I moved away from the edge and dragged a history of trauma and attachments with me. Slowly I set about interpolating the deranged mix of fear, anger and loss - one step after another. I had lost the fight against my enemies and now I needed to find myself again. My wounds bled freely, but the pain was suppressed. My ability to mask had been reinforced by economic exploitation; my mind had been fractured by the duplicity and betrayal of freinds; my heart had been broken by the same old critical and hostile comments that have been used to coercively control women, children, and staff everywhere, across time: Who was I to complain? Repetitiones et mutationes ad infinitum. Natural selection is my God.
Occassional thoughts re-surfaced in the chaos of the night sky. Why do I/we continue internalising the guilt of the previous generation, blaming our dependents and our neighbours for not being us? How does the anxiety of the crowd, escalate seemlessly into paranoia? Am I alone in seeing the perpetrators and victims of sexual and violent crimes fuse together in an eternal conflict? I'll paint the context for you, there was a Class War going on. I enlisted in the Anti-Nazi League. But it was just the Anarchist fringe of the rave scene fighting the Criminal Justice Bill. Loyalist paramilitaries joined forces with the other side.
I graduated from University and fell into the London night life. I became homeless a number of times, took whatever drugs I was given, and toured the Streets looking for the action. Beneath me I heard the scream of steel on steel cascading in the hollow pulsating tunnels of the Underground. Above I saw overcrowded urban landscapes, deprived of emotional warmth, echo chambers for sordid addictions, momentary pleasures wasting fragile hours, weeds clinging on to the scrap heap of humanity. In the distance, there were gleeming glass castles of business and commerce catching the sun on icey peaks. In the foreground, some money trickled-down through demographic populations, defined by gender, age, and sexuality, and splintered in incandescent flames, against the black crust of a seething lava of testosterone fuelled anger, slowly advancing in all directions in the guts of the Beast.
The wind chanted my name like a mob demanding protection money. Chose your side and stick with it. Get your game face on. Leave your all on the pitch. You're fucking going down. I returned to the fray. I returned to the stench of steaming urinals at the Football ground. I paid my subs to the union, the Party, the taxman, and the Team. I slipped back across the puddled toilet floor, and merged with the herd. Penis in hand, I took aim, alongside the rest of us, in a firing line. It's like we were 2 or 3 down but it was only half-time. Still time to drag ourselves up, out of the slime, and go again. I reasoned, doesn't the Holy Bible begin with a man made from soft wet clay? Doesnt he turn into hard dry stone as he is exposed to the flames of hell. As we pissed, I imagined our stale spermaturia chasing cheap beer down municipal drains. The socialisation of our collective genes, expressed according to status, and financial contingencies, extracting our wealth from us, as blood from stones. The suppression and construction of our emotions, over generations, had commanded us across this battleground, regulating the instinct to survive, crushing our mortal bones between heaven and the unforgiving earth. Our piss returns our ashes to the dirt, our life to the drains, our aspirations to the sewers underground.
How could I allow myself to die? How could I not? I was beset by conflict zones, viral loads, tension building across public services, multi-agency safeguarding breaking down. Fragmentation, monopoly, waiting lists, and welfare dependents: a concophony of narratives being constructed at different levels of scale and time, silo thinking within/between industries, gears crunching through the arthritic carcass of the Nation state. Ethno-nationalism, cultural separatism, and the "global majority" respectfully waiting for reparations: splitting migrant nurses from their indigenous patients, mothers from daughters, fathers from sons. Legislation and executive powers, moral injury, military intelligence, zero tolerance, criminal justice, taxation, litigation, rebellion, destruction, desolation.
We fought hard for many years, with many wins and losses in the spaces in between us. Then the final solution came suddenly when I was 59, as the machines replaced Satan, and global capitalism replaced the Nation state. From the world of gamers and hackers, artificially intelligent robots took over the cognitive warfare we had perfected. Political positioning became an automated science, taking perspectives on neural networks, they began targetting the salient features of their moribund audiences, selectively processing stolen enigmas, their prisoners staring blankly down the barrel of a gun, watching their own demise on 72" TV screens. Scrolling on smart phones hastened the end of mass media. Personalised algorithms, the end of the American Dream. Streaming services, the end of popular culture. Click bait, the end of the human spirit. Today, the structures of the psyche are slowly decaying in the heat. Data centres starving us of the light. Starving the blue planet of oxygen. God is dead, Nietzsche said. And I managed to survive, at least until I was 29.
