Work! Consume! Die!. Frankie Boyle

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

       Chapter 3

      The old cliché of men saying their partner ‘doesn’t understand them’ comes about because we deliberately look for women who don’t understand us, who don’t understand what cunts we are. Women who have insight? Perceptive women who see through us? We run like hell from those women. No man wants to hear the truth. That after 40 nobody desires you – they put up with you because you remind them of their dad. Don’t hate yourself for struggling in relationships, it’s tough. Only being allowed to fuck one person – and that being the person whose farts you’ve listened to for the last ten years – is the sort of abject test that you would be set in hell.

      We live in a society where women are demonised for having children in their teens when they are biologically meant to have them but there is no such stigma for women having children via IVF in their 40s. This is because what we see as the defining factor in bringing up a happy child is whether you have money, not whether you are still young enough to engage in play, or have the energy to love them properly. Still, you can use the money to hire some teenage girl. ‘Tommy! We’ve hired someone who’s fun, we’ve hired someone who likes you’; and she can play with them while you look on exhaustedly with a mug of tea.