Sod The Jubilee Baby

Ever since moving back to the UK, after years of being steeped in the rhetoric of the American Revolution – which I rather like – I have been blown away at the failure of many intelligent people to recognize the inherent incompatability between basic (and I mean like, really basic) principles of democracy and a monarchical system of inherited privilege. It is truly amazing and I have even lost friends over differing views on the English royalist question. Yes, you read that right: actual living people who have had real-world friendships with me, enjoyed my company, maybe even been hired by me to do paid creative work, people like that have unhesitatingly decided to insult and dump me as a friend, in loyal preference to people that s/he will never, ever meet, except MAYBE for 5 seconds some day in a public crowd.

I do find that weird.

I have never yet heard a single convincing argument that is not based on some kind of irrational identification with an elusive sense of tradition that is neither quantifiable nor shared by many of her madge’s so-called subjects.  Certainly the piano-player I refer to, obliquely, above could not produce a rational justification for s/his intense loyalty to a bunch of rich strangers who don’t have to testify in court.  In fact, come to think of it, it was right when I offered to ease up on the barbed witticisms (I had been having a bit too much fun, true that) and consider with an open-mind any rationale s/he wanted to lucidly present, that things got really out of hand!

Instead of a calm and devastatingly inarguable articulation of exactly why I should crouch into an odd posture when in the presence of people of a certain genetic grouping imagine this: I received a furious missive that nearly scorched my laptop screen with its ire!   It  somehow managed to invoke an Italian grandmother, some kind of concentration camp experience, Winston Churchill, an unfortunate theft of sentimental jewelry that had taken place in Hackney in 1974, veganism and the importance of banning GMO corn (actually s/he made really good points about that last one that were totally convincing; only I already knew that).

I forgive myself really easily (thanks to Linda Serbu for that awesome life philosophy) and so I don’t really feel all that bad about admitting that I responded by asking s/him why and when s/he had begun dressing like Adam Ant (s/he WAS though! had just changed s/his profile pic ‘n all!) and inviting s/him to demonstrate s/his uber-patriotic fervour by leaving sunny, cheap and well-fed California to see how s/he’d fare in post-modern “Broken Britain”. I told s/him he’d gone soft and wouldn’t last a week in the damp and overpriced mould of London. S/he didn’t take kindly to that and insisted that not living in rainy, overpriced, overcrowded and confused modern Britain was a pulsating wound that would never heal; my earnest efforts to inform s/him of the wonders of transcontinental flight and how indeed, it was still yet possible to exchange the sunny vegan groves of Marin for a bedsit above a condemned kebab shop in Tottenham merely fell on deaf screens.

You get the gist.  So yeah, that was the end of the friendship and I’ll never use the mix s/he did of a song of mine.

It’s crazy how rabid royalists will get when their failure to provide a single solid argument in favour of the monarchy drives them into a sputtering rage of irrational pretzel-logic. The usual unprovable declarations of the millions earned in tourism (great, let’s check that out then – oh, royal secret privilege = total lack of transparency? so you can say anything and not have to show any evidence? your word yer honour?) – let’s just get that out of the way. And don’t forget to subtract the lost revenue from the millions of horrified residents who always flee the country when royal pageantry ensues so as to avoid even-worse-than-usual-English-levels of ineptitude that are sure to extravagantly reign in the public transportation and highways sector.  Surely that’s a few kabillion exiting stage-left?

Non?

NO no no. It’s a crock of shit, and while I’m getting all into it let me just say that every aristo I ever befriended since being here in the UK these past 7.5 years has turned out in the end to totally believe in their own inherent superiority despite, in several cases, displaying few honourable characteristics beyond superficial charm, what Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful queer stutterer in Bridesehead Revisited referred to as “the English disease”.  (Or was that meant to allude to a penchant for caning?)

Whatever.  It’s true and until I meet one who’s given up their title, I will always challenge people from the so-called gentry.  Inherited titles are fundamentally ridiculous.  Even the ones I’ve met who were big campaigners against the war on (some people who use some) drugs were Tories in the end and in the end they just view themselves differently.

After one such friendship revealed the truth of the above, one truth-telling night on mushrooms, I wrote this poem. I’ll be performing it in the street at this weekend’s protests.  I found an updated written version of it after recording it so there are a couple minor discrepancies between the audio and text but I decided to keep the improved text in written form, rather than fix it to match the audio.

Can you feel me?

I’d like to thank Paxus Calta for dubbing me “MC Hazard to the Status Quo” a buncha years ago because it’s become a sort of alter-ego for certain of my more controversial, I suppose, pieces.

The authorship of this work is definitely attributed to MC H2SQ

Monarchy in the UK!

Aristocracy

It’s got no place in a democracy

It’s nothing but hypocrisy

When some are born to reign

“Let’s put on our bestest whitest sockses

Get all dressed up and go kill foxes

‘cause that’s what orthodox is

We’ve got traditions to maintain!”

It’s an anachronism

Not like Mr Rotten’s anarchism

Which shed a light upon the schism

The separation of the classes

It’s still as relevant as ever

Our little Johnny seems quite clever

And still the future dreams forever

Of liberation for the masses

My message shouldn’t be a mystery

Let’s help make monarchy history

Because my hands are getting blistery

From hanging tightly to the edge

Meanwhile privilege’s progeny

Are enforcing a homogeny

As they’re chugging Perignon for free

singin’ “We are Family!”

just  like the Sisters Sledge

Yes everybody is a cousin

They’ve got at least a banker’s dozen

And like a bee just can’t help buzzin’

They can’t help sticking with their hive

Just place a call to Lady Anne

She’ll do the jolly best she can

For any blood-related man

To keep the club of blood alive

Once knew a guy and he was posh

But still he hadn’t any dosh

We’d go and grab a bite of nosh

I ‘d pay my way and then the tip

What is the point, I’d say to me,

Of name, land and heredit’ry

If you’re cheap as cheap can be

As cheap as that proverbial chip

He sodomized me once on shrooms

At least he tried in his front rooms

If that was sex then men have wombs

I tell ya boarding schools had warped this lad

Kicked out of school and hooked on smack

He’d left the hive and not looked back

But it’s not hard to pose as slack

When all your tabs are paid by dad

“It’s important to have an emblem of

The things you want to be a semblance of

And note the family resemblance of

The lineage that shaped the past.

You’ll see them in the National Gallery

And in the spirit of equality

We’ve even put them in the part that’s free

So all can see our clan is built to last”

But the little people get forgotten

Just down the mine or pickin’ cotton

Don’t get to keep what they have gotten

Aint no statues of their kin

So if a miner was your great-Grandad

A rendering his visage never had

He never ordered war nor birthed no fad

Til the coal dust did him in

Aristocracy

Got no place in a democracy

Some may call it heterodoxy

When I call it weird and vain

These silly titles are beyond absurd

A princess is like any other bird

Got just two tits but by that single word

Our deference she can obtain

I have a dream like Dr King once said

When people everywhere blue, green and red

Mutts and well-bred, the hungry and well-fed

Will recognise we’re all the same

So let’s not rest ‘til it’s demolished

This silly system is abolished

Until the “honours list” is polished off

Cuz only that will end our shame

I’ll never curtsey and I won’t kowtow

Except to take applause I will not bow

You disagree? OK then, show me how:

You can start by kissing my ass

Me, I prefer a meritocracy

Where talent and hard graft will set you free

To be the ultimate that you can be

Cuz baby,

That’s the true meaning of  Classsss

Fat and Fucked Up in Daly City

It was sad to see the old boy. First thing I noticed when he got out o the pick-up truck was he looked like he’d just swallowed John Travolta. My God. He was frankly gigantic and the T-shirt he wore, emblazoned with an exploding kitten’s head, didn’t disguise things much.

They say you can never go home again and I guess what’s meant by that is that things change irrevocably and if you retrace your steps hoping to relive a fond memory on the rebound, well you a big fuckin’ sucka. End of.

Nevertheless, as my pendulum swings between exultation and extreme bad luck so does the sweep of memory’s gaze mean that blurred out bits of detail often will give a person license to raise up a frayed ole banner of yesterday’s hope like it’s the emblem of a new tomorrow.

And so it was having donned such denial-tinted spectacles that I chose to reconsider once again entering the creative lab with two ex-collaborateurs of different but equally doom-laden pedigree, location being the link.

In other words, I went back to San Francisco thinking maybe I could “get the old band back together” to use the ouch-ey words of a hack screenwriter.

Not really, because they were each just one person and not whole bands, but anyway you get the idea.

Yuck and yikes. I left screaming.

One was so far up his own ass-myth of legendariness that he couldn’t even recognize that he was living in a pile of vomit, the other, who was also living in a pile of vomit, was too wasted on opiate derivatives to notice his stench of rotting failure.

I have to admit to also being a little overweight at the time, having just endured a year of sedentary living occasioned by a furiously decaying splinter that was trying hard to rid me of a foot.

I started drinking bottles of wine in the morning, when it was still dark, and going on long walks around sections of outer San Francisco I’d never had a single good goddamn reason to fucking bother with before. Mostly boring.

But one morning, the day I later told old Bats-in-his-Belfry that he was a shameful waste of food and ought to just die as soon as possible, I found the funniest little park in all the world (so far). It’s called the Dorothy Erskine Park and I guess there might be more to it down below than what I saw, but I only found the very toppermost bit of it.

It was literally a steep mound, with trees on top, surrounded by a fence, maybe 200 feet square in terms of area? It was as if the builders and city planners and everybody had gone as far as they could, and there was just this one weird pimple of a protrusion that couldn’t exactly be built on as it was. Somebody would have had to do massive re-shaping on this mound in order to make it flat enough to put foundations down.

Well they didn’t. Instead it was just a “park”. But what kind of park was this?! You couldn’t play ball there, there were no swings. There was nothing but a few trees and a pimple of grass, a sheer bank dropping down to a chicken-wire fence on either side.

But what a view in the early morning! A clear shot over houses and rooftops all the way to a sliver of blue water, from a totally different angle than I was used to.

After walking for miles and miles I sat on the very tip of it watching the sun come up over a part of the Bay that never makes it into the movies. I worked on a song I’d first thought of about 10 years previously: roads in blue / lead straight to you/ across the town/ and up and down / the hills and avenues / like a melancholy tune…

Then I went back to the pretty but gloomy cottage where the junkie snored, his over-fed cat licking grease from his chin.

We had a big fight later that evening. I’d found the syringes in the trash. He pretended not to know what I was on about and screamed at me for making noise while I cleaned his filthy kitchen.

I left the country soon afterwards and started to lose weight immediately.

Sign # 5: A Plea for Christian Bestiality

Don’t skip to the bottom and see the sign first – you MUST let me introduce it, PLEASE!

I hold special fondness for a hand-made sign. There’s the trouble that’s gone into it for one thing. Some of the time you see one that’s obviously taken a lot of work and craftsmanship. Impressive. But on the other hand, some rough ones that were clearly the result of great haste are made especially poignant by the very urgency of the scrawl. The placement of the hand-made sign is also going to have a different logic to it than the commercial or regulatory sign and that can be a fun thing to notice.

But what of those certain hand-made signs, a category unto themselves really, the motivation to create which must surely remain forever unresolved?

For example: what probing could ever reveal what possessed the unknown author of the specimen of cardboard-fragment poetry I present below to compose his (or her, I guess) gross ode to shitty pizza? None. And an even greater mystery must surely be why, having captured this odious flight of fancy, its creator felt irresistibly compelled to display it within the glass window of a newspaper dispenser on a San Francisco street corner, like some rare specimen? Thus making it harder for others to remove without effort while maximizing its visibility to all passersby.

Was it a message for a particular person, known to frequent that corner?

Or had the tunnel vision of some self-absorbed artiste led to a magnanimous and egoistic urge to share his proudest stanza of doggerel, by intrusion if necessary?

I hesitated to post this or write about it because it’s so crude and not really funny. Or rather, it is funny, but not in the way it thinks it is. It doesn’t even scan properly and the rhyme isn’t good. It’s funny because it’s not right and then you just go “what the fuck?” And then you laugh.

WHY?

Adios a la Ciudad de Los Angeles

If you look closely you can see a tiny Hollywood sign in the distance.

I reckoned I’d do my recollections in reverse as it’s kind of easier to piece together that way.

These pictures are from my last day in Los Angeles when, with a few hours to kill, I went on a 4 hour wander up and down the hills of the Silverlake district. It was an outrageously gorgeous sunny day, February 28th. (I thought the 28th was a good day to fly in a leap year as you essentially get the 29th to recover for free – a day out of time as it were.)

People diss on LA all the time but on my visits there in January and February of this year, I was mainly struck by how beautiful it is. In certain parts. Walking around Silverlake in what would be the dead of Winter in the UK, was like being in a Hawaiian botanical garden.

The abundance of lush, colourful vegetation was mind-blowing. I guess I took it for granted when I lived there!

Check out this enormous fluffy plant. It was taller than I am (about 5’8”).

Or this crazy cacti-cluster, many of which were to be found cascading down the hillsides.

I watched this little green bird (below) for a long time but I never could get a great picture of it. That’s because, as you can see, it kept stuffing its head inside this big pod from which it would yank out some chunks of what looked like cotton wool, which it would then hurl to the ground.

                   Even the junked cars were extremely beautiful.

And at the end of the walk, having only taken what could be spared, I was able to make a lush flower arrangement which I left in my friend’s kitchen by way of thanks. Being completely skint at the time, with barely enough cash to make it to Brighton once my plane landed, it was amazing to be able to produce this for free! I felt bad not being able to afford leaving a bottle of wine or something on the table but my friend really, really, really appreciated it. I think he thanked me about 5 times in different emails so I was well chuffed!

See you tomorrow!

Resurrection Slightly Behind Schedule!

WELL HELLO SEXY!

What with Easter just behind us and the Spring Equinox just before that, it seemed like a good moment to kick my own ass and get this blog back up and running. To my 7 loyal readers who have pined for my words during this lengthy silence I can only apologize and make the excuse that I was out of the country for two months at the beginning of the year and had to have foot surgery in Mexico. That saga will soon be forthcoming, complete with bloody pictures! But, nitpicks the inner critic, that excuse only takes us back to the beginning of the year. The last blog post was for the Knox-Sollecito acquittal of last October. Well, um, I got busy and then a few days became a couple weeks and then I didn’t know where to begin and then there was that whole Christmas thing and, well, after that we’re into January, Mexico and the foot. There, satisfied! Like you care anyway!

I have lots of stories and pictures to share of my somewhat disaster-prone adventures of the last few months and will be doing so in coming days! In all truthfulness, many terrible things have occurred but I find that when I tell others of all the awful things that happen to me, in hopes of receiving sympathy or cash donations, these friends are frequently to be glimpsed stuffing rags into their mouths in efforts to suppress the apparent hilarity that my tribulations induce in the listener. So perhaps hearing about my rotten luck can brighten your day and put a smile on your face. If so, it’s well worth it.

I had to start somewhere and although this is not really a proper post at all, it is at least dated April 12, 2012. Thus, tomorrow, I will feel less pressured to close the enormous 4+ month gap (I just couldn’t bring myself to type “5 month gap”) and this will have the perverse effect of inducing me to make another post. And then the day after that, another one!

I was never a daily blogger (I know, that’s supposed to be the point, shut up) but now I WILL BE.

For at least one week anyway. So that someone just looking at my bog, I mean blog, will see several recent entries close together and not think I’m the sort of person who just lets their blog sit there corroding for 4+ months, like some kind of electronic barnacle.

Also, I think it is apt that this is the first entry since the righteous acquittal of Knox and Sollecito because they’ve been back in the news again, due to both of them signing book deals.

Naturally, some haters out there begrudge this maliciously wronged pair the right to profit from their ordeal, conveniently overlooking the enormous financial costs their families endured and the emotional hardship for which they’ve not been compensated.

What is wrong with some people?

A couple of days ago some total cretin of a guy wrote me an abusive email in which he called me a silly bitch and then stuck in at the end that Knox was definitely guilty and it was a travesty of justice that she got out. As if he thought this would get my goat; as if his uninformed opinion would bother me!

Actually, it did bother me.

But not for the reason he obviously hoped; I did not feel personally attacked or insulted and had absolutely no inclination to bother to set him straight. No, what bothered me was that he (a yobbish English guy, guessing from the one time we spoke on the phone) felt justified in even having an opinion on the matter, when that opinion had doubtless been formed by the types of newspapers that used to be more suitably employed as ad hoc packaging for fishmongers (before Health & Safety put a stop to the ancient practice).

To be falsely accused is horrible. I know because it’s happened to me. To be falsely convicted and imprisoned for years for a horrific act one is completely incapable of performing must be one of the most agonizing of all human experiences. The injustice of having to read the nastified depiction of one’s character by sleazy tabloid hacks; the distortion of one’s life and thoughts into something hideously unrecognizable; one’s personal and private actions and holiday photos turned into condemnations by the black arts of gutter journalism…it’s almost unthinkable how a person could stay strong through something like that.

Yet Amanda and Rafaele were both model prisoners by all accounts. Amanda never got into a single argument with guards or fellow prisoners in 4 years and when she left, the 600 inmates crowded the tiny windows of the prison waving banners for her and shouting with joy that someone who deserved to be free was going free. Witnesses said it was like seeing a football star walk out onto the pitch only with 10 times the emotion. To win the love of 600 people in a prison one should never have been in is an impressive testament to the fundamentally good nature of this accidental cover-girl.

With all that in mind, it makes me sad that guys like Arsepus (sorry, I know that’s childish but I can’t put his real name and that is close enough), guys like Arsepus – who probably devoted 40 minutes of his entire life reading about the case in one of those rags that have topless chicks on page 3 – can feel so confident in voicing their stupid conviction that the guilty have been freed.

It made me wonder if other creeps out there were still banging on in that vein so I looked on the web and was disheartened to see that the sick and pathetic websites insisting on Knox and Sollecito’s guilt are still up and running with plenty of new entries. Plenty of idiots here in the UK, including (sorry to have to say it) the victim’s family are still refusing to accept the truth: that Kercher’s murder was mundane.

It wasn’t the sensational stuff of best-selling crime novels. There was no satanic orgy, no threesome, no pretty American student hiding homicidal urges behind a winning smile, no shy Italian student with a secret knife-fetish, nothing but an embarrasingly politically incorrect scenario of a robbery/rape/murder committed by a guy of African descent. Those stories don’t grab headlines for long.

Sorry, but that’s the truth. Move along people. Nothing to see here.

To me it seems like the Kercher’s oft-expressed desire “not to let Meredith be forgotten” has gotten the better of their judgment and they’ve decided to keep her name alive by any means necessary. Even if that means ignoring the boring facts and backing the salacious fantasy that kept the story on the front page.

I don’t know what’s in it for the trolls who have jumped on their bandwagon though; I guess the same thing that motivates all trolls – increasing pain for people already in it.

Some say I shouldn’t criticize the Kercher family, that their loss puts them above reproach. To that I say bullshit. All it would take to shut up the trolls would be a statement from them that they accept the acquittal was correct, that they know Knox and Sollecito had nothing to do with it, that they were misled by an insane prosecutor.

But they haven’t. They were clearly hoping for Knox and Sollecito to lose their appeal and have backed the deranged Mignini from the beginning.

As someone who spent hundreds of hours wading through the published evidence, I am really looking forward to both forthcoming books. In particular it will be fascinating to finally learn more about Sollecito, whose wrongful conviction and ordeal were practically overlooked, even though his possible connection to the crime was even more wispily tenuous than Knox’s. His was a quiet but strong presence throughout and I for one can’t wait to finally get to read his side of the story. Amanda’s prison diaries will also be a fascinating read.

They both deserve their multi-million dollar book deals and only a troll would deny them a compensation that goes nowhere to restoring the 4 years they already lost and the lifetime of compromised privacy which faces them now.

See you tomorrow!

Justice at Long, Long LAST!

Amanda and Raffaele are finally free. I’ll do an analysis later, but this is just to show a picture of me and my Mum in our T-shirts we made today, going on Brighton beach and snapping a photo anticipating victory, a couple hours before the verdict.

I know I’m behind schedule on finishing my retrospective of September 2001 and was supposed to get to the bit where I get arrested (September 18), but it’s still gestating. I definitely will continue the tale in a few days.

Meanwhile this is happening now. And the exoneration of Knox and Sollecito makes me reflect on my own experience again and in a new way as well, so perhaps it’s good I still haven’t quite gotten round to writing that part of the story yet.

By the way – ignore the date stamp on the photo. I had literally rushed out and bought the camera moments before the shops shut so I could take this picture, as my Olympus is being fixed and my mobile was being a bastard and wouldn’t hold a charge so I couldn’t use its camera feature! Pressed for time, I didn’t bother to set the date.

Free before the next sunrise

The Time I Turned a Poetry Slam Into A Riot

OK, I admit that on my previous post, I put it out there as a bit of a tease that the second time I performed The Tower I accidentally caused a riot. Fishing, fishing! So THANKS for rising to the bait go to my lovely friend Jan of Zurich (with whom I had an affair in San Francisco many years ago, the ridiculous brevity of which was counter-balanced by its painlessness, spontaneity and sense of effortless intellectual fun…) who went ahead and asked me to tell the story. That conversation was taking place on FB, so I put it there but then thought to meself: hey, as long as I’m sort of revisiting the events of a decade ago (lagging behind by a few days because, well you know, just cuz), I really ought to put the story on 66witches, or the next bit, where the cops come for me, won’t have as good of a context. It’s important for me to convey exactly how much insanity took place in such a short amount of time. People living in the US then will remember that we were also being told that we were under a major Anthrax attack.
*
The 2nd time I performed The Tower was probably September 14th or 15th 2001. I was under the impression that I was one of the featured poets at a local poetry slam, around the corner from my house, a place called the Black Box, run by friends from grad school. I hate poetry slams by the way. In between the contestants, not a single one of whom was addressing the WTC disaster of a couple days earlier, were the featured poets who had longer sets; incidentally none of them mentioned it either.

It was the usual shit, mostly in the hip hop style, urban confessional, sexual politics yawn blah blah. I couldn’t fucking believe it. Then my name was called and so I went up there to do my thang. You’ve read the poem so you know it aint short. In fact, it’s nearly 2000 words, including the song quotes, and clocks in at anywhere from 12-17 minutes, depending on things like how I do the song bits, or if there’s a lot of audience reaction.

When I was about 3/4 of the way through you coulda heard a pin drop in that place. People were paying rapt attention. I was at the very bleakest part, the death and destruction and confusion part when all of a sudden I notice some kind of conferring going on at the back of the room between what looked like some of the event organizers. (cuz when you’re on stage, every movement in the house is like there’s a spotlight on it) This was in Oakland and the audience was pretty racially mixed, but there was a definite trend towards favouring the African-American rap style (which I love in music but don’t really like at a poetry recital…but I digress) and the MC was a twenty something black female intellectual type. (Just for purposes of setting the scene.) So I’m doing my poem but clocking what’s going on in the back of the room and then one of the persons emerges from the darkness and I recognize her as the MC. And she’s weaving her way through the crowd and coming straight towards me. I don’t know why she’s doing this, but try to ignore it and keep going. Then, she’s actually on the stage. Then she’s beside me! I try to keep going but of course I look over at her and that’s when she puts her hands on the Mic and sez:

“You know, we’re all really moved by whatchoo bin sayin’ an’ all but like, we really gotta move on to the next contestant..you’ve gone way over the 3 minute time limit…”

WHAT? What the hell was she talking about?

I don’t let go of a microphone too easily and my hand was still on it and so I say something like “I’m not in the contest! I was asked to come here and read this tonight by my friends who own this place!”

But where the fuck were they to back me up? I couldn’t see any of em.

A tussle began. This woman and I were literally having a tug of war with the microphone. She was being really nice but also VERY insistent. The audience started getting restless.

“Listen lady! I’m sorry if I broke your rules. I did not come down here to compete in your poetry slam. I came down here because in case you hadn’t noticed a KIND OF FUCKING MAJOR SOMETHING JUST HAPPENED LIKE 2 DAYS AGO AND NOT ONE OF YOUR SO CALLED POETS HAS SAID A FUCKING WORD ABOUT IT! FORGET YOUR CONTEST! THIS IS REAL LIFE! I’M TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING HERE AND YOU ARE STOPPING ME IN THE MOST HOPELESS, DARK AND EVIL PIECE OF THIS POEM. I’M SORRY I WENT OVER YOUR TIME LIMIT BUT I’LL BE DONE IN LIKE 2 MINUTES AND I PROMISE YOU WE WILL BE ENDING ON A HIGH NOTE IF YOU JUST LET ME CONTINUE! I HEREBY DISQUALIFY MYSELF OK?!!!”

Or something like that.

A few shouts started to come from the crowd. So I decided to put it to them.

“Who wants me to keep going?”

Well, quite a lot did and started to shout “let her finish!”

But there was also quite a few (most likely “poets” who hadn’t had their turn yet) who most definitely did not.

“Get her off! She’s gone on long enough!”

It started to get quite loud and heavy. Some people stood up and started shouting at each other. The MC and I were still grappling over the microphone. Then I looked out at the scene and noticed something else that really pissed me off and was so typical and indicative of the obtuse attitude I was facing and it was this: despite the place packed with people, so that they were even lining the walls and perimeter of the room, there were 3 or 4 perfectly good empty cocktail tables and chairs right at the front.

Why the fuck do people do that? I used to call it the “semi-circle of fear” and when I played in bands around San Francisco it was one of the things that really got my goat. This giant fucking hole right in front of the stage cuz…what…everyone needs to be near the exit in case it sucks and they gotta go? Are they afraid of having to have their reactions visible to others? Are they too cool for school? What’s the goddamn problem?

So imagine the above paragraph, complete with flashback pictures, happening in about 2 seconds inside my brain. Things suddenly came to a head.

With a final wrench I got possession of the mic in my left hand, simultaneously grabbing my papers and music stand and sticking them under my right arm.

I shouted my parting words into the microphone:

“GO ON THEN! HAVE YOUR CONTEST! WIN SOME PRIZES!”

And with that, I hurled the mic and mic stand into the empty front row, sending shit flying all over the shop, simultaneously (and rather gracefully, if completely dementedly) leaping from the stage and making a super-fast run for it!

By the time I got to the door the whole place had erupted into complete chaos. I took one look back and saw people one step away from fisticuffs and overheard little snippets of the many dozens of individual arguments that were now taking place.

..but she’s a fucking hypocrite, she was talking about peace but then she was violent…no you asshole she was making a fucking point…..i just wanted to hear how it turned out…..fuck you…. saddam hussein…well I didn’t vote for Bush…

They’d forgotten all about me and I ran home.

About 20 minutes later, a couple of my friends who’d been at the gig came to my house to see how I was. They told me that the Black Box had had to kick everyone out and shut down the event and lock the doors because it had gotten so out of hand that there was absolutely no chance of restoring order and returning to the regular program. So I guess nobody won any prizes.

This pleased me immensely but I was still really pissed off about not getting to finish and the whole thing confirmed how much I dislike the slam format, which I’ve stupidly proven to myself a couple more times even since then.

So I wrote another poem. This one was called “Slam Slam” and it was basically this story I’ve just told you, but in poem form.

When I finished it, about 7 the next morning, I printed it out and went and GLUED it to the front door of the Black Box.

I later found out, to my total horror, that the event had been videotaped. Several of my classmates from grad school then ambushed me at the peace concert in Dolores Park that took place one or 2 days later, where Spearhead played. Apparently these friends had been studying the tape and had a lot of advice to give me about my personality and wanted to help me through some kind of healing by watching it.

It was hard for me to accept their offer because I really couldn’t quite get past the part where a) it was on tape and b) they’d been watching it. One of these people was the very guy who ran the venue and whose crappy communication skills were actually responsible for the whole misunderstanding in the first place. I mean, why the fuck didn’t he tell me that I was booked into the slam and only had 3 minutes?

But they didn’t want to talk about that, just my reaction. It was a very new age scene and these were the very same people who had recently forced a very reluctant me into the centre of a bogus and very embarrassing forgiveness ritual that I absolutely hated and had to act my way out of. I’m sure they were right in the sense that I could have learned something from watching the tape but at that very moment it struck me as the most monumentally besides-the-fucking-point-thing to be bringing to my attention considering everything that was happening in the world, plus their own complicity in what had happened at the gig.

And then either the next day or the day after was when I was raided by the Oakland Police Force. It was an extremely intense period of my life and super-dramatic and traumatic shit continued happening for about 3 or 4 months.

Next time I’m in Oakland I am going to visit the Black Box which is still there. I have a good excuse to visit because when I left the country I also loaned them a piece of original art (a painting of Buddha reclining on a settee in a garden that I bought from the homeless people art project in the Tenderloin district in SF on a grad school field trip) that I’d like back.

But just between you and me, I’m also hoping they still keep the archive of past events in the same location as it used to be because I fully intend to find and remove that tape. I never signed a model release and while I am now finally ready to watch it, I think it should be up to me if anyone else gets to see it from now on.

I’m not sure what happened to the Slam Slam poem. This was all several corrupted hard drives and international moves ago. Pretty sure there’s a copy in my stuff in L.A. so maybe I’ll dig it out again someday. I seem to remember it as being pretty funny.

The Tower

On the same day as the events described in my previous post, September 11, 2001, I wrote the following poem, which I performed twice over the next few days, accidentally causing a riot on the second occasion. A couple of days after that happened, in fact exactly ten years ago today, I experienced my own personal Tower moment, when 5 armed thugs working on behalf of the prohibition stormed into my house, guns drawn and aimed at my face, chained me up, kidnapped me and subjected me to sexual assault (for that’s what I call being forced to strip naked roughly 20 times in front of up to 30 people at a time, some prisoners, some guards). It’s funny now to think that I wrote this poem one week earlier.

***
Lately certain songs seem to stick in me
seem to whirl around repetitiously
telling me teaching me healing me musically
spelling out that something’s wrong
and I say to myself

What’s going on?
So much trouble in the world So much trouble in the world

Today the twin towers in the land of Babylon fell
I saw it on Television
live and direct from Hell
Watched the unbelievable happen
before my sleep smeared eyes
with shock but not surprise
as kamikaze devotees of Thanatos blazed their satanic heroic exodus into adrenalin death-buzz overdose bidding for oblivion in a method most grandiose turning lower Manhattan just like this
into a soot-filled necropolis
thus begging a terrible question
oh how the fuck did this begin?
when will it end when will we end it stop pretending, stop dissembling stop this parroting of chewed clichés that revolve around retaliation and only escalate the situation this war has no fucking enemy fools! it’s an internal viral invasion
in this culture of tired boasts
“we are the most”s “let’s have a toast’s”
I say yes yes let’s let’s place some bets!
five bucks says 50,000 died
hey remember that thing with the cyanide?
that Jim Jones thing back in 89
let’s all raise a glass of Koolaid wine
to the numero uno and most divinely deceptively contrived lie that is us today us as in U.S. of A.-holes
for whom the death knell tolls
in this the land of the murdered Indian brave
the land of the bomb and the home of the slave
wow somebody out there must really be pissed
let’s all hang a proxy to get our fix
just like they did in old Haymarket
a fire just needs a flame to spark it
doomsday prophets want to Noah’s ark it
it’s Y2K II deja vu give or take a few plot points
the panic sets in
the xenophobic uglies start to burble in the din

don’t you know that it’s true that for me and for you the world is a ghetto don’t you know that it’s truethat for me and for you the world is a – people moving out people moving in why? because of the color of their skin run, run, run, but you sure can’t hide An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
hey vote for me and I’ll set you free rap on brother, brother rap on well the only person talkin bout love thy brother is the preacher and it seems nobody’s interested in learning but the teacher segregation determination demonstration integration aggravation humiliation time to question what’s in a nation ball of confusion yeah that’s what the world is today woo hey hey

our fix is a dose of good old-fashioned retribution
hey that’s the strongly manly solution
catch the bastards and watch ‘em die
a truth, I mean a tooth, for a why, I mean I I mean
who are these monsters who cheer in the streets?
did ya see ‘em in Palestine, waving their sheets
marked with slogans applauding this blow to their devil
but Americans never would sink to their level
oh no says the news anchor we will survive!
we’re still number one, we’re still broadcasting live
this is different from when we dropped bombs on Baghdad
watched strikes set to music to make us feel glad
that we had such good aim in this cool techy game
that we’re tough the right stuff that enough is enough is enough is enough
that the president must never be perceived as a
powder puff a sissy a wuss or a faggot
‘cause in the death culture all the spoils go to the maggot
that lives off the fat of collateral damage
so pork up the army and somehow we’ll manage
to keep building more bigger bombs than the others
to kill foreign sons before they kill our mothers..
“we’re gonna hunt down an’ punish these folks!” said the leader of the free world
in between two bad jokes
oh fuck said I we are all gonna die this is the guy
in charge of our protection?
bet yer sorry ya stole that election!
but then maybe not could it be a dark plot
is this the war from within?
if so did it just begin
if so it has barely but barely but barely begun
this twin towers thing just the first pop from a handgun
don’t you get to some people this shit is fun!
could this be some kinda sick bid for control of your thoughts of your feelings of your e-mail (!)
of your soul
no it couldn’t be that that they fabricate disaster just to crush the people faster?
Hah! They wouldn’t do it! that’s insane
you mean kill their own then cast the blame?
Now I don’t mean to be a harbinger of ruin
or imply that it’s a shoe-in
that the power’s about to do in it’s own
in its maddest ever ploy to oppress the hoi polloi
to sustain the status quo
all I am saying is that I think these thoughts but admit that
I don’t know
Whose side is which and what’s a win and who do you trust
to save your skin
and will the body count just keep rising higher
tell me again – what’s the definition of
“friendly fire”?
When your lips move are you a liar?
Or do you speak the truth though you may tire
stand when you’d like to
fall remember they made paperweights out of the Berlin wall
Yes we can be heroes everyone of us knows
hey remember how that song goes..

I I can remember standing by the wall the guns shot above our heads and we kissed as though nothing could fall
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them forever and ever
And we can be heroes
Just for one day Whatcha say

Oh and speaking of kisses and worlds and wishes
And wond’rin what’s gonna happen next
it reminds me of that song by X
where the angry eloquent punk priestess Exene
spits out poetry like lit gasoline…

danana danana nana danana danana nana
no-one is united all things are untied
guess who’s boiling over inside
they’ve been telling lies
there are no angels there are devils in many ways
take it like a man
the world’s a mess it’s in my kiss
the world’s a mess it’s in my kiss…

and yet when I saw the newsclown’s skit
seemed like some of ‘em almost relished it
seemed like they knew their time was now
camera close-up on the furrowed brow
but even the disguise was only partly intact
for the first time in my life there was a rip in the act
the mask was on crooked the hood was pulled back
that we verged on the end of times was how it appeared
like the time of Armageddon
I mean not to be weird but didn’t it kinda seem like
Judgement Day?
Or maybe just made to look that way..

Alas! alas! that great city Babylon!
In a single hour thy plagues have come
A single hour of desolation
And the merchants of the earth mourned and swore
For none would buy their goods no more
The precious stones the wealth of wheat
the souls of men the vats of meat

and so on and so forth and such
perhaps you think I’m a bit touched
In the head it’s been said
But the tower is toppled and the bodies fall down
to the ground hit by lightning that shatters the town
streets become detrituts and debris dumps
and there on the small screen
a couple clasps hands and jumps
from the one hundred somethingth floor
to be no more
so we, my friends and I , discuss this at some length
declaring it a kind of strength
I mean if you knew you were about to die
wouldn’t you step off the ledge and try to fly?
why? why not?
when one last act is all you got
look on the bright side
it’s your one and only chance
to do the 99 Storey Freefall Dance!
make no mistake
i’m not making light of death
just proposing that flight
may be the best response in a situation
requiring a choice between hurtling through space and
incineration
both are certain to end in death
think I’d take the air for my last breath
oh kids these are ancient tremendous tears
and the song that comes to mind now is
Five Years..

pushing through the market square
so many mothers sighing
the news had just come over
we had 5 years left to cry in
the newsguy wept and told us
that the earth was surely dying
cried so much his face was wet
that’s how I knew he was not lying
I heard telephones opera house favorite melodies
I saw boys with their toys electric guns and TVs
my brain hurt like a warehouse
I had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to keep everything in there
We’ve got 5 years what a surprise
5 years stuck on my eyes
5 years my brain hurts a lot
5 years and that’s all we’ve got

but wait a second friends
I didn’t come here to be fatalistic
to lose all hope in the negative statistics
the sadistic ballistics no no no!
my friends we need to get SY-NER-GISTIC
we need to combine our healthy action
we need to resist the cheap distraction
resist the urge to split into factions
it’s no longer about whose typed up the best thesis
here’s a new word
can you say SYN-AR-TESIS?
That’s a binding or a knitting together
like a creative union or a cooperative communion
like the photons with their
“spooky action at a distance”
we can combine and enjoin our energies
they will yield without resistance
which happens to be synergistic’s other definition
in other words
we can change things by our own volition
trust is our shield love is our ammunition
hope is our magic ride
our secret weapon is vision
as it turns out – we are on a mission!
so give yourselves permission to join me in a brief rendition
of a favorite rhyme I like to sing
war what is it good for absolutely nothing

war – HIUH – good god yawl
what is it good for – absolutely nothing
say it again
war – HIUH – good god yawl
what is it good for – absolutely nothing
say it again
nothing say it again nothing say it again nothing say it again..

oh you’ve been a delight so kind and polite
thank you ever so much I am touched
that you came here tonight
the envelope of hope is now open
mucho gracias for hearing what I have spoken
it’s but a token of my love
I’m kind of a nun
a none of the above
so I leave you for now with a prayer and a bow
I hope I have brought a small measure of thought
to this “tragic occasion affecting the nation”
that you leave feeling wise no need for disguise
a few tears in the eyes
and a vow of commitment to change this predic’ment

as an ally once said
in a somewhat overly dramatic voice
“we just have to dare to be brilliant
dahling
and after all,
to be daring is within everyone’s choice”

* with many thanks to the musical artists whose work I have quoted

Sharing Tragedy With a Stranger

The BBC has been airing a lot of programmes relating to the events of September 11, 2001 for the obvious reason that the 10 year anniversary is fast approaching. On their website they asked people to write in on the theme of “where were you”.

So, here is what I sent in, a story I’ve told many times but never before actually written about. If any reader thinks they can identify the people in my story, please do get in touch.

*
Very late on the night of September 10th, I dropped off a new boyfriend I’d met at Burning Man Festival at the San Francisco airport where he was taking an American Airlines flight to Chicago. Instead of driving back across the bridge to Oakland, I decided to spend the night at a friend’s place in the city, on Valencia Street in the Mission district, a sprawling sort of open-plan live-work space.

For some reason I woke up really early the next morning. It was before 6 a.m. when I usually got up around 9. But I couldn’t seem to get back to sleep and so I got up. A few minutes later the phone rang, odd as it was so early. The call was picked up by the old fashioned tape-based answering machine my friend had, so I could hear the message as it was being left. It was her mother who lived on the east coast. She had an odd tense sound in her voice as she asked Lisa to call her as soon as she got up.

I heard Lisa shift around and so I called out to her asking if she was awake.

She grumbled something about her mother never getting the hang of the time difference and how annoying it was to be woken up this early. But I’m really into voices and her mother’s sounded odd.

“You know, I really think you should call her back. It sounded like it was important.”

Some more grumbling, then she got up and stumbled sleepily to the phone.

“Hi Mom.. you know it’s super early here and…”

Suddenly she stopped talking. I was trying to make coffee and had just realized there wasn’t any so wasn’t paying that much attention, when abruptly I heard Lisa cry out.

“WHAT?”

I turned around and all the sleep was gone out of her now, she was sitting bolt upright, her eyes like saucers.

“OMIGOD, OMIGOD! DIANA TURN ON THE TV! TURN ON THE TV!”

I happened to be standing right in front of the shelf that the small TV set was on, so I switched it on, saying as I did so.

“What channel?”

Usually when people wanted you to switch on the TV it was to get a specific station.

The screen flickered to life and I saw an image of the instantly recognizable World Trade Centre in NYC, one of the towers apparently ablaze, with big puffs of smoke coming out the sides. I’d lived there in ‘93 when it had been bombed and for a moment I wondered if they were revisiting the story, only that fire had come from the parking garage, so…

Was this a movie or something? The sequel to “Independence Day” or “Mars Attacks”? I was really confused!

“Uh! What are we supposed to be looking at?!” I said, turning to Lisa, but as soon as I turned back around it was obvious: I watched in incredulous disbelief as a jet airplane glided directly into the second tower.

“WHAT THE FUCK?!”

The mute button had been on so now I hit it so I could hear the announcers’ voices: there’d been hijackings and I’d just seen the second plane hit the second of the twin towers, live on TV. It was an American Airlines flight. Wait, could this be the one my new boyfriend was on? No, he would’ve got to his destination by now! (This was before details had come through about how long the planes had been in the air or where they originated.)

I really couldn’t process this. I needed a coffee. COFFEE COFFEE! WE WERE OUT OF COFFEE!

I guess it’s a shock reflex to do something mundane in an emergency or maybe it’s just because there was something I could do about it, but I became completely focused on the coffee situation.

I ran down the long corridor to the gate to the street, remembering that the café at the corner opened really early. But when I got to the gate and opened it, I froze.

I looked out at the people walking along the sidewalk, riding on the buses, driving in their cars, pedalling their bicycles, shooting along on their skateboards…. and realized that not one of the people I was looking at knew about what had just happened. They couldn’t possibly just be going about their business otherwise!

I had a sudden premonition that I was witnessing the last moment of an entire era, of a way, of a time. It sounds corny to say “a time of innocence” but it was something like that. In a few minutes or hours, every single one of those smiling, or harried, or hurried, or hung-over people, whatever they were, whoever they were, in a very short time they would know what had just happened, what was still happening. And nothing would ever be the same.

Should I tell them? Sound the alarm? No. Why rob them of this last few minutes of ignorant bliss. What reason would I have to ruin that?

In a weird daze, I went to the corner and into the café. I ordered two coffees to go and looked around at all the people in there. They didn’t know either. They were all reading that morning’s papers that were already as out of date as yesterday’s news. Should I tell them? I was the only one who knew, the only one who knew….

Then I walked out on the pavement and I saw someone else who knew, who must’ve known. Why else would he be hugging the lamp post on the corner of 22nd and Valencia, hugging it like it was gonna save him from something, sobbing in anguished despair? But this was San Francisco, and the Mission district to boot, haven of crazies and druggies and homeless; on any other day, I too might have walked straight past the screaming, crying man who held on to that lamp post for dear life. But I didn’t because I knew why he was crying. I knew he knew.

I ran over to him and set the coffees down on the pavement. He was oblivious to me standing there.

“Hey! Hey you! Do you have people in New York!?”

Then he noticed me and turned to face me – here was someone else who knew!

He left the post and reached out his arms to me. His eyes were spinning, his face red and wet, he was blubbering with a lack of inhibition that can only be triggered by the most extreme of human crises: life or death.

“YES!” he cried, “YES! MY COUSIN!” and he fell into my arms and we clung to each other on the street while he cried and sobbed his story to me.

“ SHE’S IN THERE! SHE’S IN THE SECOND TOWER! I WAS JUST TALKING TO HER ON THE PHONE – SHE WAS IN THE STAIRWELL AND SHE CALLED ME AND I WAS TALKING TO HER AND THE PHONE’S GONE DEAD! THE PHONE’S GONE DEAD!”

We were both crying by now and must have looked a crazy sight to all those people who didn’t know. But then again, this was the Mission in San Francisco, so maybe not. Certainly nobody else stopped to find out what was wrong. Probably just thought it was something personal between us. He obviously hadn’t been able to bring himself to tell anybody who didn’t already know either.

I couldn’t think what to say to comfort him. I’d just seen the plane crash into the building, so “it’s gonna be fine” wasn’t gonna cut it. Anyway, I don’t believe in making optimistic predictions in emergencies; it’s more important to have courage to face whatever may happen.

“What’s her name?”
“Debbie. Debbie Golden.”

“OK. Debbie Golden. Debbie Golden. I’ll never forget it. I wish for Debbie Golden to be OK. I pray for Debbie Golden to be OK. I’ll always think her name I promise you I promise you! Debbie Golden. Debbie Golden! I’ll tell people her name. ”

Reading between the lines, I guess I was saying I’d remember her name whether she lived or died. That she wouldn’t be forgotten if she didn’t make it. But that I’d keep her name alive as long as there was uncertainty about whether or not she was alive. I meant all that and I know that he understood every unspoken word of it.

We were in complete hysterics by this point with him actually spasming with fear and grief as I repeated this stranger’s name like it was a holy mantra. Our fingernails were digging into eachother’s arms as we shook and trembled together on that street corner while people just walked around us.

What good was remembering this woman’s name gonna do? What did it matter if I told people her name or prayed for her or not? But for some reason it seemed comforting, both to him and to me.

I don’t know how long we were there but finally things subsided enough to release our embrace.

“I gotta go make some calls.”

“Of course. Of course. Debbie Golden. Debbie Golden..”

We parted and I picked up my coffees, now lukewarm, and headed back to Lisa’s where she was glued to the TV.

“I just met someone whose cousin is in there! They were just on the phone right when it happened! Her name is Debbie Golden!”

I told her the story and she explained that her mother, an early riser, had just happened to be watching the news when the first reports came on. She wasn’t in New York and was in no danger though. Whew. Pretty soon, my guy rang me from Chicago to let me know he was completely unaffected, so that was obviously a huge relief even though I’d sort of already worked it out. Double Whew.

But what about that poor guy’s cousin? What happened to Debbie Golden? Debbie Golden? Debbie Golden? Debbie Golden?

It took quite some time before definitive lists of victims were published and reliable. So for many years I would check and check again, seeing if the name Debbie Golden appeared on any of them. It never was but it was many years before I stopped checking and could finally feel 100% certain in the knowledge that she’d made it down the rest of the stairs to freedom, safety and life. Over the years I had occasion to tell the story many times and of course, always told her name.

In all the emotion, I never did ask the guy what his own name was, nor he mine, but I’m sure he remembers our encounter as vividly as I do. I must be the first person he saw after his phone went dead.

I’d sure like to meet him again and let him know how glad I was that his cousin got out alive and that I kept my promise and never forget her name. Could the BBC help with that? I bet a similiar scenario was played out between other pairs and groups of strangers all over the place. I see it as a tiny story with a big resonance.

Maybe it would mean something too, to this woman Debbie Golden, to know that in the middle of that awful tragedy and many thousands of miles away, specifically she (her name anyway) made a huge effect on, and thus created a weird bond with, someone she has never met. That some woman named Diana Trimble, who now lives in England, cried for her safety in her cousin’s arms on a street corner in San Francisco during those exact moments as she was anxiously making her way down that stairwell for the hope of life itself. And that I will always carry her name with me because of that moment in which I briefly shared a stranger’s anguish. I’d like to think it helped him a tiny bit. May the good luck that was fortunately hers that day ever be with Debbie Golden and her cousin, wherever they may be. And may it rub off on me a little too.

Sweet, Charming Chats about Killing?

Nothing whatsoever strange about keeping this in your bedroom.

OK. As senseles and rotten homicides go, this one is in a league all its own. Certainly if you live in the UK, you’ve come across the recent case of a 16 year-old boy, Joshua Davies, who casually murdered his 15 year old ex-girlfriend by meeting her in the woods then bashing her head in with a rock, variations on which idea he’d apparently often talked about. The “charming” horror-movie fanatic who also collected knives and was fascinated by weapons made his final decision based on a kind of sociopoathic misunderstanding of a flippant text from a friend in reply to his throwing out there “what would you do if I really did kill her?” The ludicrous query got an equally ludicrous response (“I’d buy you breakfast”) from a supposedly joking-right-back pal, who was soon afterwards taken to look at the dead girl’s body.

The story is being sold as “the boy who killed on a dare for a free breakfast” but I think that rather badly misses the point.

I went on the message boards to see what people were saying about all this and predictably there was a lot of disgust and desire for revenge, hangings too good for him etc. The victim’s family has come forward and asked for the reinstatement of capital punishment for which they have received much support. I can understand their feelings. Rebecca Aylward seemed like a lovely, smart and promising girl. Sadly, she fell for the “dangerous one” as so many females do, only in her case, there was more to it than motorbikes and ditching school.

But something else struck me, something that no one besides myself seemed to comment on. Below is what I posted. I’m interested in what others think, so do write in.

***

Um, I’m still having trouble with the part of the story where it was somehow considered normal by friends and family, including the victim herself, that the guy openly talked about various ways to kill her. Look, me and my friends did a lot o risky stuff when we were teens: group shags, LSD in the woods, shoplifting, shooting up drugs…. but we never, I mean NEVER joked around about MURDER. There was a horror show element to a certain strand of the underground punk and gay scenes (what eventually became goth and fetish) but that was all just fantasy theatrics, vampires and fun sexy nonsense. Anyone who showed a genuine interest in violence would’ve stuck out like a sore thumb.

I guess what I’m saying is, the most disturbing thing to me about all this is that everyone’s saying “We never saw it comin’! He was so sweet and charming…um, and also totally obsessed with gory murders, knives, death and um, yeah, frequently mentioned killing Rebecca in all sorts of different ways…but still we thought he was a lovely kid….”

Sorry, but it is only me that’s going WTF??? I’m the furthest thing from an old prude or fart someone of my 45 years can be but I’m genuinely scared of the REAL decline of Western civilization if nobody once suspected this kid had some unhealthy obsessions because his leisure pursuits were what, so mainstream? But then I think of the triumph of ironic consumerism, Manson girls T-shirts and serial killer collectible cards, Grand Theft Auto and movies like Kill Bill and yeah, I guess it gets harder and harder to tell because everyone’s so desensitized.

Calling for the death penalty though, rather misses the point too. Ted Bundy was right – we should’ve taken the opportunity to study his brain rather than just snuff him. We need to know what creates cold-blooded killers. Assuming one is not the product of abuse, as seems the case here, and ignoring the religious fanatics who speak of “evil”, we really have to look for answers in brain make-up.

Already strong causal effects have been proven between certain kinds of brain tumours and sudden onset of paedophiliac tendencies, for example. Something is clearly wrong with this kid and it would be good to get beyond the desire to annihilate him in retaliation for his hideous action and instead use him as a scientific subject in aid of increasing understanding about what kind of birth defect it may be that creates certain types of killers.

***