2002-01-30 - 7:26 p.m.
�Everything�in its right place��
Despite the lasting uncontained amusement at the day that FINALLY HE WAS MISTAKEN FOR ME, I made my way to work with unusual thoughts of committing spectacularly bloody suicide, live on daytime TV. It hadn�t been a particularly stressful morning thus far. I mean, I�d butter-fingeredly dropped a contact lens down the plughole. Had to iron a pair of trousers I�d mistakenly thought were already pressed. Nothing especially horrific to induce this spate of undue crankiness. But it was just one of those weird chemical imbalances that you get, where everything around you just wants to make you puke fetid blood until your own small intestine reaches up and suffocates you, just to end the suffering. That kind of thing.
In these cases, the essential accessories for �the commute� are a) headphones and b) an attitude of disaffected, sneering nihilism. Any music will do (I, unoriginally, chose Radiohead) as long as it drowns out the snivelling grunts of your fellow humans. Staring blankly ahead as if you�re either about to cry or hack the entire carriage into small chunks in a frenzied scimitar attack is a favoured pose to strike on the tube, along with a cold, robotic reaction to anyone jockeying to get past you. It�s very therapeutic. By the time I got to the office I was practically skipping down the road.
There was a peak of hatred, though. As the faceless hordes approached the ticket barriers at King�s Cross, one commuter made the almost Darwinian mistake of fumbling his ticket, dropping to the floor to retrieve it right in front of the paddles, the swarming drones, baying for their workstations were upon him and down he went and, I swear, at least three people stepped OVER him before he could recover. What is happening to this fucking city?! The cattle mentality, obviously boosted by the introduction of genetically modified beef into the food chain, has us in its vice-like grip. I just thought, if I stop and just start randomly stabbing people as they pass through the barrier, will they just keep coming, the ones that get past just counting themselves lucky and dashing to clock in? I definitely need more vitamins, I think.
It reminded me, though, of the catalogue store my friend back home manages. It was Christmas Eve. There are a million sweaty-faced desperados piling through the doors buying whatever they can lay their hands on as the availability / desirability trade-off goes into freefall. One guy has drunk his way to inspiration, and walks through the huge plate window at the shop front, leaving a jagged, man-sized gap in the glass. As he is carted off to hospital and a present-free holiday, and before the busy store assistants have had chance to seal off the gaping window hole, the bovine consumers, in their unblinking fucking stubbornness to get into the store, are walking through the self same hole, crunching through the still-falling glass to skip the queues, traipsing into the store like a docile, product-dazed trail of death-shard baiting lemmings. Just�stunning.
I mean, how long can this species go on?
�Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon�.�
The pablo tour Spring 2002:
February 8th-11th: Barcelona
March 5th-12th : New York City
March 22nd : San Francisco
Late March: Los Angeles
Be there, or�.live somewhere else.
�Everything�.in its right place��
