Burrough-ing Underground

Friday night i decided to take in the new Nic Cage movie, Bad Lieutenant. Nic Cage has made some duff choices in his career - not least financial - but when he's on, as in Wild At Heart and Leaving Las Vegas, he's a blinding actor. Bad Lieutenant needed to impress me, as they all but stole the title and idea from Abel Ferrara, who also made a film called Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Kietel, which was so close to the knuckle i'm suprised it ever got released.

Anyway, as i wondered through the open sewer that is Bath city centre on a Friday night, i approached a homeless chap sat on the floor, his jacket in front of him with a few bits of loose change in it. Feeling affluent and in need of good karma (if you do something specifically to gain good karma you never get good karma do you?), i went to give him some change. As i got closer i could hear him mumbling away to himself. It was like a stream of consciousness kind of thing, and i strained to filter out the crap and see if there was anything coherent going on. I reached down to drop change in and the homeless guy stopped his rambling, looked me in the eye and said 'Now do you know what the truth is?' He then looked away and continued with his babbling.

Things sometimes seem like such a good idea don't they? I get told by some people not to give money to homeless chaps for various reasons. Commonly they are 1) They may not be homeless. To this i say they still deserve money for dressing and smelling like that and hanging on a street corner in the cold. 2) They'll only spend the money on drugs and booze. To that i say so would i in their position. And i'll probably only spend my money on booze anyway. If you're going to fake being homeless and be such a good method actor you're willing to learn how to babble incoherently for hours on end until someone approaches you and you can then freak them out with a crazy ass sentence......you still deserve money.

Einstein was brilliant enough to realise that time is relative. The faster you go, the slower time goes until you get to the speed of light. Then some very odd things start to happen. If you were to travel very very very fast, your time would pass slower than mine. Time then, is subjective. Albert also said that time and space are intrinsincally linked. This isnt just a theory either, we know this to be true as the Hubble telescope has taken snap shots of galaxies in their infancy. It basically looks back in time and it can do this because it can see so far away.

In the same way, many people consider truth subjective. Do i know what the truth is Mr Homeless Freak Out Man? I know what the truth is according to me. I never tire of saying there's always three sides to a story. There's the two protagonists view and then there's what really happened.

Anyone who's experienced a nasty argument or the pain of a relationship breaking down, can testify that the truth is a very shady area. You know what really annoys me? When people say "I didn't lie, i just didn't tell you everything". As if concealing the truth isn't telling a lie. I believe it is.

William Seward Burroughs was an author. He was part of a splendid collection of reprebates called the Beat Generation. Burroughs was the oldest one. He labelled himself a 'queer', and was homosexual throughout his life. Although he tried to become a straight man by getting married to Joan Vollmer and having a kid, Burroughs couldn't deny who he was. I'm not homophobic, but i can say i've never had any gay tendencies. I will say though, that Burroughs made a good point about gay sex, when he pointed out that at least with gay sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, and you know what to do to make the other person feel good. Us men we fumble and stumble, searching for the fabled 'G spot' and if we're lucky we brush past the clitoris on the way. Like Burroughs said, if you're sleeping with someone of the same sex, you know what to do as you've done it to yourself through numerous masturbation sessions.

Burroughs was famous for his book, Naked Lunch. A really fucked up thing i can't even begin to describe. Forget the Cronenberg film, its not worth talking about. The other thing Burroughs was famous for was shooting an apple off his wife's head at a party. Burroughs loved guns bless him. He was a good aim too. But not that day. He shot and killed Joan and fled from Mexico.

Aaaanyway. Burroughs' Grandfather invented the Burroughs Adding Machine. As such, his family came into a great deal of wealth. Burroughs received regular monthly payments to fund his drug and alcohol habits, much to the understandable anger of his parents. It was Burroughs view that the truth lay with the underground. Much like Dostoyevsky. Burroughs was rich, but chose to hang around with people like Huncke the Junky in New York. He did this believing that the underground, bohemian characters knew more about life than anyone else, and he wanted a part of it.

For many these days to be down and out, to be beat, to be bohemian, is nothing more than a fashion statement or a load of student posturing. A bunch of people read the seminal works of the Beats - On The Road by Jack Kerouac, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, and Burrough's Naked Lunch, and basically built the sixties out of it. I assure you the shockwaves are still reverberating now. On The Road was written using the same stream of consciousness as my friend the Homeless man. Kerouac would hitch coast to coast with only a few dollars in his pocket, i can't see too many doing it now without the back up of a credit card.

I don't know what the truth is when it comes to being homeless. I can't even begin to imagine how that must be. I do know that the homeless guy's words stayed with me as i made my way into the thankfully very empty Little Theatre. The film was very good. Well, it was made by Werner Herzog. How can you not be good at things with a name like that? As i made my way back to my vehicle, through the drunks and the slappers, i looked for the homeless guy again. He had gone. Gone to carry on writing his book in his head. Gone to ask more do-gooders searching for good karma existential questions. Gone to experience a life i hope i will never have to know.
And that's the truth.

A Joke

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in"

There's a Greek proverb for you. And, all things being equal, it's a stunner.

I am a little tetchy sometimes with our left-wing hand wringing moralisers when it comes to the subject of the environment. Of course the environment must be protected, but i tire of people saying it will 'be the end of the world'.

Noooooo. You see, the world will always be here until the sun dies. It's held in place with some very basic laws of physics. What you mean is, WE won't be here if we keep on the way we are and, some might say that's a good thing.

And why might that be a good thing? Because despite efforts to the contrary, those that can do what the Greek proverb encourages us to do, seldom do it.

And a case in point is the little 'joke' left behind by Liam Byrne, telling his successor there's no money left in the treasury.
I don't know about you, but i do enjoy dark humour. Forrest Gump for example. That's black humour of the highest order. A retarded chap all but changes the world while his girlfriend fucks every hippy this side of Charles Manson, then finally fucks Forrest before dying of something one can only assume to be AIDS. The fact that she gave birth to a child - probably whilst infected - means he too stands every chance of being infected, dying early and leaving our loveable retard without his true love and child.

Pass the needle, i think my sides have split.

If i can see humour in that, surely i can see humour in Liam's message?
Well no....no i can't. I know politicians aren't robots, and that many - John Major being a shiny example - are grey and boring. Surely the odd rib tickler here and there should be accepted with open arms?

It would be, except for two factors:

1) Imagine if Labour had won. That means we still wouldn't have any money, but they'd be hiding the fact. I wonder how much more debt we would have got into while they held the reigns for another 4 years.

2) It feels like they fucked it up on purpose, knowing someone else would have to clean up their shit. Again.

You know those times when you're doing something either in anger or the name of fun, and you don't really realise the full implications of what you're doing until after you've done it?

During the election campaign, i was so eager for Labour to piss off, i never fully grasped what the alternative was. Labour did piss off....eventually, and now i look round to see the result. I got my way and i'm left with the Tory party. A coalition no less, but a Tory party at heart.

I get confused at those branding Tories as 'toffs'. Most MPs are. Mandelson - the backbone of New Labour - is a Lord. Don't see many working class Lords these days i gotta say. What you mean to say is, the Tories look out for toffs. That's what you mean to say. Get it right.

I hope that this new coalition - which we know will never work but hopefully the Demmers can do some good while they're on the peripherals - will begin following the proverb. Start planting trees - not necessarily literally - that future generations can sit under, because just leaving a note around confessing you've handled the situation appallingly, isn't going to help anyone.