable candidate for General Manager I have never seen. And he was sixteen! And this appearance, this sluggish gait and general under-qualified-but-a-prick-anyway demeanour wasn’t scolded, it was respected and (get ready to vomit) celebrated! He was awarded ‘most likely to succeed’, ‘leader of the debating team’, ‘executive on the student council’, ‘advisor to the bursar on excessive spending’ (after his year eleven ‘thesis’ on profitable school management). I mean, he cut off about 65% off gratuitous spending for students and was applauded. Now I mean, these are the people I am dealing with here, knowingly serving the body corporate, instinctually forgoing services in aid of revenue, approving negligent cut backs for the sake of shareholder (namely, their parents’) investments. I mean, to deliberately cut off your own amusement for the good of the insular economy of one (namely WABS) is existentially insane. He had to go.
Now as a teacher this one students’ contributions to the school did not disadvantage me at all, in fact, they actually heightened the luxury spending for the faculty because of the un-forecasted profits returned to the school. We have the most comfortable staff room in the country, replate with leather bound armoires, fully stocked libraries with many first editions, state of the art technology and 18 hour access to a fully stocked kitchen with a full time staff of eight. No, the exorbitance is not (or never) the problem in such regimes. It’s the complex balance between haves and have nots, the blatant disregard for your fellow man which results in a gluttonous over compensation for the ‘overlords’ coupled with the fact that this ingenious thinking is welcomed by those meagre individuals who (a) have been deprived and (b) see there depravation as directly enhancing their superiors, and worst (c) applaud and respect this outcome because in their mind they are working their way up to become the fat pigs in the upper echelons who will be rewarded in the end from cutting off and depriving the ‘lower class’ from receiving what they deserve or even what they had as a necessity.
Can I let you in on a secret? I really enjoyed this one way I dispatched this little bucktoothed capitalist prim-and-proper kid. I know it’s horrible to say but hear me out. In my position I was able to use the god-tool of grades to persuade this Bradley (no, it was not abbreviated to Brad for his friends, well, no one really had friends here, associates…yes they say that) that he needed help to up his English grade so that he could get into Harvard Business School. Almost instantly and without questioning (even though several of his housemates have died mysteriously) he agreed to meet me at seven pm in my office to negotiate a way to increase his grade. He arrived at seven on the dot, plonked a briefcase on my desk and opened it, clearly having watched too many movies, unclasped the locks and revealed, I don’t know maybe twenty or thirty thousand dollars in cash (all fifties…what the fuck is wrong with these kids?).
“Ah Brad., that’s…”
“Bradley”
“Yes, Brad, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. You know that you, and several of your classmates, aren’t really doing well in my class and…”
“Who else?”
“Brad, it’s not about that”
“Bradley. And maybe you’re a shit teacher then? Maybe I should report you to the board?”
“The board? There’s no board Brad. It’s the faculty. You’re not in business yet son”
“I’m not your…”
“Shut up I knew you’d say that, that’s way I said ‘son’. That’s why I keep saying Brad. Do you get it?”
“No…I…”
“Of course not. I’ll tell you why, Brad. Subtlety. Subtlety. One word, very simple, but completely lost on all of you. You see Brad, you don’t care what you look or sound like, you just want results, is that true?”
“Well…yes…I came here with, this bag and…”
“Yes I know, and this the point Brad. Ahhhh let me think”
And after that I went to my drawer, and pulled out a long knife and was trying to pretend to explain something about life and fear and culture but was really just trying to get closer to him and when I was close enough I just sank it into his heart. Funny really, it just goes in. He actually looked up at me and then looked down at the knife and then died. There was blood everywhere and I rolled him up in the rug and dragged him into my en-suite. I didn’t know what to do so I went back to my room. Here’s the good part, the very god damned next day the police came and I, naturally was panicked out of my mind, I mean, there was a dead fat boy in my bathroom but what happened next was they shut down the school, all the boys returned to their rooms and the announcement was made to staff that Henry Thompson, Religious Instructor and Pastor, was being arrested for child sex offences and that he was responsible for the missing boys of late and that investigations were ongoing. Yay!
I live in that place
Where they come from
And I can tell you
No one is there
And they don’t care about
You.
MENTAL HYPERTENSION EXTENSION, IN WHICH YOU GET MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR
I am finding it hard to believe anyone anymore. The starving musician, the penniless artist, the aspiring writer, the greedy capitalist…anyone. What they have in common is they recreate a stereotype, an assigned and played out role that is apparent in an instant and yet still desired as real and a goal[1]. As if there is no other way to live other than to align yourself with a preconceived desire to become something that already exists, yet in achieving this formulaic pre-existing ‘truthfulness’ they have already failed because deep down they know they are choosing something, they are choosing this or that theme/appearance, choosing this or that aesthetic, and then the worst part is choosing ‘this or that stuff’ to think and feel[2], and the resultant choosing ‘this or that’ thing to say[3]. Self censoring with a gauge that is self-referentially checking whether or not ‘this or that’ feeling/sentiment/sentence fits in with the overall goal of the persona they love so much (admire) that they want to create[4]. It can become easy over the years to believe that you really are what you wanted (chose) to be, the more you cultivate and edit and asses your ‘output’ (clothing, speech, sentiment, opinion, musical tastes, themes, furniture, behaviour et al), the closer (you assume) you will be to achieving a sense of honesty in your persona because surely over the years of telling and demonstrating to that many people you are this and representing yourself as such will ergo make you ‘such’[5].
GROUPS CAN DEFINE THE INDIVIDUAL, WHICH COMPICATES THINGS
People know, by preconceived assumption, what they think is authentic. We are aware of truthfulness straight away. From this, there is a mental checklist, prerequisites, that need to be ticked off in order for like-minded associates to accept another as being authentic. This is the horror of reality. We can all smell a fake a mile off. How? Because they do not pass the ‘rules’ we’ve created in our insular, checklist-based ‘pass or fail’ test we force people to undergo in order to assume an inclusion in an invented, imagined and created-based-on-precedent reality. The better you are at concealing this, or more, the less aware you are of this, the better. Now, as a huge aside, there is nothing sinister and calculating and exclusive about any group that exists, you can pretty much ‘get in’ by simply knowing one person (ergo nothing is exclusive)[6]. But hilariously the hierarchy and the way ‘members’ are valued or exalted is remarkable, i.e. those who attain the highest ideals of the whole are the (oh god) leaders, or…what do I say…best of us[7]?
THE DESIRE TO BE AN INDIVIDUAL IS NOW COUNTER POST-CULTURE
We now hate everything that is manufactured, obvious, already done, conceived, born[8] and so the only option is to revert to the pre-aware days of tribe based living; community; circles; bands of like minded people you can shun the world together amongst etc. There is an amazing beauty in this, yet alongside this a fear in progress, as if the hands that reached out for something else where cauterised by the fear of not knowing what else there could possibly be[9]. By reverting in disgust to what has already been our sickness creates an inherently twisted new sense of both self-aware post-irony boredom coupled with a futuristic Hellenistic desire to re-emerge as better than any other ‘version’ of this sense of impossible commune honesty[10]. So now then what is the individual, but one of a group of individuals, unable to exist without some type of ‘banding’, hopelessly lost in the void between not wanting to exist in a band but inadvertently being in one per se. This new horrible world has rules, and in breaking the rules you are a rule. You say things that are expected, you think things that are expected (of you), you try so hard to say something unexpected, but you are trying, and we can see that. There is nothing between heaven and hell we have not foreseen. That is our new mantra and we are sticking to it[11].
THE WAY TO HAPPINESS EMERGES IN WAYS YOU DIDN’T ENVISION
I hope. But lately I’ve become attracted to transsexuals who look really really like women.
[1] Imagine in your mind a musician who works as a part-time telemarketer but he is really good at playing guitar and sings in a local bar. Got it? Really? You can actually imagine that? Well then…that’s exactly what they look like, without irony.
[2] Politics, ethos, reason, purpose you name it
[3] So many examples, let go with the underground musician/hipster/artist, who are so post ironic that they no longer care about anything. How the very act of creating is useless(!) so we are trying to find ways that are still expressive and real but not so all-inclusive, like it’s a way to make people feel again (when of course they have given up feeling beyond wanting others to feel). For example what would they (all!) say to the question: What do you think about privacy?
[4] Thinking on this level on the fly is amazing, either you are able to process that fast or who have brainwashed yourself, that is, convinced yourself of your (desired) true identity, being to be able to actually respond truthfully.
[5] It gets complicated here. You of course are who you are, and what you want to be. But how much of you now is really who you are in comparison to who you want to be and how far away are you from acknowledging to yourself that you are not only real but also seeking to achieve a desired version of yourself and how much importance do you give (or grace) to the intermittent transition whereby you are not what you want to be now but are in the transition of becoming who you think you should be.
[6] Really, have you been to a party? In fifteen minutes you’ve made a stranger a friend. And you don’t care about them in any way! They give you their number and the next day you make sure and delete it. Security overrides humanity.
[7] Jealousy etc
[8] Although it has become do bad an confusing that now things that are obviously abhorrent have found their place in a nonsensical neo-hate/ironic love sense that they re-emerge. I would like it to be a real love of something for the thing in itself (which can happen) but more and more it seems to be a quasi-performance art piece people play with their real (read: not real) sentiments…and it gets gross because we then buy our friends gifts based on their recalcitrant “post-modern ironic representation of ‘like’ as art” newfound beliefs that’s gets so complicated that they themselves don’t even know whether to say “thank you” anymore, but instead react overwhelmingly happy because they have to (performance art, remember) continue the reality that they are in love with this type of thing…and it goes from there.
[9] Let’s go: long hair, drugs, shitty clothing. Again and again and again, right? No? This is the problem, you can see it happening around us, we can see teenagers NOW wearing Nirvana t-shirts. Nineteen years after they made their first album.
[10] With the desire to preserve all the ideals of this, as insanely sick as they have become these days. Allow ALL? Are you CRAZY J
[11] See? The individual, the real individual is nothing but an insane moron unaware of what they are or what they mean (as an unartist, say). Any meaning can be attributed, any subversive sentiment can be categorised. We have created a reason for everything, to fight against it is the be another reason that already exists. What is the answer: to be completely and unequivocally honest, loving, open, true and real. Yet, who among us wants to sit for any length of time with that person?
Invariably (and in a way attempting to destroying any reverence I had for Lego) every other child I knew had a mother fucking huge BAG of the stuff (which I found out was Lego approved, a common way of storing massive collections). They cared little for the dissemination of pieces and distinction between genres I had come to self-teach[3] was the proper way to control ones Lego collection (using various boxes and cataloguing systems, carful to archive the manuals and partition the pieces into their correct “brand” grouping. I was not insane after all). The large bag exalted a way of treated Lego as a pile of garbage, as a toy, as a thing you ‘got out, messed with and then collapsed into a incoherent mess’ with no deep value other than perhaps an aggrandised ownership. I felt no guilt in stealing amazing pieces from these heathens. They did not appreciate what they had, I appreciated it far more, they would not notice any losses for they were fools with gold (or swines with pearls, whatever analogy you want). So I left their houses with my pockets full with reward. My only disgust came when these ill-gotten pieces from incomplete collections did not fit in with my carefully matriculated collections. They stood out like sore thumbs, they were singular and abhorrent[4].
Back in my bedroom, sitting over my modest yet superior Lego collection, I stared at it, processing the confusing mix of anger, disgust and admiration I felt toward those with grossly overpopulated übercollections. I stared at the pieces before me and felt love for every piece (except for maybe the two-ers[5] which, let’s face it, are pretty perfunctory and not very stable). I began to build, using colour matched pieces which a Lego perfectionist would know is the key to creating master works, a working industrial complex replete with security and staff quarters, an open plan building mimicking a cross between Die Hard (the movie) infrastructure and neo-terrorist capabilities (for the infiltrating party…this is ‘space’ Lego after all, they need advanced clever tools). It quickly became clear that my ability to creating fully fledged finished Lego-company quality pieces out mastered the kids with massively ambiguous grey-goo collections. They had no attention to detail. They had no idea of how to get the most out of every piece. They had no idea even of colour matching! They built like imbeciles seeking to create the tower of Babel. Red, yellow, blue (colours foreign to me for I had sets of pristine mainly white space Lego) were used indiscriminately…they made pieces that needed explanation, they made pieces that were abhorrent to nature and architecture. “Where do you see buildings like that?” I’d say. And they would answer feebly and without heart: “In the future”. Like that was a blanket rule that allowed them to create ludicrous monstrous-cities (sorry), as if human evolution would do away with aesthetics. Bah! I knew what they were doing. Quantity over quality. Having my refined collection meant I had to be smarter, more aware. My impoverished collection forced me to become much cleverer, less like a blundering buffoon who used Lego as a way to fill in time, avoid boredom, to luckily connect pieces like an ape.
Imagine them, opening their big bag and hearing the pieces settling, but not hearing it in a loving sense, in a noise sense, white noise, or worse even suffering it as an annoyance. The sit and draw their hnds through the pieces, inspiration-less, trying to find a base to begin with. Finding a landscape plate that inspires them! I’ll build a house! And hey build an ugly house. That will do, they think. Even with this sea of potential they crate a stock standard replication of their surroundings, enough for the inhabitants of this brief existence. In their exuberant living conditions they managed to fashion a cold dead ugly reflection of themselves. No awareness of a desire to create beauty, to produce a version outside of the current world, to give value, to offer a better version of life. These are the privileged children who go into government, make the rules they think we al can live by. Devoid of choice, value, appreciation and worst of all awareness that these things mater at all. My understanding of the preciousness of a single piece sets me apart from these conglomerate spoilt for choice moguls who, with it all, instead chose to develop ill-formed, visually disgusting normalities. And we wonder why things turn out like they do.
Mainly, Lego built in disdain is built for destruction. The pieces are built without any longevity, almost deliberately brittle and hollow, only visually useful, but mainly, once boredom has been replaced by a need to build with Lego (which is the reason/purpose/point of Lego) the next level (only ten or maybe twenty minutes later) was to smash their creation back to noting, back to a pile. There’s more fun in the destruction for these unimaginative irreverent gluttonous humans. Joy in destruction. Satisfaction in wreaking their crappy inventions. And here’s the clincher, the fat that they knew it was crappy, that it was always destined for the junk pile, that their eagerness to create was underpinned by the eventual desire to destroy. This is the real reason why they didn’t care about their huge collections, or the attention to detail in creating something everlasting. They wanted a quick dirty build followed by a triumphant suicide. The joy in killing what they made outweighed their joy in creating.
THE END
[1] That’s the great thing about Lego, it actually promotes a level of excitement in mundane cooperative actions, like setting up a moon base, like sharing resources, like fixing a vehicle et al. The greatest socialist tool is not killing all of the upper-class, its aggrandising common perfunctory interactions. Socialist propaganda? Space exploration as a tool for global supremacy? Want to be a town planner?
[2] Further, and the horror again, you realise that the I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-you present you received from a somewhat distant and let’s face it probably poor adult you used to think were interesting and ‘big’ were those cheap as hell Chinese made rip-offs (fake crappy transformers) that I, now, would never consider giving to a friend’s child, or even as a gift to a acquaintances child let alone a true blood family member! These things happen over the years and you correct your history with them. The fact that you can add detail to historical events is bizarre, and it usually leads you to even further disgust for the moments you in your (youthful) gut knew were distasteful in the first place. You just couldn’t articulate them back then, beyond things like ‘this toy is CRAP!’.
[3] Thus creating a higher ideal I would hold all Lego owners unto.
[4] Not because they were stolen, no! Because they were orphans. Symbolic of the destiny I had rescued them from and juts didn’t fit in with the rest of the collected kits (mainly because I could visualise the finished kit just by seeing a single piece, hence the conceot of belonging).
[5] If you don’t know what this is either you are not versed enough in Lego or (being nice now) for some more or less common terminology start here http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/a_common_nomenclature_for_lego_families.php