Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  The guys come round and we have a cup of tea and watch Florence and Connell in this BBC Scotland sitcom about an unemployed former metal band called Bitches Buroo, and drop the microdots I scored. It starts as this philosophical, futuristic buzz and when the show ends Stewart goes over and puts Dr. Octagon on the stereo.

  Paul has this completely asymmetrical face. He got a bad eye injury as a kid, which exaggerates it, but I start to think how it’s expressive of him, the bit that wants to visit the 23rd dimension and the tense bit that wants to be normal. His face, it suddenly occurs to me as I come up, is a yin–yang symbol.

  Stewart is talking about Terence McKenna, who he’s got right into. He starts quoting this thing about how we can choose to enlarge our consciousness or remain brutish prisoners of matter.

  ‘Yes!’ I laugh, as the acid drips me that loose physical buzz. ‘That’s that quote I used for that HMV thing! They wanted a quote from someone who’d inspired you for a poster campaign at Christmas. I gave them brutish prisoners of matter!’

  Stewart: ‘That’s cool man!’

  Me: ‘They didn’t use it – they used someone quoting Ferris Bueller.’ I’m overcome with the giggles.

  Stewart is grinning. ‘That’s fucked … these fuckers are … brutish prisoners of matter!’

  I shrug. ‘I dunno, man. I think you can choose to be amused by the hopelessness of the world. Laugh at every … crass awful thing, it’s like this fucking universal armour! You know that Buddhist thing where they say you can’t choose what happens, but you can choose how you react to it? You can choose to just laugh.’

  Paul is struggling badly to make a joint and looks up.

  ‘“You can’t choose what happens” sounds kind of apolitical … like, laugh at stuff instead of doing anything about it.’

  ‘I’d love 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 03

  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.

  On April Fools’ Day I sat my kids down and told them they were adopted. You should have seen their faces! They were delighted. I find the best way to deal with the news on April the 1st is to consider it all lies. Which is only slightly different to how I approach the news on any other given day.

  I read that one in four children eats their supper alone in their bedrooms. Of course, the alternative is having to listen to two adults talk about photocopying and bills while staring at you angrily, analysing every mouthful that doesn’t have a carrot in it. Gazing at a cold dark wall is possibly preferable.

  Social services say they want to stop kids eating themselves into an early grave. I agree. There’s nothing sadder than a child’s coffin. Especially one being carried by twelve men dripping with sweat. The Department of Health has promised new measures to cope with the fat-kid problem. For starters, a scheme where paedophiles can exchange sweets for bits of carrot and apple.

  Experts say under-5s should be physically active for at least three hours a day to lower their risk of getting fat. Of course, there are some clever gadgets to help toddlers keep the weight off. For starters, you can put them in a launderette tumble dryer and it’s like a hamster-style exercise wheel … and if he wets himself, it doesn’t even matter. Just another 20p will sort it.

  Bloody social services! The nerve of that Sharon Shoesmith! The Court of Appeal says she was unfairly dismissed, and she’s off again, trying to pin the whole Baby P thing on the mother and boyfriend who tortured him to death. It makes my blood boil. When will these people realise it’s their job to constantly oversee us raising our own children, and take responsibility should we kill them because they didn’t stop us?

  Apparently, what you call your son can have a huge effect on how their life turns out. You can’t take chances, as I was saying just yesterday to my young lad, Doomcop Ace Rock. Studies have shown that you should name your son David, George or Michael if you want him to get into Parliament, and just the last two names together if you want him to arrive there by crashing through a window.

  Top Gear’s James May says men these days are losing their ‘dad’ skills. I disagree. We’re just swapping them for new ones, like deleting our browser history and skipping pages of a bedtime story but having it still make sense. He says men can’t put up shelves properly anymore. Nonsense! Not only have I put up loads recently, but they double as little slides for my son.

  90 per cent of parents have admitted plonking toddlers in front of the TV to entertain them. Guilty. It’s easy to wean a toddler off TV. Buy a cheap one, then put them to bed after the Dr Who monsters have been on for a minute. Then smash a hole in the screen and stick a note on it saying ‘Free at last! Exterminate! Exterminate!’ for when they come down in the morning.

  I think outdoor activities should be encouraged. I was lucky, as our local priest ch
eerfully turned a blind eye to our scrumping. He’d just paint his nuts red and hide amongst the leaves.

  There are fresh concerns over the safety of Facebook. I must say that I’ve always found Facebook perfectly safe and enjoyable, but then I’m a predatory sex attacker. The bespectacled pervert Peter Chapman had a photo of a 17-year-old hunk on his Facebook page to attract young women. You should get yourself on the telly, Peter. I have a photo of a bespectacled pervert on my Facebook page and I’m rolling in pussy.

  There’s a very simple way to check if you are being groomed for sex on Facebook Chat. Are you on Facebook Chat? Yes? You are being groomed for sex. Remember girls, that guy you’re talking to might not be who he says he is. Often someone who pretends to be a teenager will actually play for England.

  There have been calls for a law so we can check with police if partners we meet on the internet have a violent history. Let’s not forget the happiness internet dating can bring. The simple joy of watching the restaurant with binoculars as they sit alone at the table waiting for you to arrive. These internet dating sites can lead to violence against men, too. Especially if you forget to delete your browser history before lending your partner your laptop. Call me a Luddite, but I miss the more traditional arts of dating. The impossible romance of sinking pint after pint in a nightclub to find the courage by five to two to slur nonsense into a girl’s ear, in the hope she has sufficiently low self-esteem to be groped by a man so drunk he needs his spare hand to grip her coat for support.

  Miley Cyrus said the internet is dangerous. That’s true if your Miley Cyrus – even Tom from MySpace sexually harasses Hannah Montana. The dangers of children being online is overstated. After all, what inappropriate content could possibly breach the impenetrable fortress of security that is the ‘Only press Enter if over 18’ button?

  Surely the genie’s out of the bottle here. Let’s face it. In 20 years’ time, kids will so totally shop, date, chat, doze and interfere with themselves in front of a screen that the only skills they’ll really need are moving their buttocks to prevent sores and learning how to suck sweet and savoury nutri-pastes from dangling rubber teats.

  Apparently 40 per cent of teenagers see nothing wrong with posting topless pictures of themselves online. I wish they had more self-respect, so that maybe I could finally close my Bebo account. And a third of boys under 10 have watched internet porn. Sadly, the other two-thirds don’t get quality time with their dads at all.

  Basically, our kids are fucked. My daughter’s primary school are teaching a ‘pirates and mermaids’ project to the kids this term. Not because they’re fun kids’ characters but because it’s time to teach them to steal at gunpoint and live on plankton.

  Of course, our children will never have ‘nothing’, because our capitalist, Thatcher-moulded hearts know no way of showing love to our kids other than through the medium of a Rapunzel Light-Up Tower. From the first time our child breaks from our embrace because he’s spotted a Winnie the Pooh figurine, we know that – should we starve, should we owe the bank the roof over our head – our last vision, before death clouds our eyes and steals our breath, will be our child throwing a Kung Zhu Hamsters Battle Arena to one side while shouting, ‘And what else have you got me?’

  It’s just hard to feel Christmassy when you’re shopping online, isn’t it? There are no garlands, no mistletoe … They need to decorate the internet. Maybe Jason Manford can put a Santa outfit on his cock. The Sun referred to shopping on 18 December as ‘last-minute’! No … ‘last-minute’ is when you have to pump sedative gas into your kid’s bedroom on Christmas morning as you hastily draw Snow White onto a packet of fags.

  In my day, it was all hand-me-downs. One year I asked for an Action Man, and ended up getting my sister’s old Barbie doll with the tits scraped off with a hot knife.

  The top-selling children’s toy this Christmas is expected to be a building kit with real wood and tools. It comes with a booklet of handy phrases like: ‘Sorry I’m late, Mum, the traffic was murder,’ ‘What cowboy’s done this? It looks like it was made by a 2-year-old,’ and ‘Get us a cup of Ribena please love, I’m parched.’

  Lidl’s selling reindeer meat. Critics say it’ll destroy the magic of Christmas. Don’t worry, The X Factor’s already got that one covered. I say they deserve it. Last Christmas Eve one did a shit when Santa flew over, and it froze on the way down and cracked two of my slates. So what if they’re selling reindeer meat? We eat all kinds of animals, after all. I hear it tastes a bit like puppies or panda cubs.

  Half of all British firms are cancelling their Christmas parties. In the current economic climate they can’t afford to pay for the maternity leave in nine months’ time.

  The Sun has a phone line to deal with the stress of celebrating Christmas. It has the voice of Dear Deidre, but I’m campaigning to change it to me saying, ‘There is no God, stay at home and masturbate into the sink.’

  Of course Christmas is simply a corruption of old Pagan festivals celebrating bitter family arguments and lashing out drunkenly after finding a flirtatious text on your partner’s phone. Domestic violence rates also soar during big football matches. Because of course it’s your wife’s fault that you have nothing in your life except football. If she’d only castrated you like she should’ve, you’d have been happily watching Titanic together.

  The police in Scotland produced a leaflet about domestic violence that answers a few old questions about the issue, such as: Q. ‘Why didn’t she leave?’ A. ‘Her head and outer limbs were in a bag’, and Q. ‘Why don’t we just leave the couple to sort it out between them?’ A. ‘Because her floating corpse will become a bio-hazard for the canal wildlife.’

  Apparently Britain’s mums do housework worth over 30 grand a year. It’s made me look at my partner in a whole new light. I’m sure she could get twice that on the game. We could get a Lithuanian in to hoover and keep the difference.

  A study shows that men judge women in a millisecond. Guilty. Sometimes it can be so quick the image hasn’t even fully downloaded. Ladies, when are you going to realise that you don’t need to endure all these stupid, expensive beauty therapies. We love you just the way you are. Unless you’re a real pig, in which case go for it.

  A survey revealed six out of ten women are happy to split the bill on a first date. Nice to know. After all, dry cleaning can be expensive. Never mind splitting the bill; I’ve been known to empower women even more by climbing out of a toilet window after coffee if it looks like they’re not up for it.

  Love is meant to produce the same results as cocaine. Certainly, whenever I make love it usually causes the death of an orphaned Colombian street-child. Women fake orgasms because they are riddled with insecurities and have a fear of intimacy, according to researchers. It’s a shame that women feel they have to do that, especially when men couldn’t care less if they have one or not.

  Actually, 18 million people were injured having sex last year. No wonder, I sometimes get hurt when there’s just three of us. The most common injuries people reported were pulled muscles. I bet that’s because not many people reported accidents caused by shutting their laptop too quickly when someone came into the room unexpectedly. A third of us have had sex with someone at work. Guilty again. All part of being self-employed.

  I was surprised by the hoo-ha about breastfeeding at work. I’d suggest just tattooing your breast with a megaphone and having the baby stand up for feeds. By playing selected recordings from the History Channel it will just look like a tiny Churchill addressing the troops.

  A drinks company is funding a campaign to warn of the dangers of alcohol during pregnancy. Booze companies say they’ve always supported mothers, adding that without their products most mums wouldn’t have got up the duff in the first place. Especially the mingers. The unborn child absorbs some of the mother’s alcohol, which can cause premature births. Usually, when the placenta bumps into the foetus and the foetus says, ‘Outside. Now!’ If you drink while pregnant the foetus is bas
ically addicted. Which means it’s best to always wear tight-fitting knickers so it can’t sneak out to the pub while you’re asleep. In parts of Scotland the problem is so bad there’s evidence that breasts are gradually evolving into optics.

  A 3-year-old from the West Midlands became the country’s youngest alcoholic. His parents have been giving him booze to keep him quiet for the past six months and he may now be taken into care. Mum and Dad are furious, as it’s his round.

  I’d never let my 3-year-old drink. Nike quality control send back too much of his work as it is. His first AA meetings are going to be weird: ‘My name is Tyrone and I’m a cowboy.’ There is something sad about seeing a baby unwilling to shake its rattle because it’s got a splitting headache.

  At least he learned to crawl. He just copied his parents. Apparently, this child displayed all the classic symptoms of alcoholism. He kept turning up at crime scenes with a fishing rod and picnic basket. His parents deny charges of neglect – they worked really hard to stretch the teat off the baby’s bottle over the top of a can of Tennent’s. Being an alcoholic is only really a problem when you have a job, a car and a family to look after. This is the perfect age to be an alcoholic. What’s the worst that can happen to a 3-year-old alcoholic? He pukes on his mum’s tits.

  Asda are giving £1 million for schemes to dissuade kids from drinking. I’d suggest a good one might be having them dangle damp beer mats from the top of a stepladder and have Gazza dance barefoot on broken glass beneath, just in the hope of catching drips.