Teeth

When brushing the teeth care must be taken, a certain agility even is desired. When you have a small mouth like mine gotta make sure the lower teeth are diligently de-plaqued. Take five minutes.
Imagine the dental cement if it corroded & crumbled away, or the fillings, sparkling like black diamonds, came loose. No, the cement is tough. When people get immolated in a housefire they get identified by their fillings, them being the only things that survive.
All of the dentists are private and there is anyway a serious lack of them. Alternatives to fillings; rubber, transparent glass, ice.
I had a filling drop out of a back tooth, put there by an incompetent dentist. A nugget of metallic black. Eventually when the dentists get bad enough, or are just replaced by 3rd year students, your teeth will erode through vigorous brushing. Flesh and blood and sharp shards of enamel, a crumbling filling. Get new prosthetic cyberteeth top right. All hollow.
Soap opera actress/model in a magainze: "I have loads of dreams about my teeth falling out. I've been told that means I'm anxious".
Freud interpreted it as a sign of sexual frustration.
Connotations: anxiety, sickness. Moral and physical and structural decay. Angst in bathrooms, slavering.

Old Viz's

In the bathroom lookin through old Viz's, I recall that humour industry that sprang up then. Viz was successful in its market share & therefore inspired a number of shoddy imitators.
And in the old  Viz's, printed on cheap paper, one can see the many strange subterranean cottage industries that were able to exist in its shadow, in the form of the ads for obscene or satiric T-shirts or cards or rubber stamps or inflatable sheep. All of it aimed at the lowest common denominator of Viz reader, vaguely thought of as someone young, sarcastic, a bit cynical. Targeted for the toilet humour sub-market. Nostalgia for anything...
When you leave a magazine for fifteen or twenty years and then look at it again you get a not-unpleasant sense of the futility of life, and you can examine the small ads with a clarity afforded by hindsight. As always, with the small, exploitative ads selling tat, you get a much more valuable insight into the period than with the big-money ads. The ads in old Viz's are not funny, but they belong to an old satiric tradition. This is why popular culture is always immensely more revealing than official culture.
K. is showing me the mildewing old Viz's with the enthusiasm of a recent convert. She always adopts a craze, usually too late, for rap or Marvel comicbooks or the Pixies, or Hong Kong cinema, say, and then leaves token examples of it around her room for visitors to see. Whether she appreciates the stuff in itself is debatable.

Christian Girl

Christian girl is in bed, feigning sickness. In our domestic set-up, our suburban bedroom we share.

She claims to be not a born-again. "I just call myself a Christian". But this is to obfuscate: She is one.

One of the sincere, intelligent Christian teens. Intelligent in a limited way of course. A trendy Christian, unrelated to the old born-again stereotype. The youth movement now is immensely sophisticated and doesn't hesitate to stoop to depths of psychological warfare for recruitment purposes. Someone very clever is behind it. The shadowy hand of a United States-ian.

They have usurped popular genres of music and fashion and Christianized them ruthlessly. Some Christian public relations expert figured out that the thing to do to get the kids signing up was to copy MTV. Thus a particularly nefarious and insidious branch of the evangelical movement is born. They got their own channels & music videos at times indistinguishable graphically & sonically from the merely moneymaking mainstream. They have mass rallies for youth which are then televised, where individuals give speeches more like one a them motivational speakers than an old-fashioned preacher. Like that geezer what sells his CDs DVDs Affirmations for Personal Success and Enrichment in long advertorials, sharp-cheekboned, sharp-suited, perfectly white teeth grinning in a photograph. Obviously pumped up on steroids.
Part of that network of evangelical Christianity and freemarket capitalism which edges ever closer to a semblance of fascism, a fascism with perfect teeth. That has crept all over the rich and jaded west, brainwashing millions of disappointed teens, kids with a spiritual hole in their lives fed up with hedonism, falling prey to the over-simplifications of a predatory Christianity, a Christianity aggressive, base, and greedy, no relation the simple faith of our forefathers.

But Christian girl is a blasé little thing who unfortunately has fallen victim to propaganda. Duvet pulled up to her chin and smiling slightly. She hails from Belfast but is part of a latter-day generation that has seen little of the Troubles. An apolitical and non-sectarian generation. What used to be called in America Scots-Irish. Her daddy is some sort of minister. Very clean-cut air and a pixie-ish face, conventional shoulder-length light brown hair.

School Part One

The school was a long low building, a corridor with classrooms to the side. On my first day it seemed enormous to me. The large windows, the steel frames, the grey panels. 

At the front there was a cloakroom, with coat pegs in it. There must have been benches in there, to sit on. 

The boy's toilets were on the left, a large room with frosted windows along the top. The metal troughs to pee in.

At the furthest end of the corridor, on the right, was primary one. As you went further up the corridor you advanced in age, and primary seven was at the top. 

At the back of the school there was a slight hill which led to a large playing field. There were two sets of stone stairs set into this dip in the land. The back of the school was the windows of the classrooms, with the odd door, and some bushes growing. 

On my first day all this seemed to me enormous and alien. It was more perplexing than frightening. The windows seemed to me to be enormous, like the windows in a cathedral. On that first day I saw a boy have a nosebleed. I saw him throw himself down the grassy hill. It all seemed inexplicable. 

In Primary one, the plastic chairs. The plastic blocks that we would play with. 

At the end of the corridor were the teacher's offices and a sort of small entrance foyer. 

The school was bordered at the front by a fence with a gate, and a row of tall trees. There was also an expanse of grass to the right, at the limit of which there was a slight rise bordered by a rickety fence. This formed the limit of the school, beyond which it was forbidden to go. If you went beyond that, to fight with the boys from the other school, you would be given the belt. 

At the furthest limit of the playing fields was another fence, behind which was a derelict house. This house had an evil reputation and was said to be haunted. 

If you walked to the very end of the playing field you came to some long grass, and beyond it, the woods. Behind the school was a patch of woodland, a lesser part of the wider woods. 

In this little world we spent our days. 

We owe a cock to Asclepius

We owe a cock to Asclepius

We who have renounced this life, 

Therefore on the morrow rising

Do not neglect the sacrifice, 

But dispatch the victim swiftly,

Brandishing the silver knife.

We owe a cock to Asclepius,

We who have renounced this life. 

A serpent on his staff entwining, 

The god demands the price.                            

So that the soul when pining,

May be delivered twice;

First to Hades' shady halls,

And thence to paradise. 

We owe a cock to Asclepius,

We who have renounced this life. 

A report of a gig

We went down into the basement. The band was playing downstairs. The support band was on first. They were some local band. We went into the bare room and hung shyly back. He said into the microphone, "You... can come closer". The slight awkwardness.
I thought it was unbelievably loud. The guy in the band on stage was long and hippyish. They did a cover of "She Don't Use Jelly". I went to the toilet, a tiny closet of a room under the stairs.

I wasn't wearing my glasses. The American band was on stage now. The room was full of bodies. People sitting down near the stage. The clear smell of cannabis from their ranks. The darkness.

The band came on and did their set. It sounded like their records. The singer: An American in leather.

The lights came up and there was some kerfuffle. I didn't have my glasses. It transpired that someone had stolen an effects pedal from the stage. Someone had taken advantage of the darkness.

There was much hubbub and waiting. The venue manager got up on the stage, very irate. A blur of a balding, sweaty man. No-one was allowed out until the wah-wah pedal was returned. Someone in the audience shouted at him. He shouted back, "No you shut up ya radge!". The band waited, nonplussed and brooding.

The pedal was sheepishly returned. We filtered out into the night. I had gone almost deaf, my hearing was drastically muffled, as always happened for a day or two after these punk gigs. They were always too loud.

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight, grimy gret toothed old patchy walls all concrete and haunted and no wonder if whatever band backstage, the singer thereof, or more likely geetar player, finds himself most lonely at that point, knuckles cold and fingers raspy and ready just prior to onstage. Haunted is the true name of this stage, this gloom onstage illuminated only by these spectral lights that loom large upfront to fright the eager night. A little doomy club or, nameless word, venue, ripped-off and secret walls, needless hangings, doesn't matter, terrible topfront lights, perhaps seedy memories of sweat dripped on the caverny floor. Echoing loves of spirit up from the lusty ground.
Here is the heart of secretiveness in the heart of that anguished sound, guitar riff, combined with the blind hysteric numb of the dark and the throb thru the feet of the waiting patrons healthy to be crushed, in their hearts a tremulous, approaching love, awed under artifices of star, all the more awed for the artifice, all the more ready for joy, death to leak out in the sparkling night 'r under the subterfuge drink of sweat and fights that turn and twist in the moulting pit, perhaps some shirtless white trash saint, like a ghost, 'll stagedive or splitting thirsty for angst and sweat, make supplications on the creaking floor. The girls down there all clothed and gloomy'll surge scattered and treading with the upsurge of the crowd, hearts awakening, moving onwards, nonplussed in the momentous void. Hear that just then that cry, that rasp of sigh, that delicious escape of shriek that held a dark unlawful promise of condensation and glorious sin among an animal limb?Collectively drawn like grimoire puppets, delicately driven under an awful wing, of music slowly becoming death.