| « 27.5.14 | I like girls who are into drugs » |
I am officially disabled
"No, I can't do that. What if they ask me to prove I'm disabled? I'm not disabled."
"They won't though," he insisted. "Just say your Dad's lost his. Say he's a bit forgetful."
"I don't know, I'm not sure. Will they not check?"
My new mate down the pub has just lent me his key to get into the disabled toilet rather than going upstairs to the normal one, and is now urging me to go to the Town Hall to get one of my own.
"Look, have you got three quid?"
"Yes."
"Well give it me and I'll go and get you one." A few minutes later he is back with a sparkling key. It opens up a nationwide vista of free micturition.
All is resolved with Donna. She replied graciously to the email I sent her (which I posted in the comments last time) saying that she also isn't interested in a long-distance relationship but would still like to go to Glasgow. She rang up an hour later and we agreed not to cancel the double room, but we would respect the no entry sign. After that we'll just keep it as dancey friends.
I had a good chat with my youngest about drugs the other night. There was just me and her left up at about half past eleven. I just answered her questions in a straightforward way. While the girls' sex education is rigorously scientific and thorough, where they practice putting condoms over dowelling rods, and study anatomical line drawings of pudenda, discussion of drugs is little more than propaganda and misinformation, using only extreme, unrepresentative cases to advance a one-sided argument that doesn't reflect the experience of the majority of responsible drug users.
"Thing is Melanie, the reason drugs will never go away is that despite what they tell you at school, 99% of the time they're just marvellous, if you've got the right context and people around you. I mean, friends of mine you know, people who've been round here and looked after you, they're occasional drug users and they get up in the morning and go to work and look after their children. They're not the wild-eyed lunatics they probably show you from these American horror sites about meth addicts."
She was curious about the effects of acid, ecstasy, speed and heroin. I have no experience of the latter, but I told her about Damon Albarn's short article in the Independent recently when he said it was a great help in the creative process on one of Blur's albums. I also repeated the obvious point that two of the most dangerous drugs in the world are legal in the UK.
Erica and me and a few others ran through pouring rain to a city centre pub which was having a few DJs on in the garden. A very irritating woman of my acquaintance came and started drivelling some crap and riffling her hands through my hair. I told her to fuck off. I was worn out with this election work and didn't have the patience for her. She came back a few minutes later and tried to talk to me again and I just waved her away. She's the kind of person whose friends dwindle down to clownish women who can't say hello without doing a dance of hugging.
I was clearly not talking to her, but instead to someone I know from years back, a good DJ and partygoer. His friend said he remembered one of my gigs about twenty years ago. "That was fucking amazing," he said. (Who wouldn't get a little thrill when someone says that about something you've done twenty years ago?) I was going through a Dadaist phase at the time and the show involved the insertion of an ecstasy tablet (actually an aspirin) up my rectum after removing some long johns with a red bicycle light hanging in front of my willie. Such innocent days.
It was really wet though, and I nipped across the road to Neil's flat and had a couple of pints of strong Belgian ale, which they'd been given but don't drink, and I dried my socks on the radiator. I had that pleasantly sensual, garrulous, delirium that comes from lack of sleep, having worked very long hours at the elections.
We declared our result at 12.30am this morning. Trina was kind, picking me up and sitting with me as I sat glazed with tiredness and gulped down three pints of cider.
6 comments
Don’t get me started on drug teaching in schools.
They do nothing to dissuade the views forced on them. My offspring, the little gobby one :-), has on more than one occasion put people right about alcoholics and that we aren’t all smelly tramps pissing themselves of park benches.
As you say in any urban area in the UK these days you are barely ever yards and moments from access to one of the most harmful drugs ever. I know I thought I was clever not getting into all that illegal jazz when I was younger… about £200,000 later and a rehab stint along with the night sweats and tremors I was so happy about that choice.
Does make me inwardly smile sometimes, when, on their fifth pint and tenth fag of the day, some people start fulminating about drugs.
The odd bit of speed or e at a gig or a night when you want perking up though – it’s about as risky as eating peanuts (i.e., a tiny proportion of people will react badly to it).
Do you REALLY think you’ll both respect the ‘no entry’ sign? Are you trying to kid us or yourselves?
Is Melanie’s mother aware of your frank discussion? She might have a more traditional take on it.
A film of your gig from 20 years ago would have been a YouTube sensation, I’m sure.
You do have this streak of conservatism and pessimism Mark :) Last week you were asking me where all that honesty will get you. A woman spending a weekend on a dancefloor, plus next week, flying up to Glasgow to meet me, plus superb snogging. That’s where it gets me (although yes, that might just be a lucky one-off I suppose).
For legal purposes the following sentence is not true: Kirsty and boyf are as enthusiastic users of the drugs as I am, and would only welcome a discussion such as that. Drugtaking is completely normalised within my kinship and peer groups.
She wouldn’t even think it worthy of comment even. And what I say to Melanie is my own affair, even though I’d happily repeat the conversation verbatim to Kirsty.
Re the no sex agreement. We will respect it. Perhaps some Kim-type sex coming up – wanking together. Or I don’t know, anything. You can imagine. But really, truthfully, that boundary is not going to be crossed. There is more than one way to skin a cat and enjoy yourselves, without the cock-cunt interface coming into it.
Yeah, it was pre-You Tube. Someone coming up to you in a pub twenty years later and saying they remember it – that’s worth more than any number of internet fan hits to me.
So you have been a performance artist?
And you have worked at the elections? At the EU elections?
And you made a no sex deal with Donna?
WOW Looby, you’re my hero! *MWAH!*
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