freedom costs money

Bloody chilli peppers bringing out my bad side.

There’s always been a part of me that wanted to be the leader of the pack. Not necessarily to pick up women in sweetshops and die as a result of a head-on collision with a lorry transporting dustbin lids. More like I always dared to dream that I had it in me to create a stir, some real anarchy. It’s all very well to whinge about the law and the government but to really fight back, it takes a little more than smoking a bit of weed in your student squat and wandering the streets moodily at night for no apparent reason. I crave the machismo and the intoxicating rush of powerful individuals sharing a morally ambiguous goal. Imagine being a high-performance cell of some messy, vicious but super-efficient organism.

I suppose it’s all to do with acceptance. A lot of the geek subculture is based on people bowing out of a race they ostensibly don’t believe in. Really, they’d like to believe they could have won the race and the only reason that they didn’t was that they couldn’t be arsed; they had nothing to prove. That’s where I’d like to be. As it stands, people like me split off from society because we couldn’t play the game. Imagine if we’d stuck at it, insinuated ourselves into society’s infrastructure all the time holding true to our belief in its shallowness and futility. We could have brought it down from within! That old cliché. We totally took the cowards way out. It’s the easiest thing in the world to disguise weakness as strength. To disguise strength as weakness is a move few creatures opt for within nature except those deadly fish that pretend to be part of the landscape then eat smaller fish whole when they come too close. We could all learn from those fish. Yes.

I’m uniquely disadvantaged in my quest to become a big sweaty gangster. I’m a small woman for starters, not a big hairy tough guy. I’m bookish and pompous. If I was a cartoon character, I’d be more of a Zazu than a hyena. If I was in an anime cartoon, I’d be the urotsukidoji chojin pre-transformation, all skinny arms, blushes and sexual awkwardness. Sigh. Also, I can’t drive or ride a motorbike, I’ve never been in a fight and my idea of being armed and dangerous is a small penknife which I usually use to divide up fresh fruits.

On the plus side, I’m something of an authority on Tarantino films and Mexican hallucinogenic plants and fungi. And I’m not averse to a bit of leather. But ultimately, I’m a bit of a sad sack. Could do with toughening up a bit.

Maybe this is where Tyler Durden came from. Some puny loner type who decided to reinvent himself as a bad-ass mo fo.

Anyway. The obvious solution is to get another tattoo.