To hurt is human

He said he never wanted to see me hurt.

So I handed him the most recent scientific papers on the possibility of time travel, a packet of condoms, and my mum's address in 1985. Good luck with that.

London's burning.. and you've got nothing to say?

Dear Facebook and Twitter (at least those segments of it I pay attention to);

Yesterday, in response to the police shooting and killing a man in Tottenham – no reasons have been given, although theories abound and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating already, which is highly unusual – there was rioting in the streets, two patrol cars torched, several shops burnt. The people living above these shops had to leave their homes and now only have the clothes on their backs. The rioters looted and burnt many things, 8 police officers are in hospital.

From a BBC report:

“Local resident David Akinsanya, 46, said several shop windows had been smashed. "It's really bad," he said. "There are two police cars on fire. I'm feeling unsafe. It looks like it's going to get very tasty. I saw a guy getting attacked." Maria Robinson, another resident, told the BBC: "The police seem very frightened at the moment, people are unstoppable. They've broken into various businesses, jewellery shops, bookies, it's absolutely crazy. They've beaten up a man for talking to the fire brigade." “

I live a mile from both regions of riots. I was away this weekend, just got back. Many of my local shops are closed – shutters are down. The sirens are running constantly. Fire engines and patrol cars stuffed with police are in the streets.

And noone is talking about this on social media, and this is fucking weird, all right? I have a lot of leftie friends who have said nothing, barring a few comments about robbing JD sports for tracksuits or other chav-baiting comments.

However, you had very strong views about:

Ian Tomlinson dying after he was attacked by a police officer

Jody MacIntyre being maltreated by a police officer

The riots following the anti-cuts protest in June

Why is this different? I don't expect anyone to support this rioting. But I kinda thought there might be concern and questions... and their lack is causing me to ask questions. I'm not telling you what to do but I am megaconfused.

Things on my mind:

Was shooting Mark Duggan 'reasonable force'?

There was strong feeling around here when Smiley Culture died under odd circumstances while being searched by the police, in April. . I suspect there are many other dodgy situations and the police rep is hardly high at the moment.

People protest and riot when they are angry and ignored. Tottenham is what politicians call underprivileged and everyone else calls poor and desperate. The burnt out buildings are just down the road from the Job Centre I was going to. It was very busy. In an environment where people are poor and desperate and put-upon, they're more ready to riot. For everyone's safety, if not our wellbeing (I suspect they don't really care about either but it's inarguable that dead people don't vote) it would be in the govt's interest to try and reduce these desperate conditions and the chasm between the guys who make the rules and the guys who take the hits.

If you wanna see how I'm scared it might go, check out the comments on this youtube video of the news reporting the events.

I've had White Riot in my head all day.

“Brixton in South London was an area with serious social and economic problems. The whole United Kingdom was affected by a recession by 1981, but the local African-Caribbean community was suffering particularly high unemployment, poor housing? higher than average crime rate.[6]
In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of Lambeth.[2]”

Wikipedia on the Brixton Riots

This Way To Freedom

I passed a sign saying 'Freedom ->'. So naturally I got off the bus at the next stop and followed it. I was returning from an exam somewhere in London's East End - land of curry, eels and asymmetric fringes - and in the mood for proving my self-determination after being shuffled from assessment to assessment. So I followed my urges and the black and red arrows.

They led between two shabby shops, into a narrow alley between two recent, offensively perky red building, snaked round the left hand corner and entered a dim fire escape. Mounting the arabesqued carpet, I progressed up, wondering whether the arrows exempted me from trespassing charges, and entered a moderately sized-room with bookcases on all walls and a bespectacled young man with Sideshow Bob hair leaning nonchalantly on his chair while reading in the corner.

I may have deceived you, dear reader, into thinking I was bolder and more absurdist than I am. I had an inkling I was entering a radical politics zone by the black and red of the sign, and the fact I passed the ASS office (Advisory Squatting Service) on my way down the alley.

All the same, I tentatively approached the bloke and enquired if this was the anarchist bookshop. He said yes, and authorised me to browse. I flicked through a few magazines exhorting me to support anarchists in jail for hitting pigs, and wandered round lookng at the categories - feminism and anarchism, anarchism for children, historical anarchism, artistic anarchism - before trailing back and admitting I didn't know anything much at all about anarchism.

He asked what I thought of when people mentioned anarchism. I said "Men in beards sitting around slamming their fists on tables and demanding something ought to be done." He was shocked and hurt that I didn't associate it with action of any kind, and sent me off with a seminal work to read (Bakunin, I seem to recall. Central point seemed to be that as anarchism develops everyone will magically stop being a selfish bastard, citing a few studies that did not convince me when considered in the context of the entire history of the world, ever).

At this point an older anarchist with grey hair came in. We shall call him Dave, for no discernable reason.

Sideshow Bakunin greeted him in a distressed tone. "Those kids were hanging round here again, Dave. They were lobbing stuff at us."

Dave seemed to not share his worries, and explained that he had had some success talking to young delinquents, and through the use of sweet reason had persuaded them to pick up the litter they had left there.

"Yeah, well, litter maybe, Dave, but they were throwing big things. We have broken windows. One of them nearly hit Judy with a plank of wood, man! A plank of wood!"

"Did you try talking to them?" Dave repeated his faith in negotiation.

"They just kept throwing things! In the end I had to call the police..."

Bless their little black hearts, foiled by a load of violent yoofs not listening to sweet syndicalist reason.

--this is all 100% true, save the inevitable distortions of memory--

The Recession of Hope

My stupid little self was excited when they said we were in a recession. I'd read about the shanty towns in '29. I'd listened to the punk political rants of the eighties. I thought it would spark political interest and change. Selfishly, I thought I'd be OK.

The first years I was. I got the odd job, lived cheap, didn't notice the pinch. But three years on it's wearing thin. My friends and I have graduated university and we're being wasted. Noone wants to use our skills. Our brains are rotting. We're losing hope and even though there's more to life than work, it saps you not having it.

No overall drive, no part of anything bigger, no reason to get up or leave the house. No money for fun, driving a wedge between you and anyone with a job. No future plans.

No future.

Plenty of time though to sit around and watch the news, to see the Government cutting your handouts, to see the economy contract, to see the layoffs and the pain and the columns from the Guardianistas about how they've suffered too as now they can't buy a large pack of organic smoked salmon.

Plenty of time to call the dole office and ask where your money is, to recieve no answers, to go in for meetings and try and be ignored and resented and to count the pennies and pray for money back and debts recalled and that somehow holidays become free.

It's harder every morning to get up, and if my CV was honest it would read more like a prostitute's calling card. All services offered for money.

Read this.

Lockpick Pornography

This is an order.

Samples:

"I used to steal from heterosexuals for political reasons. Anything owned by a straight white yuppie is bought with oppression. The hetero-normative ownership paradigm is a tyrant belief system that deserves to be undermined on every front, from political protest to petty thievery.

Now I'm a little more honest about it. I can admit that I steal from straight people because I just don't like them. I made myself a t-shirt that says "I break into heterosexual houses so I can masturbate in their heterosexual kitchens.""


"I want to make bumper stickers for politicians and gay rights advocates. They would read 'My other pro-tolerance message is also condescending."

Novel content later, children. For now you need righteousness down your fucking throats.

This season's look is Human

Fire, broken glass, and over everything the immortal beats of the drums. I've never seen Oxford Street look so beautiful. Topshop is wearing a belt of riot cops, lightened with notes of colour from pink and white paintball splashes, and draped in classic spiderwebs of shattered glass.

The crowd stands round, impressed at the monolith of monoculture and how easily it came down. Inside, the shadows of management move like birds with tense steps, wondering how this will affect their sweat-stained stock movement. Rebels shout insults at the police, who stay impassive and blank.

'Did you join the police force to protect leggings?' mocks a dwarf.

Tourists step dainty past, worried about being tainted by disorder. Some of the young ones are probably upset that they can't shop on their visit. Then again, some stop to take memento photos of themselves in the classic one-hand-raised-smile pose, with a background of disgruntled prostesters. This will be something to tell them back home.

Angry, drunken young men approach the police cordon, and shout that they're tools of the system. I think they probably know. I want the men to shut up and go drink their Special Brew somewhere else, because it's just the same lairy, directionless anger you get at 2.30 in the morning, and it never works out well.

'Watch out guys, there's a sock getting away!'

That's the way to do it, short guy. Highlight the absurdity of defending property, of defending money and privilege that will never make it out to society in general. It's sad enough already without more people suffering. We're angry enough already without bringing the aggro.

The band's still going though, and the insistent beat has many of us twitching. With the traffic-suffering street stopped for a blissful hour or two, and the city returned to a place for humans, we can overcome our reserve and do that. We can talk to strangers, pass on advice, pose, stage impromptu theatre. Climb the street furniture. It's our city; a city for people, not cars or corporations.

'How selfish', a middle aged woman says to her joyless partner. 'Don't they understand that some people just want to go shopping?'

Together we crowd Oxford Circus and young punks climb the station and let off banners and fireworks. The signs they hold are vague and about peace, love and understanding. Their trousers are below their buttocks and their outfits are coordinated. They've taken a break from complaining about big business to smoke a cigarette.

They're only young; they'll learn. They're just trying to find the real shit, the good shit.

The traffic lights count down the precious moments when pedestrians are allowed across the junction, when buses and taxis stop to let people without money have a go. We count along and at the final zero dissolve into cheers and roaring, and no car's coming this time.

Later, more shops go down. More fires start and passion and violence and rawness takes over the artificial heart of my sticky city. No more shrink wrap, latest models, body dysmorphia, trading your future for the newest thing.

There are those who can't take this. There are those that think that a broken window has a higher cost than the glazier puts on it, that a day's lost sales is a crime like hurting a human is a crime. That the loss runs deeper than profits, and that this outpouring will hurt what it hopes to salve.

They say we can't hope to bring down the corporations with rights like humans to the standard of humans. They say our country needs more money, the shared hallucination of the modern world. Every sale the country loses due to our hurt feelings means it'll take longer to climb back. Back up the sticky mound of multicoloured bodies that make up the global economy, to resume our rightful position squatting on the false summit. They say we simply cannot live the next ten years in the style to which we've become accustomed. We must tighten our belts, even those of us who have too many belt holes already, and we're only making it worse for ourselves by kicking against the traces.

They're forming an action group against our actions; an action group for traders who are missing profits because we made them listen. Looks like the lines are drawn, and we will lose, because real living is just too extreme these days and the sympathies of the people are with the structures they know. The cut and thrust of promotion, sales racks, sizing, downsizing, credit and debit, keeping promises, stiff upper lip, gentle exercise and avoiding overstimulation. Fire and anger and justice are for TV shows.

But for one day, we had a human heart in the dead, glossy-eyed streets, and it was as bitter and harsh and spontaneous and loving as humans are.

These stories of disorder and panic on the streets, these are my love letters.

Another day, another desperate argument with receptionists

It was sunny, I'd bought some brightly coloured cream cakes, and I'd made it through a week on a low dose. I called in at the doctor's to pick up my prescription and it wasn't there.

The blank barbie receptionist who talks through me explained that I couldn't get that renewed as my last pack was issued too recently. I lied and said I had a few days to go (truly, I ran out on Monday: but was too busy being disreputable to apply for more) but that I wanted to make the transition seamless. Which is the plan, anyway, so it wasn't a total lie.

She said I had two months to go, on a 10mg daily dose. No, I said, I took 30 mg a day and so I'd just finished my pack.

She pointed out that my prescription said 10mg daily; I said my dose was 30mg, it was in my records, and I had assumed that was a printing error.

I didn't say that given my doctor's ineptitude with technology I was surprised it even had a dose on it. I didn't say that my prescriptions had said that for months.

I didn't say I hadn't taken my pills at the correct dose for a week and that I was starting to flake out.

They looked up my records and saw that what I said was true; looked concerned, and pointed out to each other all the different doses in my records. What were they to do? their expressions said. It's a very serious business handing out medication, their expressions said. People say all sort of things to get a little extra hit of selective seratonin reuptake inhibitions.

I explained that I had tried to come down, found the effects too severe, and dropped off gradually. They looked suspicious and confused.

I'm not trying to gull anyone. I just need these to function. I need them so badly I'm talking about my mental health in front of a waiting room full of people.

They tell me I can't have my pills because the system won't let them, that I need to see the doctor and review my status.

I can't wait two weeks to see the doctor. I've had two freakouts in the last week, one in daytime. That's bad news.

I say I rather need my pills. I say I've been taking these for a long time. I say the last time I saw the doctor he gave me a lot of repeat prescriptions and the impression I didn't need to make an appointment every month.

I didn't say that seeing my doctor, my font of database-searching knowledge, for an insincere 'dear' and a chat where he tries to set me at my ease by commenting on my mohawk once a month isn't very helpful. I didn't say that his response to my questions are unhelpful because he's used to patients who don't like science; I didn't say I just want my medications, but I'm tied to the medical services.

My dose confusion is because I'm trying to quit what I've been on for the last seven years, ever since I came to London to live on my own and entered a really dark place. For two months I was scared of certain places in the university, certain phrases, words, scared to sleep; scared to do anything that might make me think of my death, my non-existence. Because thinking of that reduces me to a gibbering screaming spasming ball of panic.

The inevitability of the worst thing I can ever think of happening, the fact noone can save me from it and it's coming for me. I tense and hurt myself and cry and whine and flail and scream and beg anyone or anything to save me from what I fear the most and noone can. It ends when I tire myself out crying, or if I distract myself before I get down into that hole.

That, or the fear of that state, rules my life without the pills. The longer I go without them the more it is everywhere.

So I need my pills, dig.

But they tie me to that sad little clinic and those men telling me what I should do and having to share my privatest feelings every month because they can't remember me. Dependence. I can never just take off and leave because I need a steady supply of those little round white pills.

I want to be free. I'm trying to be free.

It's pulling at me though. I'm not sure I can do it. I wanted to cry at the doctor's receptionists when the three of them stood there and said I couldn't have my fix.

While I've been trying to get by without it this last week, I was hit by it in daylight on the street. Deep breaths, clenched fingers, half-circles of purple in my palms, trying to cling to the here and now in place of fear.

I was hit by it in the bed of a beautiful man. Blind terror, while he slept. I had to go to the cold light of the bathroom and try to regain some sentience. What would he have thought if he'd known? If I'd woken him up primal screaming my existential angst and drooling and sobbing? He can't know. He can't see me like that.

I NEED MY PILLS.

I have an emergency appointment with the doctor tomorrow to sort out the clerical error upon which my continued operation rests. Tonight will be fun.

Don't Worry, Darling

i don't want any more of you than your skin
i won't let your information in
it's not about those things
i hold you like Harlow's monkeys cling
you're a prosthetic for my stump darling

don't worry darling
i know you don't want me to care
you want so much and no more of me there
no darkness no salt no underwear
nothing it takes work to share
just turn me on i'm a mod con don't bother with repair

don't worry darling
i admire the way you know how i feel
no need to talk to me that's not the deal
choose what we do because you're scared of we
baby your doublethink's much more tricky than me
just concentrate on keeping it nasty

maybe it's your view of ladies
maybe my face has different ideas to me
i don't know why you think you're more than medication to me
an injection, a correction, not a surgical connection

(though you can wear the facemask if you want)

don't worry darling,
i know i wouldn't fit with you.
i just take the benefits of you

and I have real friends for real ends.

I need a punch to the face

Something that I have been thinking about a lot recently is how it is impossible to know what it feels like to be anyone else, and how fundamental it is to know that.

SO i'm gonna try and share here how I feel sometimes. Not always; nothing is always, not even suffering, no matter how much it feels like it.

There is a weight battering round in my chest. There is power and springs and random collisions and it is fighting, fighting to get out of me. In my forehead and in my chest it presses.

At times like this I feel a good clean punch to the face would be the best thing for me. That it would drain my fucking stinking lymph filled pus throbbing infection of an existence. That it would be honest, and I would be real, and I would be able to do something that wasn't tarred by the past and by my badness.

Not my sins; i don't sin, noone sins. but still i deserve that sweet crack to the jaw and the brave clean pain to spread across my face like forgiveness.

On Tuesday, I watched a woman die

On Tuesday I watched a woman die.

Then I watched her die again. And again.

She died once for a repressive government.

Once for the power of the media in the people's hands.

Once to show the world these things.

And a thousand times on grainy film her eyes stared out and her nose and throat filled with blood to show me and others like me what we shouldn't let others see.

I didn't know, when I first watched it. Injury I can take. Injury I can see. The warm seas inside us don't scare me.

But they told me while I watched she had evacuated her body. The last process had been completed. I had seen her soul fly, and I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't paying to save everyone else from it either.

Again and again I watched the red flower, the sticky drowning from inside, the stare, the despair, the too-long raw footage and the closing of eyes that didn't close the story.

Again and again I made her die for me. And I didn't learn.