Birmingham last week.
Out to dinner with “respectable” professor of economy.
Talking about social historical philosophical and economic issues spanning all human history.
Lavish restaurant. Endless courses and fucking pompous cocktails with half a mango in them, exotic erotic names and little umbrellas. This is rococo France all over again. Champagne, candles and prostration from a totally submissive and oppressed staff. The magnitude of the opulence — excessive, obscene. Useless and pedantic. From little stories on the menu to make the act of eating stuff you’re meant to shit into some sort of heightened experience… The mind boggling pretentiousness of everything. And then the waitress who attends our table with a tortured fake smile. Crushed and dead on the inside, going through the motions of polite ass kissy conversation because it’s — not her job, but her captivity. Psychological prisoner. And if she as much as acts human, not Robo-waitress, for a millisecond, she’ll get her ass kicked and possibly end up in the street.
And you know what? The evening offered some mathematical cornucopia. Right out of the restaurant, young, almost attractive homeless people. Maybe that waitress wasn’t just stuffy and terrified because “these damn frigid women” or “goddam paupers Buzz Killingtons”; she maybe knew the downgrade from gilded slavery to fat diners was directly rough sleeping in a sleep sack next to junkies in Rape Alley.
My dinner date? Joyous economic sophisms on merits of the British. He’s Indian. Talk about Stockholm syndrome. How’s that double anal penetration coming along, pal? You don’t bite the hand that feeds, do you? Deep throat, rather.
Open plan kitchen so that slobbering diners can witness their oral enema being cooked. By what looked like brutalised, hopeless, crushed, automatons. Big fellas look Eastern European with dead eyes. Through the steam of the kitchen looking nightmarish. For the fat inane bastards to have retarded “cultured” conversation about plays they see and galleries they troll; not real appreciation of art or anything, just sort of a snob douchey mutual cultural patting on the head.
I used to go to these plays and events and film festivals and talks and shit. Always come home disappointed, “maybe it was the wrong play”; “maybe it was the worst film in the festival”. NO. IT’S VACUOUS, IT’S THE RULE. It’s not meant to muse on the reality of human nature. And contemporary reality. Or even the truth from Dead Ages. Or any worthwhile goals of a sane human being.
This pseudo culture mass produced in Britain is a hypnosis device for halfwits that need to feel savants and superior; to justify their neoliberal capitalist lifestyle; to motivate them to throw their Carcasses under the machination of power, to generate infinite power for someone else — and get probably some trinkets in return. Cars, Michelin dinners, formula 1 tickets in Singapore, skiing in Ischgl, experimental Shakespeare. The emperor is naked, douche bags! You sit there talking about your purchases :“I did good?”; “do I get a biscuit” — but in posh flat accents. And it’s all a big fart.
On the walk back to the hotel, scratch glitz and sycophantic waitress and artificial warm and chatter — forest of devastated homeless people in the freezing cold. Eerily young and pretty.
Haunting. I tremble.
Cameron’s Britain. I hear the Tories’ sinister laugh in their gold palace as the fools let themselves eviscerated.
My pal: ”I often think of helping them but it’s the question of incentivising failure, you know?“; “They need to know worth is earned”.
I vomit on his face, the big Michelin fancy pants dinner.
No, I don’t really. Wouldn’t it be cool if I did?
Then I see a silhouette, my heart skips. A picture of utter desolation and hopelessness. A woman sitting in the dark, upright, knowing she’s dying. Silent dignified despair. In a pack of loud homeless men. She doesn’t look old or ugly. Just worn out. It’s freezing.
I feel ashamed by my red nails and designer bag. I give her my change. Only a pound left. I feel awful. She looks up and thanks me deeply, gracefully. I shiver with shame. But I walk on.
My pal starts to talk about charities he contributes to. I’d vomit but I’m lost thinking of the woman.
And I go to bed in my hotel thinking of her. Torn between the shame of not going back to help and the rage at this country of slaves that passionately defend slavery, waving their capitalist trinkets like monkeys.
This is Britain. DOESN’T IT FUCKING SUCK?!!!