The State I'm in attempting to learn. Years 1998 -2002

Choices. Life choices. Choose a course. Choose a city. Choose a shitty cheap stereo, pretentious whinny music, movie posters, books you never read and a matching set of pans. Choose bad health, greasy breakfasts and smelly urine. Choose the maximum available loan. Choose an overpriced flat. Choose your mates. Choose your trainers and tasteful bed linen. Choose your textbooks and an unnecessary range of coloured pens and highlighters. Choose a seminar and wondering what the fucking hell you’re doing with your youthful promise. Choose to be slumped on a broken sofa assimilating housewife junk life, digesting reheated kebab meat with another pissing can of beans. Choose returning home none the wiser about your hopelessly inadequate shite course, fumbling through lies in mediocre job interviews, embarrassing yourself with your lack of ambition. Make your choices. Choices.
No, that was not the exact poster that I stared at almost every morning for four years that much is indeed true. Did I have a heroine problem? I think that we all know that did not happen, no matter how romantic the remission tales would read on these pages of remembrance. I predictably owned Junk by William Burroughs if that helps? In fact it was for a typically trendy, cool, urban independent film that was loved by a niche student audience. This in turn made it a widely popular not so niche film loved by every student who still thought that they were trendy and independent. Such ironies are almost always lost on the sullied middle class, ex-polytechnic crowd for which I was a gleaming paragon. The poster belonged to film Trainspotting – ‘Choose Life’.
Some statement to awaken my sweaty brow to masking, as it does the frazzled consciousness and morning bolts of stark verisimilitude. Yet, rather pretentiously like the black and white poster of Michael Caine next to it, the sentiments echoed my own. No, not the need for sharp retro spectacles – although how I used to lie to opticians to get a prescription - or the assumption that I must ‘Get Carter’ but in asking me to ‘Choose Life’ with a series of life affirmatives and melancholic existential statements. Orange and white with some Microsoft word typeface that I couldn’t fathom. I hold it directly responsible for continual relapses to the sweat pressed feathers and every missed number 98 bus. This was on a good morning, every morning, and each day for four years. It was my time as a student.
It made me question. What? Just question.
Flicker and light, flicker and blank, flicker and back to darkness. It is at this point in the morning hours that my mind, both the conscious and self-consciousness are entirely inept to function normally. I remember nothing and I can discern little, if any, perspective on this, my immediate reality – I become the ‘fouth wall’ of the stage. The front of my head appeared to be attempting to disembark for the yellow besmirched skies and fly ridden moon. Curtains left here from another century, could do little to dislodge my frozen arse from the windowsill. Stuck, conjoined and hung as a grotesque Ofili canvas to the mechanics whose workshop was clouded by my sentry window.
Ripping my buttocks from the window was about the only action that I could manage that did not result in my chassis violently ejecting last night’s petrol. Yet this repetitive existence mattered little to education, suppressed and depressed as it was, lying there in a satchel not touched for days.
Sporadically, images do arrive, not of anything concrete and occasionally wholly unconnected to the evening beforehand – at least, like a pensioner with dementia, sub-consciousness is alive. An argument with friends, close to a cash point, concerning the lack of personal contributions - £1.50 - for the ever-patient taxi mingles with an equally embarrassing realization of naked self-exposure in the centre of town. You attempt to remember the jokes, the one liner that oiled the evening’s entertainment and made you feel like a suppressed comedian but they never arrive. Good thoughts are always secondary to the bad.
Characters that are distinct, places that embolden lost memory and events long since fondly passed away are tossed in to the trendy cocktail shaker of The Fine Line – the bar deemed too good for us miscreants - and distilled as frothy chili broth in to the pipes of the mind. I don’t help myself of course, attempting to piece together previous evenings is a common occurrence. It leaves the only question what came before the first evening out? It is a whole new chicken and egg conundrum.
God, no I don’t quite feel ready to plead to God but God it is an ethereal feeling when you realise that you have slobbered and dribbled all over your own face – anything but divine. Those poor sodden pillows that I have rolled and writhed with over four years, cajoling them like loved church pew prayer pillows. That is what a pillow means to you as a student; a break from the madness - a symbolic piece of comfort from a home where everything was once provided for you. I loved that flat, abused bag of stitched feathers.
At such times it is heartbreaking when the eyes succumb to the little light left in the day, that dawning reality that the body has had enough unconscious rest. A dull ache always persisted in my legs, granite filled veins that I treated like prime cuts of lamb, wrapped as they were each morning in layers of grey white cotton bedding. Unfurling each eyeball at such moments is like an orange gradually being exposed from its protective sheath. Christ, I could have done with an orange at such times.
Next up, the mouth makes one or two involuntary movements – I cannot recall precipitating the order but it chaffes together like a marathon runners untrained thighs. This has to be what it is like sitting on a dune lost in the desert. Parched and cracked my lips conceal a lifeless watering mirage. Life is only derived by hallucinogenic declensions to torpor. I felt like a stumped malnourished giraffe.
It never gets any better, in fact, for each of my student years it got progressively worse. Four years of failing to learn, failing to mature to the stage when I can surely, surely, imbibe the lesson to put a bloody glass of water on a David Bowie album cover surrounded by ridiculously colourful socks.
My pupils instead focus on a cloudy and greasy stained pint glass, surrounded by a smattering vomit of loose chain – turned with the Queen’s head upwards. At such times you can only curse you lack of privilege and status. Just where is the butler with the ice and slice in the drink of your choice and the, my oh my, soothing flannel for this…HEAD!
Sweet Jesus, this head. It feels like a prematurely born baby that simply should not be moved from its incubator. Please get better. A constant ringing is reverberating around my eardrums like a television on standby. Paused in delicate inertia for so long, so often I know something more than rest is needed, my head throbs confirmation, experience screams consent but I am not moving, I’m not moving anywhere. At this moment in time? Sod life’s experiences.
No. No, I need to get up. I need some fluid, some, some food. Anything. But I can’t, I do not want to. I am not going anywhere. Well I didn’t, for four years.
In a state of acute dehydration, befuddlement and utter self-loathing I learnt to gradually love every moment. With every onset of the hooch humps and cheap lager melancholy, reflective triumphalism sprouted green mature veins. I could suddenly reflect on years of previously wash-away events and memories – I lay there for four years and created a past, I created an experience.
For to long the years spanning from the age of seventeen to the early twenties had congealed in a bulbous jelly, no age was distinct, separate or distinguishable from another. Not when you are lying down mummified or attempting to impress a seasoned local landlord with orders that he has happily washed down himself one frivolous morning. My misspent education.
Or was it?
With the sub-conscious – well I think that it was ‘sub’ but I am probably kidding myself – erosion of one formal education I was mentally beginning to piece together a glass that gave prior years new meaning and fresh reflection. It is an obdurate sale, the glass has a few greasy thumbprints I cannot deny that. I mean, how do you convince your hard labouring single Mother that it is perfectly fine to be missing consecutive lectures on the economics of the Pacific basin so long as you are now, in booze blues reflection, obtaining meaning and worth in the years spent cleaning pie ovens and packing salt with a hair piece on.
Yet that was exactly it, my formal education became significantly insignificant. My immediate reality was lucidly making sense of my past that in turn was shaping a coherent future for the first time.
I still could not get out of my head, or is that bed? I still couldn’t move, I still didn’t wish to unwrap my feet to the dawn of early evening. Simply put, I still wasn’t helping myself to get any better. But I no longer thought that days spent cleaning pie ovens was an exercise in futility. You have to thank university education for that. Rejecting the mainstream in favour of a headlong rush in to self-nihilism.