Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  ‘That’s sexist bullshit.’ She’s rolling up and looking at me with one eye closed. ‘Women don’t have any say in this? They don’t have their own sexuality? They’re just things for men to fuck or make rules so they can’t fuck?’

  ‘Well, men did make the rules. Marriage is something that men came up with, everything is, men are in charge …’

  ‘It just denies that women have any sexuality, any desire to be unfaithful …’

  ‘Statistically, men are more unfaithful than women …’

  ‘And you don’t think there’s any trouble with that data in a society where women are taught to feel ashamed of their sexuality, that men who sleep around are a bit crafty and women who do that are sluts? You think they tell people with clipboards about who they’ve been fucking?’

  ‘Hey, I’m not J. G. Ballard, I’m just saying … Fuck it, he’s dead now.’

  Her roll-up goes out and she reaches for the lighter, which won’t catch. ‘Is that what you’re doing here? Fucking me because of some genetic imperative?’

  ‘No. I guess … I think everything is a communication.’

  ‘What are you trying to communicate then?’

  ‘I guess I’m trying to say I can help. You could take some money, just take it, go on holiday for a few months.’

  ‘I can’t take your money. Really, I can’t.’

  ‘You can. You should just go.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not here to exploit my unhappiness? By fucking me?’

  ‘No … I mean, no, I’m not sure.’

  I put my arm round her and she hugs me.

  ‘What am I communicating?’ she asks.

  ‘That you’re very, very unhappy.’

  I lie in the dark. The lighter occasionally brightens the room as she sits smoking. I feel like a caveman and we’re taking turns at keeping watch. I fall asleep quickly, even though she has been talking about killing herself.

  On the commuter train home in the morning, every cunt hassles me. I don’t know how unapproachable, preoccupied or fucked off I’d have to look to be left alone.

  Gary texts me.

  Amanda Hugnkiss, I FUCKING GET IT! I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! A DEAD MAN!

  I don’t know how he figured it out but he is, I reflect, the least of my worries. I think about whether I care and decide that, on balance, I don’t.

  I’m in the stateroom playing FIFA when my agent phones. She’d stopped ringing me for quite a few months, but nowadays I have to answer. She says I’m going to be on 8 Out of 10 Cats with Jonathan Ross. I’m momentarily tempted to pull it but I can’t. Any time I meet Ross, or Jimmy Carr, they pull me aside and address me conspiratorially about a Scottish terrorist organisation they claim to belong to in thick Ayrshire accents. At first I found this a bit wearing but they are so insistent, their accents so accurate, their knowledge of Scottish history and sense of injustice so comprehensive, it’s really quite overwhelming. Ross keeps saying he’s going to shoot the Queen on the Royal Variety and I honestly don’t know if he’s fucking joking.

  She tells me I’m getting asked to do I’m a Celebrity. 12 celebrities marooned deep in the Australian jungle a full 50 yards from Ant and Dec’s hotel. You might as well just fill a big fish tank with urine and drop in eight labelled turds, removing the loser each week. Seeing the line-up in the paper of who’s going there always feels like the bit at the BAFTAs where they show who died this year. I watched I’m a Celebrity last year and Gillian McKeith had a jungle breakdown that made Marlon Brando’s character in Apocalypse Now look like Tarzan.

  I say, ‘That programme’s … demented.’

  She says, ‘They don’t really pay much any more because of the rapist.’

  I’m filling a mug at the tap and my hands are shaking. I lift it up to my mouth and I suddenly think, FUCK THIS. Is this what I worked so hard for? To be frightened in my own flat, to drag this feeling of dread around with me? I know there’s something I can do about this. I decide I’m going to turn this around. Show-business isn’t going to get me like this. Slowly the dread goes and my hands steady and I feel just the general anxiety I have when I focus on work.

  I’m out running round the Botanic Gardens. There’s two student lassies smoking a joint on a bench and I try to speed up every time I go past that bit. It’s really bright but so early that it’s still cold. I go out for runs every morning now. The first few were terrible, walking and trotting like an old bastard, but now I’m going three times round the park and even doing push-ups when there’s nobody about.

  It took me a couple of weeks but now I’m on top of everything. Yes, the police have been in touch a couple of times and, yes, it’s worrying, but I’m taking steps now. I started by hiring a yoga teacher. Every morning she comes round and every evening I work at it on my own. I also went to a sex shop with a gay guy I know from the Stand Comedy Club and got a butt plug. It’s uncomfortable at first but it’s really starting to have an effect. This rape is going to be nothing for me, I’ve taken it into my own hands. I have a kind of femidom thing for my arse as well.

  I jog right down to Kelvingrove Park, have coffee then get a taxi back to the flat. I put on a Bonnie Prince Billie record and warm down. I’m stretching my hip out in the stateroom when my mobile goes. It’s my pal Stewart. The papers say the comedian Richard Herring, who used to be in Lee and Herring, has been fucked to death.

  I believe … that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. There may be entities seeking control, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. It’s like trying to control a dream.

  Terence McKenna

  We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

  Terence McKenna

  Chapter 12

  We each of us live in our own little reality tunnel, seeing things through the prism of our own prejudice and expectations. Look at Star Trek. To us, the Federation is benign, travelling the galaxy in a quest for knowledge. Wait a minute, though. Some planets are just holiday worlds. Umm, did they choose that, or did the Federation tell them that suddenly their whole planet was going to be washing beach towels and handing out cocktails? Is that what the USS Enterprise is flying about the galaxy looking for – new sex worlds? Perhaps the formal name is ‘holiday world’, but of course they are actually sex worlds.

  If we take the Enterprise as being representative of the Federation, it seems to have three approaches when it discovers new alien life. FUCK IT, STUN IT or KILL IT. And, wait a minute, that ship they fly about in seems to be pretty much a giant floating gun. That’s not good, is it? Often, they are so keen to shoot something as powerfully as possible that they divert energy from their life support systems to the gun. Yet we see them as being altruistic, floating about in the USS Peacegun, looking for places to go on holiday.

  I’d imagine the Federation looks quite different if you’re living on an undiscovered world with a lot of beaches. And maybe Star Trek looks different if you live in South America and you have a history of explorers being the first stage of colonising invasions. Does that sound stupid to you? That’s because I’m from a different reality tunnel. One where I swim up and down all day thinking about the ideology of Star Trek, when I’m supposed to be writing a fucking book.

  One of the things we heard during the global financial crisis was that nobody could have foreseen this. Everyone was queuing up to tell us how unexpected this was. But that’s just the view from their reality tunnel. Remember those antiglobalisation riots? Weren’t they saying that the global financial system was unsustainable? As Slavoj Žižek points out in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, in Seattle 14,000 extra cops were drafted in to deal with the sheer number of people saying that the international financial system was unstable. That’s more troops than we sent to Iraq. So, while we are told that nobody co
uld have foreseen the dangers, if we were trying to quantify how many people were actually predicting the collapse, it would be fair to say that there was an army of them.

  Let’s not forget that with environmental disaster, profiteering on commodity prices, the risks we take with the food chain, and mobile-phone masts springing up everywhere, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll be killed by a bank or a big corporation than by Al-Qaeda. What we call Al-Qaeda set itself up as an operation that individuals would come to with terror plans and bin Laden would decide whether or not to invest. It’s interesting that if you want to create worldwide chaos and perpetrate widespread evil, the ideal model is that of a venture capital firm.

  It seems to me that the world financial system is now geared towards privatisation. Countries borrow money and the price for keeping the rate of interest down is to privatise stuff. Who do we borrow the money from? Hedge funds, bankers, speculators. Why do they want us to privatise? Because it opens up areas of enormous profit for them. You can choose not to drink Coca-Cola but you can’t not educate your kids. You can’t not go to the hospital when you’re sick. You can’t not drink water.

  Look on the upside for a moment. The world is being destroyed by corporate interests but we’re just at that point in the horror movie before we work out how to kill the monsters. Of course things look bleak now, but ask yourself this – how do you kill a corporation? One of us will work it out! And what then? What if we win? I mean it, have you thought about what the world could be like if people took control of their own reality? We can forget about war. We can evolve, we can explore the stars and we can focus on hating the people who really deserve it – our fucking parents.

  Branded goods always get me. People paying to walk around like sandwich boards. I imagine that the FCUK logo started as some corporate guy making a Trading Places-style bet. ‘Bet you I can get them to wear at hat with FUCK on it. I’m a STUPID FCUK. Right there on their STUPID FCUKing head. Ahhahahhhaa!’ In a few years’ time they’ll be burning those logos onto them like they were cattle. ‘Here you go. It says I’m a stupid CNUT.’ Sizzle. Scream. Sizzle. Sizzle.

  More websites than ever are selling fake designer clothes, luggage, DVDs and perfume. Let’s not forget there are real victims here. It breaks my heart to think of Mr Dolce or Mr Gabbana having to return to their hovels in Milan to tell their families that, because of copyright infringement, there’ll be no diamond sauce to go with the terrified homeless teenager they’re eating for tea tonight.

  Remember, people. Pirated goods come at a price. Usually a bloody good one. I know from experience that stuff bought off the internet often turns out not to be quite as described. Still, if I turn the light out and ‘she’ wedges it right back between her thighs I can hardly tell. So, the next time a little Vietnamese man comes up to you in a motorway service station and offers you cheap DVDs, say ‘no’ and keep saying ‘no’. It’s the only way to get the price right down.

  A French court has ruled that Renault can call their latest car ‘Zoe’, despite objections from the parents of Zoe Renault, who claim their daughter will be teased at school. It happened at my school to Henry Hoover. And Max Stength-Anusol nearly killed himself. Bacardi have a similar legal dispute with me. Over my plans later this year to become known in the tabloids as the Bacardi Coke Rapist. Presumably the biggest problem isn’t that you’ll be named the same as a car. It’s that you’ll be named the same as a serial killer. That’s what happened to my best friend Dennis Nilsen. Woke up one morning to find hundreds of people with the same name were angry because he’d eaten all those men. I give fair warning now that if you’re called Frankie Boyle and don’t want the stigma of being named the same as someone associated for ever with horrific crimes, you have until the next X Factor final to change your name.

  A Spanish woman even registered ownership of the sun and wants to charge people to use it. Ridiculous. You can’t own the sun any more than you can own the oil in the ground or charge people for the water that falls from the sky.

  BP attempted to stem the Deepwater Horizon oil spill by pumping water into the mouth of the leak faster than the mess came out. Actualising Donald Rumsfeld’s fantasy of waterboarding the earth.

  They tried to stop the oil spill with a giant funnel, underwater robots and firing cannons of rubbish at the hole. Is it just me or did BP’s troubleshooting decisions seem to be decided by a primary-school competition? I was waiting for a machine made of thousands of tiny ponies that turn the oil into chocolate drops. The one good thing about the leak is that people will be forced to eat more oily fish, as there’s no longer any other kind.

  BP was worth half as much as it was before the accident. Which is ironic as they’d discovered more oil than they had in years. Just unfortunate it’s not in barrels, but in the lungs of hundreds of thousands of pelicans. Barack Obama presented BP execs with the financial reparations they should pay the people of the Gulf Coast. They presented him with JFK’s brain wrapped in next week’s newspaper and a BP points card.

  A Chinese tanker ran aground and spilled oil into the Great Barrier Reef. Environmental groups called it a tragedy for the world’s ecology that could have incredibly far-reaching consequences for life on earth, while the Chinese authorities called it ‘Stage Two’. If the tanker breaks up and oil continues to flood out, the Great Barrier Reef may no longer be the world’s largest living organism. Instead that title would go to the Chinese. Fair play to China – it has lifted 350 million people out of poverty this year. By shooting them for theft.

  Developing nations say that rich Western countries aren’t doing enough to help them deal with the effects of climate change, but that’s not the case. We’re going to help them deal with drought by submerging them under the ocean.

  People in Germany were dying from E. coli-infected salad. Across Scotland everybody was going, ‘Told you that stuff was dodgy.’ I confess I caught an infection from an unhygienic cucumber. Just one of the perils of my particular method of shoplifting. The trick is just to wear a cowboy hat, then walking out that way looks a little less odd … it’s up my arse. I’ve wedged the cucumber up my arse. My arse.

  Chancellor Angela Merkel says multiculturalism hasn’t worked in Germany. She added her government would search for a solution, some kind of final … then the mic went dead.

  In France you can now be fined for having your face covered up. This is going to be extremely unpopular with bondage fetishists and gimps, which, let’s face it, is most French people. Fortunately, they are also masochists, so a fine will only add an extra thrill to the experience. Any French women seen wearing a burqa will be fined 250 euros. So, if you’re a black nun in Paris have your purse ready, this could get expensive. They’re actually arresting women who wear them. The mugshot photos will be interesting. You can say what you like about burqas, but without one I’d never have got into that Muslim women’s knitting circle. Damn, that was good hummus!

  This story affects us all, not least me. All of a sudden it’s ‘burka’ with a ‘-ka’. And I’d only just got used to spelling it ‘-qa’. Still, in the spirit of Raoul Moat, they’ll have to prize that Scrabble trophy from my cold, dead hands. Banning the burka is taking away women’s freedom of choice about whether they want to look like an evil shuttlecock. We would never persecute a minority in such a way. It’s just not British. I should imagine we’ll stick to pushing burning rags and dog shit through their letterboxes.

  That said, Tory MP Philip Hollobone launched a bill at Westminster to make it illegal for people to cover their faces in public. Have a quick look at a photo of Philip’s face so you can see why he thinks this. It’s like a police Identikit computer has crashed and given him the features of every major paedophile of our generation.

  Just when I thought Tony Blair couldn’t get any more mental, he converted to Catholicism. That must be fucking weird, listening to confession with Tony Blair. ‘I lost my temper with the kids, missed church on Sunday, killed a million Iraqis, was rude to
the wife … Sorry, Father? Go back? Which one?’

  He even wrote an autobiography. A lot of people couldn’t put Blair’s book down. They are the same people who can’t pick it up. British soldiers and Iraqi children who’ve had their arms blown off. He revealed in the book that he was a bit of a drinker. When Tony was quizzed over what was the worst thing he’d ever done while pissed, he simply answered, ‘Cherie’. It’s no wonder Gordon Brown got so frustrated – every cabinet meeting was taken up by Tony singing ‘Magic Moments’, then claiming the next day he didn’t even know the words. Blair describes the early years with Brown as a relationship as close as lovers. Can you imagine making love to Gordon Brown? He was so creased and wrinkled. The image I have in my head is that pumping him would be very similar to when you are camping and, in order to deflate the air bed, you have to lie on it to get the last of the air out.

  Tony Blair donated the book’s profits to the Royal British Legion. Which is a bit like Emperor Hirohito donating air miles to his kamikaze pilots.

  Peter Mandelson also published his memoirs. You’ve got to admire him. It’s not easy to type with hooves. To be honest, I always found him untrustworthy but, after reading it, well, how can you dislike the man who invented the internet and kidney dialysis?

  Blair promoted his book in an interview with Andrew Marr, where he looked like a howler monkey enraged by the smell of his own farts. Footage also turned up of Carla Bruni on Eurotrash talking about sex books. Like that’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened on Eurotrash. Her item was bookended by Jean Paul Gaultier enthusiastically demonstrating a pair of dildo boots and Antoine de Caunes interviewing a willy hypnotist.

  We’ve all done sexy stuff in our past that’s came back to haunt us. I know I have, I changed its nappy this morning. Samantha Cameron would never ask a French TV presenter if he liked her titties, as she has been bred for power. You look at Samantha Cameron and realise her favourite children’s books must have been The Very Silent and Subservient Caterpillar and Spot Nods Sadly while Meeting Brave Children. The book Carla was talking about taught French people to say to the English ‘You make me very hot.’ Of course, a woman saying that to the average English bloke would simply lead to a mumbled apology and an attempt to bleed your radiators.