Science With Swearing Vol. 2: The Theory of Wastrel Dynamics.
It was a bitter quasi-intellectual bastard of an evening. There was a taut sense of wasted youth in the air, joined sporadically by the jangle of a tin ricocheting off the wall, the wet slap of its dregs on the plaster adding a coda to the sharp sparks of sound. The group sat in a small circle, sprawled in a haphazard tangle of limbs and varying states of undress, some only revealing bulging guts that had fought there way over belts pulled brutally tight, others barely concealing what would pass for dignity in very poor light. Smoke hung in the air, recycled through a dozen lungs, and somewhere in the corner there was a coughing dog, its hacking expectorations the closest the room had seen to meaningful conversation for a good six hours.
Yeah, that little memory ring a bell, at least set off a little alarm deep in that fuzzy drink and drug-fried subconscious of yours? I know it barely does in mine, which proves what? Absofuckingloutely nothing… nada… it is a useless question because who the hell can actually tell which memory is from the small “accurate” pile? Oh sure, maybe some of those loveable anal-retentives… but, you know what? No, neither do I, fuck it.
You spend the evening putting the world to rights and what do you get? A full ashtray, a lot of washing up, and a grim glimpse of old age when your eyelids snap open the following day. If you really wanted to solve the problems of the world you don’t open a bottle, you open a box of shotgun shells and start giving the briefest and most explosive head of your life… Sadly, and frankly for fuck’s sake, nobody’s that ambitious, that’s why they make that septic flavoured alcopop shit in bottles and twelve to twenty-somethings buy it on special offer because they haven’t got the balls, the commitment, the flat out sense, to refuse anything lighter than ether spiked with as much low-grade acid as you can score off that greasy spotty freakchild… It’s not a good evening until one person’s leapt off a multi-storey car park thinking they could fly, another’s put a breadknife through his next door neighbour for listening to his breathing through the wall and reporting their findings to the police, and at least one person’s decided to tell everyone else where they stashed the bodies of their last twenty nine victims…
Fuck community spirit, you want to build a big fuck off wall, you want to put machine gun nests all along the top, you want big dogs patrolling the perimeter, and, this is most important of all, you want to just start firing on random civilians in the hope of giving them the subtle hint that you’re no longer going to put up with their bullshit.
This, THIS is the approach we take to standing at the fucking bus stop most of the time, so why the hell don’t we do the sensible thing and apply it to those social soirees that we just know are going to descend into horrific grim reality at 4 am as everyone comes down, sobers up, or suddenly finds any one of a number of other good reasons to find an excuse to go to bed and get rid of all those wasted bastards so they don’t have to deal with them in the morning. Nobody likes the rest of the human race for a good four hours minimum after waking up, every single one of you bastards either falls into the happy manic category or the grim miserable bastard category, regardless of what you personally think, I’ll put you in one of those and we all know my opinion means less than Michael Winner’s life.
Hey you may be thinking we’re off to a negative start here… perhaps it’s not fluffy and chummy, filled with small yippy dogs, rutting cosmic deities embracing the almighty fuckwad principle of kitten-coated bounce joy… yeah, well, it’s half three on a Saturday night of which the highlights were about as endearing as those that magically alight on the skulls of every Matalan-lingering, endlessly breeding, scrunchie frau that gets in my goddamn way in the queue at the supermarket... all buying their five pound top-up voucher and their collection of Modern Child-Spitter Monthly. A message to those, just in passing: Quit with the bringing of unvarnished reality into my life… I would much, much, prefer it if perhaps you could, just momentarily, take a step into the cupboard and let me get back into living a glorious falsehood based on rose-tinted televisual mystery…
I’m not talking the TV that I turn off… I don’t mean a bunch of gurning pikey sperm-misfires locked in a house or some dimwitted minor celebrity revealing the ordeals of their colon, and I sure as fuck don’t mean anything, anything, that channel 5 show other than the fucking baseball. Just quit revealing to me that everyone’s out drunkenly waving their tits and whatever the fuck the male equivalent is at the camera. No, you just stop that shit, you give me my innocent, moronic, delusion that the human race is a species that has evolved. Oh wait, 24 hour news has just royally screwed that… bring down the nukes. If we can’t all be relatively nice, sane, and act as if we aren’t all banging our skulls together in an attempt to earn fucking rights to the herd… I say cleanse, cleanse with nuclear fire.
Yeah, but anyway… time to pretend there was a point to all this… actually, why bother? It’s bile spewing time and you and I both know that there are a whole load of little umbrellas you can put up to shield yourself if you don’t want to get deluged… so don’t come complaining to me about me being a tad grumpy. Viva las self-censorship. Hey, and in case of emergency, do what the bible tells you, hack it off and cast it away… cause that’s going to make you feel a whole lot better.
But yes, the dynamics of the 4am tail-end… I’m not going to attempt to cover any of the time before that because it’s a safe, safe, bet that every single one of you bastards has a far better grasp on that bit than me… But you sons of bitches don’t have anywhere near the grip on the death of sociability that I do… It’s simple… if you want to know about car problems you talk to the mechanic, if you want to know about stamps you ask a philatelist, if you want to know about the cosmos you ask a drug ravaged thirty year old hippy, and if you want to know about every other bastard being asleep… you ask me. I see every stage of drinking, from the first sip through to the gradual dawning of the hangover, I don’t do the sleep thing anywhere in that lot… I’ve sat on a sofa for ten hours, wide awake in someone else’s house while everyone slept it off and were on a completely different day to me when they woke up… I saw this every goddamn time… literally… and I can say one thing that applies a lot of those times: the last thought the owner of the house as they stagger to bed is that they really, really, hope that everyone’s gone when they wake up.
It all starts off so promisingly: You’ve got the inebriants, you’ve got the crisps, you’ve maybe got a movie, you’ve got a selection of music that’s probably not to most people’s tastes, and somewhere, just somewhere, you’ve probably got a little ambition to have a good time until dawn. Here we hit the big problem… unless you’re on enough amphetamines to grind your teeth to the gums, you’re not going to make it till dawn, you’re really not. You’re going to start at eight and feel real, real, shitty by four am when everything starts to wear off and the human body starts quietly coughing that it really has had enough. Yet it always seems that nobody’s really planned for this eventuality… Sure, the owner of the place has said everyone can crash out on their couch, on their floor, and on any flat surface available… but here’s the problem: The owner is now flat-out on the couch, snoring loudly, every flat surface in the house is covered in discarded tins, food, and, if you’re me, enough empty mugs to build a nice little pyramid because you were never once arsed to reuse one. What are you going to do? Fuck it, here’s a quiz, because I don’t care any more, you can tell… look I’m typing this with my eyes shut. This proves two things: one is that I don’t care, another is that I spend far too much time typing, and three, this means no more to me than something to do while I wait for the album to end.
Oh yeah, and because I drank half a bottle of absinthe and have the flu and everyone’s either in bed or fucking the house-boy… possibly…
Choose Your Own 4am Adventure:
You are Barnaby Cleethorpe and you’re a fairly comfortably well off student embracing the haphazard life for a few brief years before settling down into a job in advertising or banking and embedding your sharp proboscis into the fleshy buttock of the human soul. Oh yeah, and doing a hell of a lot more coke than you’re doing now. You have the correct hairstyle and the appropriate baggy “weathered” trousers, you have a second hand car with a stereo worth more than Jesus’ nail-clippings, your parents often lend you money.
- Q1: You have been hanging out with your friends and imbibing a large amount of narcotics, alcohol, fatty foods, and watching shit 80’s movies because it’s “ironic”. All around you your advertising friends are yawning and you’ve run out of uppers and alcohol… do you:
a) Suggest everyone stage a mini-Kurosawa festival.
- b) Suggest you score more drugs, with no intention whatsoever of going out and doing it yourself because it’s cold, it’s 4am, it would involve waking up some dangerous people, and you personally are skint.
- c) Yawn as well and wait impatiently for someone to put a new record on because the last one finished five minutes ago and the silence is starting to make you paranoid.
Congratulations, whatever you picked will no doubt have some bearing on something or other, just not the quiz because I’ve realised that would be hard work…
If you picked a or b you’re on a hiding to nothing… nobody else is up for anything ambitious. You have officially wasted your time, go back three squares and assume it would kill you or something… that’s just how these things work.
If you picked c… well, you’re still pushing it, but you get to continue.
- Q2. You wait another couple of minutes and finally someone puts an album on… yet they have chosen something very, very, soothing. This is bad, now half the room has passed out on all the comfortable bits of furniture. You can’t go upstairs and kip in the host’s room because you know they’ll be somewhat angry when they wake up two hours from now and lurch to the comfort of their bed. They don’t want to find a puddle of sick and you in it. You’re on a wooden dining chair and your back’s beginning to hurt, you know there is no way you can sleep on it… do you:
a) Just be patient… someone will go to the bathroom eventually to be sick, then you can steal their space and pretend to be asleep when they come back and start swearing at you quietly.
b) Fling yourself onto the pile of discarded pizza boxes in the middle of the floor and writhe around until you’re comfortable, much like a dog yet with less chance of success.
c) Give up and call a cab… your own sofa’s warm and hasn’t got what appears to be an upper class vagrant sprawled across it.
If you picked a) you find yourself sitting for the next eight hours in crippling discomfort, descending into incredible paranoia when the soothing album runs out and you realise you’re the only one left awake in the room. Years of proper upbringing prevents you from getting up and putting something else on because it might wake up those you are beginning to think are out to kill you.
If you picked c) you’re just as doomed… on the off-chance you get a cab it will cost you more than it would to hire an uninfected hooker and will just lead to you being classed as an antisocial outcast. Oh, plus you’ll be murdered by the cab driver because they’re all just out for a victim these days and they like the tender meat.
If you picked b) you’re probably covered in fleas as you read this… but hell, one of them has got to lead to you surviving doesn’t it… it’s how these things work surely… no… it’s not… not in my world… fuck you, you’re dead too…
Thus I have scientifically proven the following:
1: I’m cranky because everyone’s gone to bed.
2: I’m going to make them pay for 1:
3: I probably really need to get laid.
4: There’s no graceful way to end any social gathering… be it cocktail party or Caligulan orgy. Someone always has to either cough and start ushering people to the door or they have to chow down on the grim reality that they’re going to not only feel like shit the next morning, but also have to face all the people whose disconcerting and unpleasant sides they’ve just spent the evening discovering.
5: I’m a shit houseguest. I have references on this, trust me.
6: I’m kinda bitter and maudlin over something, but you lot don’t get to know about it.
7: “You lot” is a term that applies a gross overestimation of the number of people who read this shit.
8: That the liquor’s starting to wear off at, oddly enough, 4am and I’m getting the first grim signs that it perhaps wasn’t a brilliant idea to hit the 70% liquor when infected with some godawful plague.
9: That anybody who pays attention to this needs to seriously reconsider their priorities.
10: I should have done something more constructive with my life.
11: I need to hoover.
12: The maudlin drunk stage is not an overly good time to be trying to come up with a pithy ending to this.
13: That this could go on a while.
14: Ah screw it, I’m just going to have a cry.
15: 12: was a very accurate point.
16: Ah, bite me.
In short:
The cosmos is a strange and uncooperative swine. Don’t get to down when it boots you violently and repeatedly in the arse… you’re probably all nice people… please can at least one of you help me get as far as the bed, I’ve lost all contact with my lower extremities and my head is full of everything that vaguely looked like it might counter whatever plague I have. Also, can someone hoover and tidy the place up a bit, I get the feeling I’m not going to be moving for a while… oh, and if you can heat me up some soup I’d be most appreciative. Oh god, on second thoughts, just shoot me, it’ll save on the electric.