Mandragora - A Floral Trbute.

Liquid Lunch: Requiem for EH.

By Alex

I’m failing and it’s your fault. Let me explain. There is one person in the whole world I exalt more than anyone for going through with something I was and will forever be unable to.

It's cold in here. Dark and complicated. This was originally intended to be more an apology than an apocalyptic assault on your values, but an apology would be a lie and therefore indistinguishable from everything you’ve ever said, so here it stands; a diatribe from the shit-stained mouth of a kid marginalized by the factory that reared him, taking arms against the slings and arrows of the agents of evil bullshit.

There was a kid called Raynard who was fifteen when I was eleven and had just moved to town. I can't remember whether he ever did anything to me sexually but I know he used to beat me up and grip my body so I was ecstatically helpless. He also used to bite my arm, administer Chinese burns, and basically leave as much of himself on my body as possible without actually filling my ass with his flesh. As far as I know. He established my habit of associating sexual thoughts with violence, I guess. And I can't isolate where the sexual element came from. I suspect this is why I obsessively write, to recover the absent slices of my childhood, and to sculpt my existence into something meaningful.

Edward Furlong used to be the idealized me throughout adolescence; he represented a version of me with confidence, swagger. Eddie Furlong as the sneering, obnoxious Atari-wielding brat - in grungy garb - as John Connor in T2 was perhaps my first onscreen crush when I was about eleven. In my world at that age, he was the coolest thing going. The sort of kid I'd give anything to be bullied and broken by - I seem to have been intimidated, humiliated and attacked by confident kids so unremittingly during early adolescence that I've sexualised it into a given. A line of thought exists suggesting that some people eroticise their biggest hates and fears as a way to exorcise them. The only way to deal with such enormously negative emotions is to exorcise them with a kind of sexual vaccine - where if you invite the devil over your threshold whilst at your most vulnerable, then you're exercising some power over him...

“You fucked me over once too often baby, so I'm going to reassert the power balance by using you to get off on. Fuck you.”

I recall one evening where an epiphany might have happened - we were sitting on the church bench and Raynard claimed to be torn-up on speed, despite appearing to behave normally (or was a longform speedfreak and I'd never seen him behave normally). We got onto discussing his night-life, which was always extreme, narcotic, apparently depraved. He'd been smoking a joint round at a friend's house and they were both so fucked that when it came to administering a blowback, rather than have the donor cup his hands to create a funnel through which to transmit the smoke to the recipient's mouth, they simply locked lips. This is all I remember, in retrospect it seems designed as a seductive precursor to something big happening between us - like in 120 Days of Sodom where the libertines regale each other with stories of debauch, sexual torture to arouse themselves for that evening’s body apocalypse. His telling of this story signals my memory's end of that episode.

“The night came on, and he was subsumed in a wave of warm, sumptuous blackness.”

I was eleven and at my most impressionable in terms of the sexual blueprint; since then I've revised and carved these fantasies into an ideal so rare and transcendent it would take a really special scenario for me not to be disappointed and crushed by any real sexual encounter. In fact, any sex I've had so far just left me feeling lonelier and more miserable than ever. For me, sex just lashes petrol on the great bonfire of disconnect. How the fuck are we supposed to connect with anyone when the media propagandaises isolation through fear, unless it's 'connection' through a shared experience of some commodified, poisonous garbage like KFC, Spielberg or this week’s vacuous, squealing pop slut? Whatever.

None of my adolescent memories end properly, particularly the ones involving physical contact or discussions thereof. I think Raynard used to seize my groin occasionally and manouevre me around the room in an “I've-got-your-balls-if-you-don't-do-what-I-say-then-I'll-crush-them-like-olives” kind of way. Which probably had me squealing in guilty delight (finding release in my own vulnerability perhaps, this being the only aspect of my life where I relinquish any control whatsoever) like it has since a whole other kid first grabbed my balls in primary school to demonstrate his command over me. The schoolyard onlookers wore disdain, as though they thought him kooky - couldn't articulate that it was 'a gay thing to do', and that's the first time I felt any sort of fraternity: in that we were both drawn to participating in something that had people condemning it with loaded glances and/or a loud ignorance. The language of power has always been the most economical.

I was probably about seven. Around that time I was cycling with my cousins along a lane, past a chocolate factory. A jeep ploughed by, clipping the end of my handlebar; I ended up ragged in a ditch - and despite pleading with my cousins not to tell my dad, they did, and he was crestfallen, paranoid; ever since then he's encouraged me to wear a helmet. Last October, not long after/ not long before a death in the family, he was cycling sans helmet and fell, sustaining heavy bruises and concussion for a week or so. I tend to walk or swim everywhere anyway. Because I see cars as evil, simply another box in which to isolate people from one another, a physical manifestation of the abstract box sold by the media as Terror! or binge-drinking teenagers…

Some epiphianies hurt: I've realised what I do for a job - I sell bad ideas to people who I find philosophically detestable. I sell shit to idiots. Every time they deliver the latest comedic megaplex turd to the counter, another unit of optimism shames itself to dust in my heart. My goodwill towards idiots is finite:

“Hey, have you seen this film?”
“Let me see…Adam Sandler…Nah, haven’t, and what’s more, I’ll never see this film unless I’m abducted by a moron.”
“Oh, ok. So it’s good then?”
“Yes. Fuck off.”

I'm so disappointed in pretty much everyone - your complacent, apathetic, empty, fake, habitual, cruddy lives. So I should lower my standards? Fuck that. Why should I regard the spoon-fed cud-chewing zombie nation as the litmus test for existence - and then be shocked and awed when some cavalier mentalist exceeds the grade? I could coax more elegance out of a caged ape. And you’re so institutionally dumb that you will NEVER even turn my criticisms on me and declare that “I'm just projecting my self-loathing onto you” - that my loathing derives from a repressed envy of your complete and gracious lives. If ONLY you might have the perspective and nerve to confront me with such psycho-bullshit. You are all cows in suits; your job is your abattoir. You are shambling lumps of docile flesh, your beaks dribbling platitudes, for every day of your trite little passages through this shithole. I can relate less and less by the hour to mainstream society and culture - a passionless void, I am utterly alone, languishing crazily under my crippling, terrible Cassandra Complex. I free associate the word 'despair' with society - I wish people loved each other more than themselves. But altruism’s soooooooooo un-sexy.

No other species wears despair like a shroud.

Brian Wilson and I just weren't made for these times. Mediocrity has been commodified with such Nazi muscle that people don't question it. Four hundred years ago, nobody questioned the validity of God because there was no marketed alternative. Somehow, despite the communication media being – wow - faster than ever, we are tunneling blindly through a philosophical dark age, a cultural nadir, a spiritual slump, and only the vagrant, the lunatic, the sexual aberration – the great and good of the world - are questioning it.

Evidence:

The record shop, HIV: a shopfront display states "Father's Day - Be Original". Below this is a selection of six CDs to choose from -

“Hey you stupid fuckers, why not express your individuality within very, very constrictive parameters; perhaps be inventive with the way you orient your gift within our carrier bag? Be Creative: buy the only album released this decade in one of two formats! They're identical in every way but one: the jewel case in the model on the left is slightly more chafed than in the model on the right. Assert your right to choice: eat shit and die quickly, or eat shit and die slow. You can choose to be told what to choose, or you can choose to die, starving in the streets. You are not one of us.”

The Italian Eatery, Pissing Slut: Our request for a sprinkling of olives on our pizza was denied - they are not allowed to modify the pizza in any way beyond the advertised model. Is it trademarked? No, it's a pizza, and we're diners with self-specific tastes. But they can't simply sprinkle a few extra olives on the pizza because:

It's not company policy – may I refer you to

‘SECTION B.1.2 - Olive Policy - if the client requests the inclusion of olives in Model 3b, log the incident in the incident log, headed 'Subversive Manouevres' next to today's date (see Menu Screen 85.b on your No-vision touchscreen interfaces), politely refuse, then sound the security alert under your counter (yeah, gee, y’know,where your legs would be were you not a pivoting cyber-torso bolted to a stool), whereupon the in-store cameras ("for the safety of our clients" TM) will spin in unison and concentrate upon the Offendor, and cross-reference his appearance with details contained within a centrally-maintained database of credit details, genetic code, speech patterns, thus facilitating a positive ID of the Offendor, and by extension, forever binding him to his act of deviance in the event of his returning to Your store; whereupon you will smile politely, and explain that We cannot issue olives on this particular pizza, sorry sir. Congratulations, you have successfully evaded an 'Expression of Preference' - see Company Manual, pg 677 - Individuality; Store Viruses, Gross Misoncduct) – ‘

- and b) the till system is so centrally-governed and un-fucking-autonomous that there is no way they could actually charge for anything not price-coded on their touch-screen interface, even if they exercised enough free will to want to. Accepting fate is such a cop-out. Free olives are completely out of the question, retard. We simply couldn't give the dolls at the counter any degree of control, I'm sure you understand. They might reinvent the abacus, and through its use inadvertently shit a new mathematical model which through application to The Company, might unmask them as evil puppeteering Overlords hellbent on vampirisng any blood, passion, or love from the lunk-headed insects on the shopfloor. So, no, you can't have olives. Also, when the till breaks down, the marionettes are impotent; it's such a locked system; they have to fumble obsequiously before their fuming patrons as they explain they weren't schooled in hacking and therefore cannot issue the correct change, because the mainframe, in London has crashed and the till won't open. Have a nice day, fuckwit. Next. Because of watertight inflexible admin, we can't deviate from Plato’s pizza. This sort of thing is not considered bizarre or inhuman. So listen good kids, here’s the deal: you buy from a chainstore, you perpetuate indifference and forfeit your right to bear consciousness; you buy shares in your own enslavement, and deserve to die. You heard me.

I've had two instances of homophobic jeering over the past two days; firstly, a passing truck full of tanned, overweight hairless builders yelling “alright, gorgeous” at me as they swerved round a corner. Hubba hubba. Sigh. Yeah right. Secondly, leaving the park after the cataclysmic waste of time that was work, a bench of slack-jawed morons in shellsuits took it in turns to belt out 'FAGGOT' at me. Surely with the tragic advent of New Metal, long hair is no longer exclusively indicative of homosexuality. Perhaps to anyone but a pre-pube gangster this is the case. I like to think that, if they’d trudged over and started harassing me while eating my lunch, I'd have poured myself on the ground and invited them to kick the shit out of me, rape me, spit on me or whatever, just to freak them out. They probably would have done. And both parties’d be real happy. They're a demographic I often consider photographing, then I realize, hey, there actually is nothing beneath or behind the stereotype. They’re so two-dimensional, photographing them’d be so hard. From a certain angle they just wouldn’t show. But, re: the homophobic shit - I'm a loner, an over-discerning sexual aesthete. I can barely talk to other people, let alone fuck them.

The whole language structure of society is based on subservience, on you occupying prefabricated roles and not deviating from these positions for fear of committing Gross Misconduct. Surely the notion of needing to obey rules should make anyone suspicious. A guy imposing rules on another guy, enforcing these rules with fear tactics; this used to be known as slavery, imprisonment, now it's known as employment and represents no small achievement for you grazing shit-apes.

"Congratulations! You got the job!" I yell.

Inside, where truth happens, I weep over another soul bricking shut its own tomb.

There’s no more brutal violation than exercising control over another person and convincing them it's exactly what they need to prosper. Make them crave the oubliette you've shoehorned them into. The civilised world produces more sexual fuck-ups than any developing country. (Any developing countryman reading this, I urge you to step out of our footsteps, do NOT develop according to our model.) You're all shit-fetishists. My evidence: Barbara Streisand is a multi-platinum selling ‘artist’. You fetishize your own dissatisfaction, get a hard-on for failing, giving up, being disciplined by your superiors. I cannot sprint far enough away from this train wreck. This empty idyl. This wasteland. Help. I need to hide out in a monastery until the snake has swallowed its tail and shat its own head. I'm out of here until the idiots self-detonate. But I can’t hide, and be complicit in your blindness. I’m already performing inadequately.

There's so much elegance, beauty and danger out there. You don’t give a fuck. You've been taught not to probe into concepts the media hasn't neutered and labeled for you. Kids have such potential for staggering philosophical feats, and invariably they get coolly murdered by state programming, until they only, barely, physically resemble the startling visionaries they were as youths. So here ends the overture to my eulogy.

If Eric Harris had lived beyond Columbine and been asked to explain his motives his motives, he may have produced this paper, paraphrased. As it is, he articulated his ennui by killing twelve (?) people. It's not even hatred with me, and I suspect it wasn't with him. He was just too afloat in adolescent male pride to concede that his disease was a crushing empathy of despair -

"Like I'm supposed to feel some sort of kinship with these passive suicides because we evolved simultaneously?"

He was distancing himself from humanity, by destroying it, because humanity had done the very same. I’m being really presumptuous. But I find him easy to project onto. I don’t idolize guns. I’m no racist. My antipathy is not that discerning. We both had similar intentions I guess. He was beautiful. He reacted against a society which condemns action of any kind, even if his reaction may have been misdirected. You weren't ready for him. And what he did just shone a bright light through the holes in society. You asked to see the fabric of society and he held up a seething, infested rag. That's why he's important. He found a dead horse and kicked it screaming “Look at the rigor mortis in this dead bastard!” He’s the kid who pointed out that the Emperor is not only naked, but his crumpled body is swimming with necrotic, bursting lesions. He illuminated in neon, napalm and nailbombs, your success at failing. And all you dead fuckers completed his act, by announcing him an antichrist. No more honoured podium for the truth.

"Some kids are just born evil. The rest don’t know they’re born."

If we isolated the EVIL gene, surely we would have excised it from the gene pool by now?

It just made Christ look shit and incompetent. A surefire charlatan.


We each carry every incarnation of us around simultaneously like a photo album, where the photos are chronologically plastered over each other, your birth pose at the centre - my character at this moment comprises the various layers of the previous me, having gone through profound formative events at various ages. Skins of consciousness. Say, Raynard's slamming the shit out of me circa 1991; say that even now I find Eddie Furlong circa 1992 indescribably dreamy – because the part of me that perceives him as a God, will always be the age it was when he first fell from heaven, into my lap. And he’ll always be older than me, and he’ll always be an adolescent, circa forever. We'll evolve together in my internal erotic theatre. The grungy, cool, creamy-skinned, brusque, sneering, street-rat from hell. Sigh. Chin propped by hand on elbow. Absently chewing bubble gum. Gazing dreamily at the back of Eddie's head from my desk in maths. Someone breaks my self-immersed sexual narrative with a lump of screwed up graph paper chucked at the rear of my head. I feel self-conscious - what if he noticed? The insecurity galvanises my respect for him, and this afternoon a complex is born. Lock me in a room with an un-self-consciously cool kid, I’ll tremble and gibber; my stomach beamed up by aliens to make way for a motorway straight to my heart; this absence of stomach almost electrifyingly orgasmic; even my ego retreats behind the curtain when in the presence of a God. How the hell am I supposed to fend for myself without that lynchpin of my arsenal?

Fill the void. The greatest porn is vacant. That's why I prefer still-life erotic stuff - there's so much more space to accommodate your particulars. I crave contact, the currency most feared by society. Sex has been sterilised, codified into being mentally inseparable from products and narrowly-defined aesthetic ideals;

“Coca-cola is so damn fine, baby, yeah, ram that bottle up my guts, and let that toxic fluid sabotage my crass and imperfect tissue. Let the aspartame rock my uterus into deathly spasm. Let me become one with the sputum of factories, the seed of puppetship, I pray to the Greater Good that I'll one day spray from this detestably unclean pod the bastard Godspawn of Ronald McDonald and Dr Kellogg; a logo-ed homunculus, a starchild of maltodextrin, connective tissue, ribocnucleotide, ricin, rusk, papier-mache, silicon, sparkling heterogeneity, aqua, wrapped in crumb; an unimprovably loveless chunk of mewling, rancid, living death, entirely devoted to the Gepettos in their counting houses, eating bread, honey, babies, and your dreams. Congratulations on the birth of your baby girl, now, smother her; force her back into the womb before she's privy to any of the ghastly scenes I’ve outlined above.”

In this world, childbirth is child abuse, and the tabloids tell us all repeatedly how abhorrent this is. Ladies, this century, if you're pregnant, I urge you to sew up your cunt with wire and save your child from a lifetime of raped ideals and the slow deadening process of participation in the rusting machine. If you choose not to, I challenge you to shoot smack in your womb; toss yourself repeatedly down the stairs late in labour, and see if what squealing mucus trickles out of you isn't exactly the same as what you see grow up in society if you let things be. It’s the only generous way. Or you could raise your child to resist the allure of the Way of Greater Good, urge her to assume her own flightpath through this ontological minefield. Who cares, I'll be so disillusioned by the time that any of you come around to the notion of making choices, that I'll be sitting out my twilight years in a cave, squatting, pretending my psychical emanations are a salve to the collective soul of mankind, while my body disintegrates under the weight of ignorance in its ruined mind.

Thanks for never, ever, listening. Like you battery-farmed puppetfuckers even give a shit. Burn this paper and let the sparks ignite your soul. Or burn this paper and feel your social persona bloat with pride at having extinguished from the world a renegade voice of discontent. Or don't burn it at all - do nothing, as always. Still, I realize now why I declined to act on my impulses. Because the kids aren't responsible for any of this; more the institutions that house them and bleach them of love; shave them of identity. If I ever killed a kid, I’d be just like the rest of you. Even back then I was canny enough to realize that if I’d turned up at school and gunned all you dense fuckers down, I'd either be dead or in prison – whatever, my right to a voice would've been voided forever. Instead, by holding back these impulses at the last minute, I have secured me time, and a platform on which to mount my sentiment very loudly and very clearly, very bombastically. And I’ve spared an assembly hall full of dazzling kids a very fucking painful death. Back then I asked, does the symbolism in a massacre outweigh the bodycount? I’m still totally clueless.

Let it be made clear than I in no way blame my parents for my failure as a person. My parents have only ever been kind, liberal and compassionate. Maybe if they weren't, I'd be just like you. So I don't blame them, I thank them. I bless them, and I hold them on a pedestal way above the flames bursting from the torches I take to your fecal minds. I blame you. I blame all of you, without exception, for the crippling loneliness inherent in not being one of you. For my inability to connect with anyone, ever, except for dead revolutionaries and festering psych-ward loons. For instilling just enough moral consciousness in me, to have stalled my teen apocalypse, much against my better judgement. For making me write this every night for the rest of my life, and for making me erase it every morning as soon as I’m done. For saturating my soul in cowardice so I go to work every day, smiling through my A-Bomb of a head. I blame you all. The biggest wipe-out is, usually a person can be blamed for doing something really bad. But in this case, you are all implicitly being blamed for doing nothing really good.

Bless your strength, Eric. I have failed.

Nick Hudson.