Frankie Boyle - Work! Consume! Die!

Sat on my bed feeling the actual throb of those records, the hum of that conversation, like a spider at the centre of a web of banality, it occurs to me that it’s less than that. Most people don’t give a fuck what records get played or what gets said, so long as they can get drunk and have some prospect in the future of fucking a stranger/the wife of a work colleague/a slit they have cut in an uncooked steak.

The guy puts on a Daniel Johnston record and I feel sorry for having hated him so intensely. I remember this old Daniel Johnston drawing of a guy choosing to put on his happy or sad mask for the day. I text a few of my pals and suggest that they come round tomorrow, and we scoff in the face of reality. Stewart texts back, ‘You mean take acid?’ Yes, now that I think about it, I do.

The guys come round and we have a cup of tea and watch Florence and Connell in this BBC Scotland sitcom about an unemployed former metal band called Bitches Buroo, and drop the microdots I scored. It starts as this philosophical, futuristic buzz and when the show ends Stewart goes over and puts Dr. Octagon on the stereo.

Paul has this completely asymmetrical face. He got a bad eye injury as a kid, which exaggerates it, but I start to think how it’s expressive of him, the bit that wants to visit the 23rd dimension and the tense bit that wants to be normal. His face, it suddenly occurs to me as I come up, is a yin–yang symbol.

Stewart is talking about Terence McKenna, who he’s got right into. He starts quoting this thing about how we can choose to enlarge our consciousness or remain brutish prisoners of matter.

‘Yes!’ I laugh, as the acid drips me that loose physical buzz. ‘That’s that quote I used for that HMV thing! They wanted a quote from someone who’d inspired you for a poster campaign at Christmas. I gave them brutish prisoners of matter!’

Stewart: ‘That’s cool man!’

Me: ‘They didn’t use it – they used someone quoting Ferris Bueller.’ I’m overcome with the giggles.

Stewart is grinning. ‘That’s fucked … these fuckers are … brutish prisoners of matter!’

I shrug. ‘I dunno, man. I think you can choose to be amused by the hopelessness of the world. Laugh at every … crass awful thing, it’s like this fucking universal armour! You know that Buddhist thing where they say you can’t choose what happens, but you can choose how you react to it? You can choose to just laugh.’

Paul is struggling badly to make a joint and looks up.

‘“You can’t choose what happens” sounds kind of apolitical … like, laugh at stuff instead of doing anything about it.’

‘I’d love to debate this further but I seem to be losing my mind,’ I interject in an English voice and lurch towards a porthole.

Sheets of rain are lashing down and I feel a surge of excitement. For some reason it looks like it all starts below us, like we’re above the weather system. These flats sway a bit and we’re all standing there, and I know we’re all thinking it’s like a ship.

‘Haharr!’ I turn round roaring like a pirate waving a rolled-up notebook as a cutlass, but they’re laughing and giving me a look like What the fuck?

I’m still kind of high in the morning and go for a walk up the Necropolis. I meet this girl I know walking her dog, and we have a joint behind a gravestone and I start necking her. She starts wanking me off, her hand inside my tracksuit bottoms as I look out across Glasgow, breathing the cold morning air deep into my lungs. I stand up to get a better view and she just stays on her knees, reaching up. I feel like a post-millennial Tom Weir, my face proud and unreadable on a book jacket.

What I think about during the whole thing is Superman. He saw his whole planet die and became this force for good. Batman just saw his parents die and wanted revenge; it was all about him, his ego. Superman saw his whole world die and realised you need to transcend what you want, transcend the ego. Perhaps now, as our world dies, we will be forced to become good, to have perspective, to be Supermen even.

And I know it should feel sordid, this whole thing. But it doesn’t. Even with the dog there, it feels tremendous.

Capitalism only supports certain kinds of groups, the nuclear family for example, or ‘the people I know at my job’, because such groups are already self-alienated & hooked into the Work/Consume/Die structure.

Hakim Bey, Immediatism

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love. […] By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves. A half crazed creature, more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.

R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

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