* * *
Someone rang a taxi; and when the driver turned up I think he was somewhat taken aback to find the group of us stood by the top of the seafront, eyes like saucers and clearly still on another planet.
I shut my eyes for the journey, to avoid having to talk to anyone. Then when I got home I climbed into bed and lay there thinking about what had happened the night before. I was exhausted, the party having used up all my energy, but when I shut my eyes it was as though every single image in the world wanted to be inside my head.
I watched as a fluorescent pink rabbit dived down a dark black rabbit hole which then turned inside out and exploded into a thousand more tiny rabbits, all in different bright flashing colours. The rabbits spun in the sky and made me feel sick, then joined together to create a sphere that shined like the sun, before sprouting wings and a tail like a dragon and flying towards me. This went on for ages; a succession of random hallucinations that tormented me until I could take no more, my head filled with ill ill thoughts of peace and peace in pieces.
I needed sleep, more than I’d ever needed sleep before. But it didn’t take long to dawn on me that sleep would have to wait. The images were going to continue for some time, no matter what I did. I got up and put my copy of Daze of Happiness in the stereo, then laid there on my back in the bed, watching the soft brick walls bend. A hundred mad little samples fell out of the speakers and into my ears; captivating me, while I thought about the music and what it meant. I shut my eyes again and let the visuals wash back over me, trying to enjoy them for what they were, a constant stream of random images in the private theatre of my mind. It didn’t work, I still hated them and would have given anything to sleep, they were like the bad aftertaste from a night gone wrong and I just wanted them to stop so I could spend some hours in a place with no thinking; then wake up and start the arduous task of putting myself back together.
I don’t remember when I finally got my wish, only that it was far too long into the day. When I woke again it was dark out, somewhere between evening and night. And man did I still feel like shit.
One good point; something had unravelled itself to me listening to that tape on my own, something I hadn’t known twenty-four hours earlier. Rave music wasn’t like other music, it was a music borne out of a drug. All other music had come about because it was what people wanted to listen to at the time, one genre evolving into another, as new instruments were invented and youth was handed from one generation to the next. Rave music came about because of ecstasy. One wouldn’t, and couldn’t, properly exist without the other. They worked with each other, like two opposite pieces of the perfect puzzle.
As a final piece of poetry I realised that rave was the only music named after what it made you do. Ecstasy by some coincidence being the only drug named after what it made you feel.
A Big Yellow Spark Flew Out and Landed on the Bench
September 2000.
September of 2000 bought my time working with my dad to a round even year, more than enough time to know that I didn’t want to stay in carpentry. Having started applying for other jobs three months prior I found myself at my first ever proper job interview. Going for a job being paid hourly instead of weekly, which I worked out might net me as much as forty pounds a month extra.
The interview was for a company called Precisional Electronics in Carlton, on a Monday following a weekend that I’d sensibly split between Club Z and James’s flat; on a cocktail of ecstasy and speed. Now whilst I can’t remember what happened in the job interview itself, I can still vividly remember the feeling I had during the interview, like the weekend somehow didn’t want to let go of me and was doing everything in its power to teleport me back to Saturday night. At times it was taking all of my effort just to stop my teeth from grinding, and that’s on top of trying to articulate intelligent responses to questions about what interpersonal skills I had or why I wanted the position in the first place (which I didn’t). So bearing all of that in mind, you shouldn’t be surprised to find out that I left the interview not only unsure of whether I’d gotten the job, but also unsure of what the job even was. Electronic Assembler not being something I was familiar with.
When, midweek, the phone rang and I was told I could start the following Monday, I didn’t know whether to punch the air or cry. The one thing I knew though was that it meant I’d no longer have to spend every day of the week with my dad. As much as I knew I was going to miss him.
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