Screwed Up

There is plenty wrong with the world. We don’t seem to be making inroads in fixing many of the problems, but we are fantastic at creating more.

I love films, stories, depiction of lives around the globe different to our own – ‘shapes of otherness’. But I am feeling despondent at how many of the brightest Hollywood actors die in their twenties. Drugs, pills, alcohol, guns, knives, cars. Heath Ledger, Brad Renfro, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, James Dean. Young white males taking on the psychosis of our age.

I worked with ‘at risk’ teens in London for a while. The same issues are there, just a bit less money to go around. Disconnected families, alcoholic parents, unemployed, glue-sniffing, self-harming kids. They can all watch TV and see this brighter world out there, where people have cars and homes and holidays, and they don’t get why they can’t have it. Don’t they deserve it? If they were prettier, thinner, cleverer, sneakier, maybe they could get out of the ghetto-ised suburbs, leapfrog their way to the States, or get a record deal, or a rich boyfriend.

And if they got there? To this dreamland of riches and fun and fame? How screwed up could they get there?

There’s no fun in studying every night, getting exams, going to uni’ while working in bars, studying more, applying for jobs, putting up with cheap clothes, a car loan, a student loan, a mortgage, studying more, getting a promotion, working late, putting work before family, squashing dreams, being practical. Is there?

I think I should set up a rehab unit in Spain, on our remote plot of land that’s truly miles from anywhere. A place to learn physical work, study the stars at night, read in the shade of the carob tree, forget TV and DVD and PSP. Actually it wouldn’t even be rehab – I don’t want to tell other people how to kick their habit or sort out their relationships. But when I was a teen and stuck inside my own head I had different options...

I spent a week at my nan’s once. Left London, got on a train with my cat in a travelbasket, turned up on her doorstep and was welcomed. She didn’t ask why. She said ‘Do you want fish and chips tonight? Would you be a love and walk down the hill to get it for us? Take the dog with you.’

I slept on a horrible Z-bed, in a room with paisley wallpaper and flowered curtains. I walked around the hills and didn’t meet another soul. I listened to my Walkman under a big oak tree. I wrote some stuff – all angst-ridden nonsense, but it removed it from my train of thought and cleared my head. After a while I went back to my bedsit in London, and cleaned the kitchen. Even though it wasn’t my turn.