Sunday, January 01, 2006

17 :

I am a creature of habit. There is comfort in being sad.

When I come back there’s no-one here.

After she left I was faced with months of boredom and poverty. I came back one day from work. And she was gone. Just like the Song.

As if she were never here. As if there was never love. We are the Divorce Generation. Our parents taught us by example. They split up, so we believed that that is what people should do.

When things get hard, just walk away. Pretend they don’t exist.

No long term relationships. No grand love. No happy ending. Just a series of stuttering liasions, repeated mistakes. Some of the mistakes lasted for years.

We were taught that there are no consequences. That you can get out of any situation. It’s not like Herpes, which you carry around forever. We were taught that nothing is permanent.

You can walk out on a marriage just like that. Pack your things and drive away to some better day. Let someone else pick up the pieces. We’re Generation Fucked. Our parents taught us by example.

They shit in the water they make us drink from. They pollute everything they see. They cannibalise the earth. And they get away with it. Because they have letterheads and mirrored buildings.

We just inherit this shit, and live with the consequences. You can’t flush away a turd the size of a planet. By the time the planets blackened edges reach us, our parents will be dead. So they don’t give a fuck what happens. Its Someone Else’s Problem.

This is the generation that has no consequence. Whatever happens in the next few hundred of years is irrelevant. We’ll be dead by then. Our childen will be dead by then. Our childrens childen too, if they are ever born.

We’re the dustmen of history. We will inherit your shit, and you will teach us that only the corrupt, only the liars, and only the hypocritical will survive. Teach us by example, and lament the state of society. Blame the parents : blame yourselves.

She was her parents daughter. Just walked away from the car crash, leaving the smoking wreck in the road, and pretended it never even happened. Life was not what happened, but what you could get away with. And how fast you could get away from the scene of the crime.

This is the unseen violence that is the new war, the new battleground. No longer do we fight wars on the streets. We fight them in our banks. The violence that assaults out psyche. Our finances. Our ability to put food on the table and electricity in the meter.

I survived. It’s what we do. We survive. We fight against the bullshit. And by not dying, somehow we live. And that makes us survivors.

Like the sun retreating behind the Icelandic horizon.

I’d tried sleeping longer, but my body didn’t work anymore. Exhaustion was burned into my retinas in thick streaks of light always found a way in. I couldn’t escape daylight. Exhaustion was the skewer upon which I was spit-roasted.

Life is by its very definition cruel.

It didn’t care if you were there or not. It had nothing against you personally. Life just went ahead and did it anyway. Like the waves of the water. If you were in the way, you either got out of the way or you suffered the battering of the tide.

In my hermetically sealed container of a flat, I feel like an astronaut. The whole world is out there, and I can see for miles. The problem is, I have to pass through a multitude of doors, airlocks, lifts and corridors before I reach the rarified atmosphere of ground level. Down there it’s poison. Every breath of air is poisoned with pollution, exhaust fumes, and noise.

Insomnia is the unseen enemy that hangs over me every night. Every night, as exhaustion battles consciousness, I waste minutes, hours, day, months of my life, just trying to work out how I can switch off. How I can get my hit.

Sometimes if I’m lucky and manage to snatch sleep, something wakes me in the night. Normally around 4am. Sometimes it’s the fear of a disaster. Sometimes it’s something else, something more elusive. The feeling that somewhere something is wrong, but I don’t know what it is, or why, or what I can do about it. The feeling that someone is missing in my bed.

My next memory, every morning bar Sundays, is the alarm clock. I stumble to gain conscience. It sounds like my burglar alarm. Where is the fire? Shall I call the fire service? Police? Ambulance?

I contemplate being woken up by a man holding a gun to my head telling me to turn over so he can kill me before ransacking my home for consumer goods to sell on street corners and backrooms. At least I would have slept.

There must be something very wrong to be woken by an alarm, some emergency somewhere. A semi-conscious, automatic limb reaches out, decativates the sound, collapse sback into stolen sleep. And seven minutes later it happens again

This is my life. Every day the same old torrent of bullshit. Food. Sleep. Travel. Work. Queues. Debt. The game never changes and it is never won. Every day is moulded and stamped in the production line called employment.

Whatever order of distractions, the bathroom sees me wash with soap, comb my hair, brush my teeth – but only after eating breakfast, so as to allow the active ingredients to do their work whilst I do my work – apply various moisturisers, deodorisers, and perfumes, before emptying myself of the nights produce. Soap is normally a vintage purchased enmasse from VAT-free foreign holidays, as is my Greek only deodorant, an essence of a fragrance called “Homme Boy” which indicates strength, yet softness. It’s cheap shit I purchased in order to survive.

I am a machine.

Appearance is everything. So whilst I appear, on the surface, to be successful, it’s an act.

A shit and piss later, and I’m ready to start the day. Breakfast is a ritual : cereal and milk, prescription pills, water. Hurriedly, every second watching the clock, the countdown until I need to appear like magic at my office. Breakfast devoured, I check my e-mail, before dressing in whatever suit I have ready today. Sometimes I don’t have one ready. Sometimes I pick out the first thing I can think of, improvising. I hope the tie matches the shirt, the clock is ticking. There is no time to change my mind later.

There is no time anymore. The countdown has begun.

I always have a pack of mints ready so as to appear fresh and clean, and eager to please. This is after breakfast, before leaving the house. The office has washrooms with vending machines that dispense toothpaste/brushes, and individually wrapped deodorant portions, but I have yet to sink to such levels. Such things are a luxury I can’t justify. £3 for a personal freshness kit is half an hour’s salary, before tax.

I prefer to shave every evening, so as not to risk the groggy blunt end of unconsciousness to nick my flesh. Leaping from oblivion to 24 blades at 500rpm chewing your keratin cells within the space of a few minutes would be enough of a shock to kill a pensioner.

Ambition bites the nails of success apparently.

It’s always a rush in the morning. Always racing to meet certain points of time before waiting. Today I walk briskly to the train station, performing a mental competition with the other commuters, working out if I came first again, which ones I beat since yesterday. Trying to find the shortest acceptable routes over roads, roadworks, car parking and traffic lights to reach the destination.

My muscles ache with use. Unused, virgin muscles stretched with activity.

Dressed, shaved, and fed. I am ready to battle it out in business. Whatever you may say of the rat race, it doesn’t matter if you come first or second, you’re still a rat.

On a sinking ship called Earth.

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