I SPLURGED OUT on Chinese takeaway last night. Chicken ~ satay sauce ~ mixed vegetable fried rice. I felt awfully indulgent spending the 80p extra ~ £3 on the paltry amount of demoralized veg they throw in against £2.20 on "egg fried" rice, but I was in a liberal mood so I splashed out anyway. And didn't even curse myself for missing half of EastEnders in the process..! The whole thing cost me £7.
How times change! I used to buy chicken curry ~ egg fried rice for £3 back in 1992!
That was just about the only nutrition I ever ate in those days, when white bread and jam was what I considered a tasty meal and our sinister landlord never deigned to fix our unworkable oven the entire 12 months we were in there. 2 students and me, the depressed university drop-out who was so unemployable I got turned down for CLOAK ROOM ATTENDANT jobs~!!
1992 feels almost like yesterday in so many ways... that year was the heartland of hardcore "rave", a scene that I liked, but was never really part of. I didn't have the right friends, liked the euphoriant drugs, but was far too depressed ~ clinically so: dragging myself back and forth between psychiatrists' and counsellors' appointments, spending all day doing not very much, and never making seminars (we didn't have lectures ~ a passive form of education like that would have far appealed to me the miserable state I was in...)What I remember most about that time is absolutely hating being alone. My head was about as comfortable a place to live as a roofless burned-out house with boarded windows, no electricity and only rats and mildew for company. So I paid these visits on poor, unfortunate other students who must have cursed the day they made my acquaintance. This was student residences, so visiting unannounced wasn't quite the social faux pas it becomes in later years. Certain rooms attracted a nightly crowd of TV watchers/music listeners/spliffsmokers anyhow. And I sat there. And most of the time had nothing at all to say. Nothing. No confidence. No shared interests. No attraction or attractiveness. Why on earth I didn't just jump in front of a train back then and put everyone out of their misery I do not know... O yes I do. Because I was in Norwich, which is at the end of the line. How very symbolic!
I had a semi-fixation with heroin even back then, though I didn't take it and certainly wasn't fool enough or desperate enough to hang around the roughest areas of town to get ripped off.
Heroin's main appeal to me was those government "Heroin Screws You Up" posters which portrayed alienated youthful angst and said: Do you feel like this? Then heroin's for you! This is widely dubbed the biggest backfiring ad campain in UK history. I mean, I'm not alone in my experience.The second appeal of heroin was the taboo. I kind of semi fell in with a crowd who thought they were awfully hardcore and clever to be experimenting left, right and centre with every new dance pill that came out, various lines of powders ... even ~ ooh! cocaine ~ which was ever so glamorous and forbidden. But if you so much as even mentioned smack, all this open-mindedness closed off. Which made the drug appeal to me even more. So in a way it wasn't peer pressure, but peer antipressure that turned me in the opiate direction. Though I never found myself near any such "scene" for several years after this university student disaster experience of mine...
Thirdly I knew heroin could kill me ~ and that heroin is a painkiller that makes you "high". Nobody could explain this high in a satisfactory way (which piqued yet more curiosity)... but I did recognize that heroin overdose was a painless "easy" death. In fact the first time I ever tried to score I was intent on killing myself, so I gave someone I knew could get heroin (I had met a "connexion" by that time) £50 and said get me as much as you can, fully intending to snort the whole lot and hopefully never open my eyes again. When he gave my money back saying he couldn't get it I was gutted and instead tried zonking myself out on sleeping pills and drink and drowning myself in the bath, fully clothed and weighed down with bricks and as many layers of clothes as I could fit on. But I woke up freezing cold and floating many hours later. Yet another failure.
All in all, re those only days, when I so hated feeling as I did I was prepared to take acid and have a horrible trip than feel dull and depressed as I was, I am glad in a way I never did find heroin. Because if I had, I am sure without any doubt that I wouldn't be alive and posting this now.I was so sad the other night I googled some old "rave" anthems on my phone. This was one of the nights I was awake all night... and felt incredibly old (the music is now called "old skool") and saw how crap most of those parties actually were. (You had to be on drugs to survive one...!)
Anyway. How Chinese takeaway got me on to all this I do not know, but I have to go. It's pissing it down outside, the most gormless of days. Grey skies, drizzle and damp.
PS if you think a three-headed skull-tongue man is a "symbolic" not literal experience, you've never dropped acid!
BODYSNATCH: JUST 4U LONDON
This one sounded transcendently beautiful at 4am on lots of "E"...
"MDMA: a drug so strong makes white men think they can dance ~ no wonder it's illegal":
It's not just the "cool moves" that are so appauling here... its' the thought that these people are in or nearly in their 40s today..!
URBAN SHAKEDOWN: SOME JUSTICE
(why on earth it was called that I've no idea ~ those words are nowhere to be heard in this track...)
"We live as one family" ~ ie "we are all together on E, E, E!!" ...
MDMA/Ecstasy is famous for the transcendent feelings of "empathy and togetherness" it engenders (as well as flying euphoria and irresistible urge to dance) ~ This is what the rave scene was all about. Worst of all, some of us BELIEVED in them..!!! Not so much the druggie stuff but what seemed to be "behind" it all. What utter utter crap.
