By: Will Roberts

4th February 2011

Just caught my reflection in the window.  With the blue/white light from my laptop reflected in my glasses I look fucking sinister.  I have eaten, predominantly, South African Biltong this evening (ahh, the primal thrill of tearing strips of dried meat with your teeth), I’ve drunk, exclusively, lager and smoked a good handful of cigarettes.  This could be a rough one.  Not that I’m feeling sorry for myself you understand, it was very much in an effort to prepare myself for the experience of knocking the smile off this keyboard’s mush.

You see, there is a fug on the horizon which is shaping up to be something I feel suddenly rather bitter and bent out of shape about.  It’s that hideous plodding of life towards the grave, the listless pissing of time into the ether, those days spent idly idling whilst all the while a world was hopping and skipping passed my window.  Could someone not have warned me that there was a killer at my heels, knife in his teeth and a grin on his mug (if you can grin with a dagger wedged between your canines)?

I met a man I did.  Stood outside a pub he was.  But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

Met some boys I did.  Stood outside a pub was I.  The four topshopped, plimsole wearing, tight t-shirted baboons, buffooned out into the street whilst I stood happily smoking and contemplating the nature of existence, the credibility of religion in the modern world and, probably, tits.  You could smell the testosterone in the air, I swear two of them were already sporting semis, their tight bodies fairly glistened with spattered sambuca and there was a hint of mischievousness which, if the alpha felt inclined to show off for his acolytes, could suddenly explode into violence.  They were eighteen.  Tops.  Almost certainly older in fact but they all look so fucking young these days.  I’m a proud man and showed no sign of being intimidated but I sobered up three degrees as they approached and encircled.  ‘We’re looking for, like, where all the main bars with, like, fanny in and cheap drinks and shit are’ they said raising their inflection at the end of the sentence to indicate a question.  ‘You’re of advancing years and have a bald head and glasses, you look like you might have a semblance of intelligence.  Tell us what we wish to know or we shall exhaust our pent up energy bouncing your head off the kerb whilst boisterously singing varsity rugby songs’ is what their demeanour said if not their mouths.  I furnished them with information, attempting to carry myself with the matter of fact air of a man who had barely noticed them but almost certainly appeared to be a man struggling with terrible constipation.  They skipped away into the ebb and flow of the old main drag and woke the next day in strange places and spent the coming days piecing the night back together from the photos of themselves tagged on facebook.  I presume.

At first I was annoyed.  How dare they?!  How dare they treat me like a fragile old man?  How dare they assume I was afraid?  How dare they assume that I couldn’t outdrink and outlast every one of them?  ‘But wait’ I thought ‘you were their age, you were high on your own new found sense of power and drunk on the freedom that comes with release from the family manor and immersion in the life of a student’.  Suddenly I felt happy for them, ‘fly my pretties’ I thought ‘you can have this night, I give it to you.  Now take the baton and run, run like the wind for, just like me, your time will come.  One day you will awaken in your own bed with a hangover you know will last for two days and pass your time shakily checking the NHS direct website to see if you have the symptoms of the early onset of AIDS, unwilling to believe it’s just that your kidneys can’t keep up anymore and that you can’t ‘have it large’ with impunity these days. Enjoy my boys, have one for me.’

On re-entering the pub I saw a man I had somehow failed to notice before.  Mid twenties.  Tops.  Etc.  Near skeletal, Nick Cave hair, immaculately dressed, sumptuously accessorised, cheekbones so sharp his statuesque girlfriend’s face was an ordinance survey map of nicks and scratches.  The glistening cunt.  The slick wide-on of a man commanded attention, captured the eye and the imagination on a heady Friday night but would have looked utterly out of place in, say, a supermarket early on a Tuesday evening.  He popped and fizzed with pizzazz in a way that I don’t and, now, never will.  I’m too old for a David Bowie style reinvention and, in any case, not built for skinny jeans.  I moved on to my table, avoiding eye contact.  If he’d talked to me I’d only have gone weak at the knees and said something giggly and sycophantic.

Later that night, I met a man I did.  Stood outside the pub he was.

He had a voice with more gravel than a suburban driveway and had a good few years on myself.  A fellow smoker, I became a member of his circle and he held court.  ‘I smoke’ he buzzed and drawled ‘and I drink a lot, especially for a nurse, and you’re supposed to feel bad about that, like you’re wasting your life (inhale, exhale) but I’m enjoying myself tonight and I spend my days working on a geriatric ward.  If you spent your time in that place you’d be comforted by the thought that your lifestyle choices will lead to a heart attack in your late fifties ’.  This man was ok with his lot.  He’d seen a lot and done a lot and he knew who he was and where he was going.  Some people plan to be successful accountants and retire to sunnier climbs, others plan to retire in a much more literal sense and skip the whole chintz and nostalgia end of things altogether. Maybe I won’t bother setting up that pension after all, looks like I won’t be needing it.  Fuck, I thought I was just smoking to look cool in front of my friends.  If I’d known it would eventually rescue me from the indignity of the colostomy bag and the crippling price of adult nappies I’d have been inhaling all these years.  Was this man a glimpse of my future?  A voice like Tom Waits, a look borrowed from Richard Hawley and a comfortable sense of resignation to fall onto when I’ve drunk myself insensible?

Who knows? What do you do when you’re never going to see yourself as really being young again but you still don’t feel old enough to take responsibility for planning the rest of your life?  What happens in that limbo between the age at which your tomfoolery can be dismissed as the folly of youth, or the consequence of juvenile confidence, and the age at which you have to know who you are and where you’ll end up?  You write about it I guess.  I survived my twenties.  What the fuck do I do with my thirties?

Will Roberts.  D.O.B. 30/03/1981

By: Will Roberts

I’m temporarily residing in a grey satellite town, cowering in the shadow of a slag heap in South Yorkshire.  Though the mine nearby is still, on paper, a going concern it is one of the countless forced to hand over it’s gift-wrapped testicles to dear old Maggie back in the early 80s and the town is bitter, backward and belligerent because of this.  There is a stretch of road near me which always smells like shit, it’s everywhere.  I say this not flippantly but literally and I say this not out of spite but simply as a rather illustrative statement of fact; so brow-beaten is this place that concern for social/environmental issues hasn’t progressed even as far as acknowledging street strewn dog faeces as something to take action against; these guys would charge the beach to roll a stranded whale back into the sea but only because they would consider it to be an illegal immigrant (‘fuckin whales, stealing all our jobs’), the idea of allocating any percentile of your brain’s processesing power to anything grander and more noble in scope than, say, the increasing price of pipe tobacco or the inability of Royal Mail to deliver CASHMYGOLD envelopes in a timely fashion is anathema.  This isn’t entirely true, a man not too far from my current residence has had solar panels fitted to his roof though I believe he was recently burnt as a witch.

There is a community out there striving to drag us kicking and screaming out of the apathetic funk in which we’re mired.  God help me, I should hate these plucky mentalists for hauling me from my comfortable pit of ‘meh’ but, god love ‘em, I don’t.  I speak of the Real Life Superheroes (RLSH for short), the seemingly ordinary citizens around the globe (though obviously mainly in America) who don their gay apparel and patrol their beleaguered streets.  Reeled I did when I saw these bright, becostumed braves admonish litterbugs and hand sandwiches to the homeless.  Swooned I did when I saw our brave new protectors spray mace in the faces of handbag snatchers.

Thanks largely to the 2009 film Kick-Ass and the recent media hubbub around Seattle’s own Rain City Superheroes headed by the erstwhile Phoenix Jones (though they pre-date both by many years), this community has been able to touch more cold hard hearts than ever.  Those unfamiliar with the RLSH should go towww.reallifesuperheroes.org/ immediately.

The friendlier of these folks take their costume tips from the camp and colourful world of the old marvel and DC heroes; it’s all bright colours and capes.  Should you ever see one of this particular breed tackle a mugger you would be unsurprised to see words like ‘PAFF’ and ‘ZONK’ leap into the air as your champion doles out a hiding.  The other type seem more akin to the ‘Dark Knight’ re-imagining of the Batman series.  These guys are all ski-masks and black leather, body armour and army surplus.  Samiritan, for instance, has a photo on his bio in which he sports a futuristic black mask and helmet, milky white Marilyn Manson contacts and a facial expression which screams ‘god I hate you, I hate you so much I could punch your mum and eat your soul’.  Similarly Mr Jack is turned out in a black and purple suit and a black balaclava which gives him a seemingly inappropriate ‘master criminal’ air.  It’s worth noting however that even this physical manifestation of childhood fears is apparently ‘working to create bonds of understanding and help every person I come in contact with to get the most out of their life’.  Well, fair enough.  Carry on.

I had hoped to find that the RLSH were out there fighting crime, hitting on it’s girlfriend and stealing it’s pint but they predominantly act as informants for the police and involve themselves in blood drives, charity yard sales and soup kitchens for the homeless (though the rather darker www.rlsh-manual.com/ offers a guide to the weak points of the human anatomy and hints on the best ex military hardware to buy) but it is comforting to know that there are people out there who care so goddamned much that they’ll put their underpants on outside their trousers in public and show the rest of us up as the lazy, ambivalent, ingrates that we are.  Bet they clear up after their dogs too.

By: Will Roberts

Now I don’t wish to rock the boat, and do stop me if the particular thread I’m picking at here is the one which unravels the cardigan, but I’m currently contemplating something of a quandary and I’m concerned it might be an ‘elephant in the room’ of an issue over which it is unhealthy to mull.

I’ve written before (lyrics, articles for small magazines, short stories for self gratification and profoundly fucking terrible poetry) and have lately begun flinging my particular brand of mud at the internet to see if it sticks. And stick it does. Mine does, yours will and so will that of every shoe gazing poet sat tweeting all the faux intellectual codswallop permeating from under his understatedly charming hair into his iphone with one hand whilst the other absentmindedly twirls a tarnished teaspoon around a soya latte in the back corner of a vegan coffee house. Every crushingly depressed and oppressed teenager without parental internet controls on the high spec, star trek tech PC that daddy bought them for Christmas can ‘wish theyd neva bin born’ to their hearts content and expect their facebook status reflecting this mood to be ‘liked’ by Daz, Gaz and Shaz who will all agree that their parents are wankers for not buying them JLS tickets for their birthday. Lolz. OMG. Isn’t the internet fucking ‘epic’ mate.  Nowadays I can readily read guff flatched out by literally anyone with access to affordable and widespread technology. Every wannabe intellectual who ever got a battered notebook out of their brown leather satchel in a real ale pub and stared into space looking like ‘something might come to them’ but who, if lightly and justifiably tortured, would have to admit that really they wanted someone (preferably an attractive female someone, you know, one of those pretty but they don’t really know it, DM wearing, folksy types who drink beers called ‘Abbots Arse’ and ‘Rat up a Drainpipe’) to ask them what they’re writing can now jump up and down waving their bleatings under my nose. And how do I respond? I become that one who gets out of bed in the wee hours of the morning having been unable to sleep for seething, who pours a little whiskey for sipping, and rattles my laptop fully, full on intending to submit my protestations to a website where I know they can be picked over by large numbers of people who really aren’t obliged to give the finest fraction of a shit what I think.

And I want them to read it. Worse, I want them to like it. Worse still, that bit about the notebook, the satchel and the real ale was me as well.

I’ve been alive for a while now and I’ve come to terms with a lot of things about myself which I used to find reprehensible. I accept that I am a show off. I accept that I feel a ‘need’ for recognition and thrive on people’s praise and approval. I’m not proud of the fact that I clamour for attention like a child tugging on his mother’s skirt at a supermarket checkout desperately trying to negotiate their way into ownership of a kinder surprise, but I don’t beat myself up about it either. A few beers in and ‘yes, actually, I have got a semi for the sound of my own voice’. I do, I might add in defence, attempt to offset this character flaw through other, more laudable, aspects of my personality. I’m not a monster.

It begs a troubling question though, one which I can’t think I’m the first or even the thousandth to ask myself. Is my ‘need’ the only reason I write at all? There is undoubtedly a large amount of excellent material available online to anyone who wishes to look for it but you will have to wade through a lot of codshit (see above). Does the internet provide a medium for the literary talents of those who in the past would not so easily have found a voice or is it simply a megaphone for every needy, self centred and deluded individual who wants to be seen to be a writer?

I’ve tried to tell myself that the first time I write something which I think is truly accomplished and profound, something important; I’ll put it straight into a drawer and never show anyone. This would go some way to proving that I’m more than a dog on its hind legs begging for boneos but I’m not convinced I’ll ever do it. What’s the point in me writing it if no one will ever read it? In fact, don’t read this article. You’ll only encourage me.