London Calling…

I loved the movie. The first time I saw it I was deeply impressed with the storyline, and the characters and direction were fresh and fascinating. Brad Pitt as an antisocial weirdo’s hot alter ego in low cut jeans didn’t hurt either. Subsequently I also read the book, which delighted me because so much of the script was faithful to the books narrative, though the essential plot seems to be somewhat squished and twisted into movie form.

But sometimes I find it vastly irritating. Not in and of itself, but in people’s interpretations and the depth they see in the shallowest parts of the idea. Fight Club as I see it was a demonstration of how easily society could theoretically be subverted. That in elevating man so far above the level of an animal we have so thoroughly lost touch with instinct and real emotion, that the slightest contact with either sends us into a frenzy of desperation for more.

It tells us we go to soulless offices every day, and never challenge our own personal hierarchy. That we do not understand what we do, or its place in the world, and so we do not really care and cannot bring ourselves to. That the slight snub of a co-worker is a major event in our lives, that we seek to perfect ourselves through obtaining material things, and that in the end, none of these things truly matter. That we allow ourselves not to matter either, and be trampled by the world and all the other pointless soulless people in it. So when we are offered the chance to feel something real, or passionate, it becomes the centre of our lives, an addiction. If we face losing it we will kill, or die, or subjugate ourselves to keep it.

“You are not your fucking khakis�. I’ve heard it so often as a rebellion from materialism, an assertion that who you are is deep inside you, and could never be defined or contained within something you buy, or want, or go to work to do. Newsflash kids, you are most definitely your fucking khakis. Do you really think your underwear, suit, and Ikea couch don’t say anything about you? That they aren’t an expression of who and what you are? If you bought it, keep it, or do it, it’s you. Because you chose it, you chose how to behave and how to live. You chose to work in a multinational, you chose to live in the suburbs, you chose your bathroom tiles and your couch. You chose your life, and if you drifted into it without noticing, that’s your fault, not the fault of society.

Fight Club makes the excellent point that no matter how much you happen to like say, your kitchen table, you don’t need it to be happy. The part people seem to miss is that neither do you need to reject it to be happy. The only thing you really need is the knowledge of what is important, and what isn’t. Astonishingly, thats the part most people manage not to have.

Mostly, the difference is that feminism is conceptually stupid, whereas being a bitch is just conceptually nasty. Besides which, I don’t really see myself as a bitch, I just know I am seen as one by other people, presumably because I’m verbally agressive and I don’t beam sunshine out my arse.

Feminism, as I understand it, is a movement that believes women are superior to men in some way. Possibly every way, I’ve never manged to get that far into the argument. If this is not the case, then they should stop calling themselves something so dumb and be egalitarianists. Or another theory I’ve heard is that feminism is seeking to even things out after the centuries of oppression by men, and therefore the goal is simply for women to have the advantage in circumstances like the workplace.

What a pile of utter drivel. I don’t give a damn what happened previously, you can do the right thing _now_. So why would anyone decide to ignore equality and logic for the sake of some sneaky honourless vengeance? I would be understandably pissed if I wasn’t given a job or a promotion purely because of my gender. But I’d be just as insulted if not more so were I to discover that I had been given something _because_ I was female.

Then there’s the “feminism is just the celebration and empowerment of womanhood” bit. Great, good for you. Have a fucking medal for being born with a uterus. Women aren’t special. Either everyone is special or no-one is. Men and women tend to be differently talented and have diverse personalities, these are inclinations rather than set rules.

I suppose the crux of this rant is that I don’t understand why people are proud of something they have no control over. You can’t be proud of being a woman, or from your country, or beautiful, or smart. You can only be proud of what you do with those things. Anything you are born with is, depending on how you look at it, a gift, or a random chance.

If you’re a woman, and you’ve overcome huge diversity to be where you are in life, congratulations. If you’re a man and you’ve done that, same deal. If you’re beautiful, and make millions as a model, hell even a stripper or a porn star, then you capitalised on what you had. Well done. If you have a 180 IQ and you put together boxes for a living, you deserve a slap. Preferably a slap from someone with half your intelligence, who’d love to be doing anything other than putting boxes together, but just doesn’t have the wherewithal.

Generally speaking, I am unimpressed by suicide. I don’t care how bad you feel. I really, really don’t. I’m leaving out the question of whether its actually morally wrong or not, because I’m not sure what the answer should be. I will happily argue however, in favour of it being selfish, stupid, and incredibly cowardly.

It is not a brave venture into the unknown, it is not a resolution of your own destiny by your own hand. Its fucking retarded. It an admission of weakness beyond any other, you are saying that you cannot handle _living_, the most basic and simple of functions in modern society. It the easy way out of the worst situation, and it is the ultimate shirking of responsibility. It is fucking pathetic to take your own life in an overwhelming majority of circumstances.

But by all means, if thats your decision, feel free to do as you choose. Your life is not subject to any rule dictated by myself, your life belongs to you and you alone, to dispose of as you see fit. But for the love of fucking anything at all, please do not fucking kill yourself by jumping on the tracks of the London fucking Underground. You fucking stupid asshole. Have I used enough expletives to communicate my rage? A resounding maybe!

There must be a million ways to kill yourself in this golden age of humanity. Heroin overdose, hanging, bullet in the brain, sleeping pills, falling on your fucking sword, walking into a chav pub and asking for tea and biscuits, becoming a security guard in Iraq, to name but a few. So why the fuck would anyone choose to forego all of these convenient and readily available deaths just to be crushed by a filthy train?

First off, the only place you have access to the track is the platform. By the time the train gets to the platform, it is now going much more slowly than normal. So instead of dying a quick squishy death as you are splatted like a bug on the front windscreen of a speeding monster, you are slowly crushed to an agonising end as a circle of slack-jawed gawkers slowly gathers for some human/trainwreck traditionalism. Frankly, it makes no sense.

Unless you consider the fact that by flinging yourself underneath a tube you are not only ending your crappy existence in this world, you are also fucking up everyone else’s day. Is that the dying wish of these morons? “The world is too much for me, so I will take my life while simultaneously annoying several hundred thousand people”. Is it a cry for attention? “My life is hell, so I will make everyone else’s just that little bit worse, maybe then they’ll realise how miserable I was”

Do us all a favour and ritually disembowel yourself instead.

At least thats my question about it. The word itself pretty much explains the nature of it. Something designed to engender terror. Someone asked me today if the current state of affairs in London ever made me worry about being there or avoid using the tube. The answer is “absolutely never”. I suspect a similiar response would come from most people who live here, too.

London has a different attitude to these things than many other cities. I suppose the best example recently of a city shitting itself in terror was NY after the World Trade Centre attacks. Not that those attacks weren’t serious, they involved huge loss of life, but the blow to the american ego and sense of self-righteous and safe superiority was much more severe than the blow to the headcount.

London has been bombed multiple times, for years on end. It has been a centre of violence, intrigue and conspiracy, has survived angry mobs, the great fire of 1666, and the black plague, amongst other disasters.

I will happily concede I was around for none of these events or circumstances, and that neither was anyone else living there today. But living memory is not necessary, the city has its own memory. The way things are built, and the way the police work, the lack of bins on city streets, the reaction to someone leaving a bag unattended on the tube. That is the memory of a society, of a place, the structure which shapes the future and offers an insight into the past.

When the London suicide bombings happened last year, everyone still went to work that day. Within 24 hours the tube was running again. Transport For London did not grind to a screeching halt, nor did everyday life. It was a tragedy, and no-one denied that. But to let everything come to a standstill is to be beaten. The Americans may have come back with guns as well as a major personality disorder, but they did have to run crying to their rooms first. They may win the war on whatever underdeveloped nation they choose, but the war on terror is the one they have already lost. They are afraid.

Perhaps I grossly generalise. I was not in NY then. I have never been there. All I have to go by is news and the speeches made by idiotic politicians. But I am here, and London is not afraid. Apathetic, indifferent, maybe slightly paranoid. But not afraid. The point of all of this is fear and intimidation. By the fuckwits who bomb the tube or by the government who looks to take advantage of public apprehension, its all the same.

I treat the thought of dying from a bomb on the tube the same way I treat the thought of being hit by a double-decker bus. Except that I’m fairly certain the odds of the bus are substantially higher. Those fuckers are dangerous.

So no, I’m not afraid, and neither are most people I know here. Yes, I value my life, and the only thing I value more than it is how I live it. I value it too much to ever live in a way I do not choose, and I do not choose to be afraid of an intangible threat. Though admittedly most tangible ones have trouble penetrating the thick layer of arrogance too.

But I’d rather be an arrogant bitch than soil myself every time I watch the news.

Is anyone familiar with the concept of a gift economy? Well I am. At least, I am now. I went to a talk on various aspects of Burning Man (read: hippie) culture. The worst one by far was the “gift economy” talk which may have been the biggest load of crap I have ever heard in my life. Unfortunately, the speaker was useless. Had she been any less than terrible I would have felt entirely fine about arguing with her, but as things stood any debate between us would have resembled a rabbit being run over by an articulated lorry.

I’ll cover the concepts that were expressed very briefly, and then rant about them at length. First off they claimed that capitalism “believed in scarcity”, the logic of this being that this is why they save, or “hoard” posessions. Gift economists, or worthless hippies as I generally prefer to call them, “believe in plenty”, and therefore share everything.

What the fuck?

Believing in plenty kinda sounds like the act of believing there is more than enough for everyone actually makes some sort of difference to reality. Like somehow, giving away whats yours will magically create more to go around. Except of course for the essential flaw here, because nothing is yours. You have no right to anything, the only things you will have are gifted to you by someone else, someone who has no reason to give you anything except your need of it.

The more capable you are of surviving, the less you will be given, the more you contribute, the less you will receive and the more you must give away, all the time, to those who do less, but need more. Nothing can be earned, everyone is a beggar. The act of giving becomes meaningless, nothing is given but for the sake of need. Nothing is posessed, because that would be hoarding.

Capitalism is based on getting what you earn, on trading value for value. No, its not perfect as a system. But its by far the best concept anyone has come up with. but it means if you want something, and you work hard enough, have enough skills or talents, you can get it. In a gift economy, the only things you can possess are what no-one else needs or wants. What a disgusting waste of human ability and achievement.

Not that such an impractical and ridiculous idea could ever be put into practise anyway. Humans are fools, not suicidal imbeciles. I will never believe humanity is crap enough to really attempt that. I just wish they would stop calling it a utopian fucking ideal. Because if thats an ideal evolved society, then I’ll take back my banana, crawl into a tree, and scratch myself for the rest of my life. It will be more worthwhile.

A very good friend of mine holds this as the eventual end for all of us too selfish or crazy to be in relationships with other human beings. To grow old, and die alone, accompanied by gin and cats. As pathetic deaths go, I like the poetic quality of the idea. Though upon hearing me describe this as my future the other night, another friend suggesting snakes and tequila as an exciting and challenging alternative, so I may take that one on board instead.

What is so terrible about being alone? What is it that we are all so afraid of? I don’t care if I die alone or surrounded by a cast of thousands, I’ll still be fucking dying and I can’t imagine I’ll be happy about it. Frankly, I would rather die alone than spend my life with someone who wasn’t good enough. Someone once told me you shouldn’t marry someone you can live with, you should marry someone you can’t live without. There is no-one on earth that I cannot live without, and I doubt there ever will be.

Now who can explain to me exactly why this should worry me?

People, in large part, piss me off. In huge crowds they are mindless, in small groups they are scared of themselves, or each other, or shocked by anything that steps outside the expected. Individually they are occasionally tolerable, but all too often their behaviour and personality are gratuitous, unoriginal, and dull.

This does not mean I toil through life, miserable and in search of someone who understands me.

Everyone wants to be understood. Personally, I’d limit that a bit. I want to be understood by someone worthwhile. Imagine being understood by someone you don’t like or respect. How slimy and demeaning. To think that your personal thoughts and impulses are easily guessed by someone stupid, or petty. That your mind is not your own, or if it is, then that doesn’t make it private, sacrosanct, or complex enough to confuse an idiot you wouldn’t interact with in a pub.

I don’t like very many people. So fucking what? It doesn’t mean I’m a bitter, angry little girl who can’t reconcile her own deficiencies. And it certainly doesn’t mean I’m unhappy. Sure I rant about things that annoy me, or that I disagree with, but take it as a basic premise to everything I say when I tell you that I love life, mine in particular. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t care about the things that are wrong with it sometimes.

There are people I do like. Significant in number, but not percentage. It would be an insult to them if I also went around liking people who weren’t worth it. I don’t disregard people because I have a shitty sense of self-worth, that sort of thinking is for people who watch too much Dr Phil. I disregard people because I believe my friendship and esteem are worth something, and I won’t give them out for no good reason.

So here’s the story. I don’t pretend to like anyone, ever. If you meet me, you start at zero – complete indifference. I don’t do politeness if it facilitates lying, I don’t like being lied to either, which includes exaggerated or nonsensical compliments, or any other form of bullshit. And I do. Not. Care. Whether you like me. Or not.

I do this. People have complained extensively about it in the past. Presumably because I am female and therefore walk around with a massive neon sign over my head that says “Please kill and eat me, for I am in fact made of chocolate and strawberries, and do anything people tell me to do”

Leaving aside some glaring biological inconsistencies, lets start with exactly why this attitude is a pile of utter horse shit. Firstly, its up to me. If I’m stupid enough to do something blatantly inadvisable, then I think I can safely state that its my own goddamn problem. Not yours, nor anyone else’s. And it does not endear you to me in the slightest when you make it clear that you consider me incapable of performing this, the simplest of tasks, on my own.

I am not impressed by your concern. Or your guilt, for that matter. People have used arguments in the past which run along the lines of “But I’ll feel bad if anything happens to you, would you really want me to feel bad?” I now have a completely just and honest response. I don’t give a damn. If you choose to allow yourself to feel guilty for something not your responsibility, then that is fuck all to do with me. In fact, how dare you use your own emotional bullshit to try and force me into doing something.

So don’t bother insisting. By all means offer me a lift home if you genuinely wish to, I can assure you the offer will not go unappreciated. The fact that I occasionally like walking alone doesn’t exclude all other forms of travel and certainly doesn’t mean I hate when people offer to drive me. But anyone who attempts to pull the “there’s no point in walking because I’ll drive along beside you” stunt again, will soon find themselves crawling along at 5mph on the busiest road I can find at 3am.

And now to prepare myself for the inevitable angry comment from my mother on why I really shouldn’t do these things. Sigh.

Like, for example, that no-one does a study just to discover how many arachnids are consumed by the average person in a year. This has been a sticking point between a friend of mine and I in the past. I am aware that this “fact” has been purported as true around the internet for years. That doesn’t mean it make any fucking sense whatsoever.

People are not very clever. Or rather, cleverness no longer seems to be a barrier to being fooled by utterly ridiculous nonsense. Is the world so fantastical now that we can no longer discern reality? Take for example, the spiders.

First off, no-one has ever decided to do a study on this particular topic. Do I know this for sure? No, I must admit that I do not. But I will officially bet fifty quid right here and now that no such study has ever occurred, or produced any, not to mind conclusive, results. Anyone? I’ll give you a month to dig out any information on one. If I’m wrong, I’ll apologise profusely to a certain swedish person, and give you the money, but I somehow doubt it.

A pity really because what a wonderful thing it would have been to recruit for. “We’d like to monitor you every night for a year, along with a hundred others”… “Why?”… “To see if you should happen to eat any spiders while asleep, and how many on average that works out as per person. Its for the good of mankind, really”…

Or perhaps one day a group of scientists were conducting a sleep study, which for some reason was taking place in a completely open and normal home environment, and suddenly one of them realised that one sleeper had eaten a spider, and that it could be essential to the future of science to count the number of spiders that everyone ate and thus calculate the average consumption rate. Uh huh. Yeah.

So why is it so damn easy for people to believe this? Why do people take random completely unrealistic nonsense, and behave as if it is a foregone conclusion? I’m a cynic, and I don’t believe things unless they make sense. I have come to the inevitable conclusion that people do not think. Perhaps they feel they do not have to, as long as someone is there to think for them. By definition, this idea is grossly flawed, but to people who don’t think, that fact is unlikely to become apparent.

I suspect that gullibility is a contagious disease.

The following things suck so deeply, that I may not be capable of putting them in words.

Bebo
MySpace
OKCupid
Orkut

Why? Because they are all “networking� websites. The sole purpose of which is to make new acquaintances via the medium of that sprawling tentacled monstrosity we lovingly call the web. What on earth could be wrong with making new acquaintances through old friends, one might innocently inquire?

Well, first off, and trust me I’m warming up, its because an astounding number of the people who attempt to contact you through these sites invariably end up being people who do not, in fact, speak English. Now, I have no problem with people not speaking English. There exist approximately 6 million languages of which I myself am outrageously ignorant. However, I do not leave comments in English on people’s fucking Portuguese homepages, so I completely fail to understand why a host of morons expect me to read their ranting in a language I don’t speak, and then add them to my “friends list� or whatever the fuck it might be called.

Furthermore, like so many things on the internet, they are extremely easy for even the most retarded of individuals to grasp. This makes them a compelling imbecile magnet, so that anyone who might actually have been using the site for its originally intended purpose is very quickly tired of being constantly bombarded by huge waves of idiocy. (Yes, much like sound, idiocy travels in waves. Sometimes you can actually see them emanating from the people wearing both baseball caps and hoodies simultaneously)

Then of course, they sweep the net in a massive on-going fad that grabs an entire generations worth (generation in internet terms meaning “about 6 months�) of users. If any more than 3 of these users is of your personal acquaintance then suddenly this new annoying piece of shit website suddenly becomes the only means through which they can be contacted, forcing you to set up an account there purely to keep in contact, or be complained at for your discernment between a useful networking tool, and a pile of utter tripe.

Sometimes I really wish certain concepts were tangible enough to be firebombed.