Education, careers and Captain Beefheart – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Religion is a compulsory subject in British schools. Every child has to be brainwashed every single day with a religious input, by law. Isn’t that absurd?

It is an archaic throwback to the days when religion was the cornerstone of society and schools were first conceived as places where children of the elite were schooled in Latin Grammar so they could read the Bible. Later, schooling became more widely available to the general public as society had progressed and there was a need for people with knowledge and skills to carry out the various tasks and careers needed by society.

But where does the concept of educating people to expand their minds fit in? A career is one thing but a questioning mind is something else altogether. I wanted my education to be expansive, fun, illuminating and thrilling. I wanted discovery, excitement and revelation. I received facts to learn for exams. I did not really count that as an education.

13.10.01

 

Captain Beefheart was on at Middle Earth up in Covent Garden in London. That was an event that would change the whole of anybody’s life. Captain Beefheart, complete with Zoot Horn Rollo, Rockette Morton, Alex St Claire, Drumbo and who knew who else. The whole Magic Band. That was worth £5,000,000 of anybody’s money!

The only problem was that it was right in the middle of A Levels.

This was a crisis.

No problemo. It was the week before my Biology. I wasn’t one for revision anyway. I always did well in Biology. Besides I needed a good night out. It would set me up for the exams. But I needed my grade to get my place at university to study medicine. No problemo. I told you, I always do well in Biology.

But this was the whole of my future!

No problemo!

There was no choice in the matter. It had to be done. Beefheart might not tour again. The world might end and I wouldn’t have seen him.

Besides – it was a whole week before.

I went. Rockette Morton was ill so they postponed. They put on Aynsley Dunbar instead. There was no comparison.

They put the Captain on the following week and made it a double bill with John Mayall, complete with Pete Green on lead.

Now that was a slight problem. That was the night before my Biology exam. But a double-bill with Captain Beefheart with John Mayall and Peter Green – who could possibly afford to miss that???

If I went I would not get back until three in the morning. My exam was at nine. That was about five hours sleep. That also meant no night before revision (the only revision I tended to do). I had this theory that it was pointless revising more than a day before an exam. You forgot it all. It really wasn’t so much of a theory as an excuse – back then my memory was very good. It was just that my mind was on other things that seemed much more important to me back then.

This was my future we were talking about! My future for fuck’s sake! My eminent career as a doctor, a surgeon even! Surely I was mature enough to understand that?

But then, Captain Beefheart might not tour again, the band might break up, and Pete Green was scintillating on guitar. Besides I always came top in Biology; I didn’t need to revise. I could breeze it.

But you had to admit that five hours sleep and no revision was hardly perfect preparation for a crucial exam.

I had to think this through for all of five minutes.

Where were my parents in all this? Where was my father’s guiding hand? My mum’s words of wisdom? I can’t remember. I think they had given up on trying to influence my choices. They had decided that I was a law unto myself. While not shining in my academic endeavours, I did seem to get by, so they tended to leave me to it.

The concert was brilliant! One of the best ever! The Magic band were storming! Beefheart was incredible! John Mayall, even with Pete Green, paled into insignificance.

The Biology exam was all right but there were a few questions that proved a little tricky. A bit of revision might not have gone amiss.

When the results came out I had missed the required standard by a grade. That could have been a single mark! One fact! One glance at one page of notes! The university was not impressed. They declined my services. Instead of studying medicine I did a Zoology degree at a lesser establishment. I went on to establish a scintillating career as a teacher. The pay of a teacher is not greatly comparable to the pay of a surgeon. But what the hell! Who wanted a career anyway? There was far too much real living to be getting on with, a whole universe to explore!

Some concerts are worth £5000,000 of anybody’s money.

2.11.01

 

Why is poetry not the only compulsory subject in schools?

13.10.01

 

There’s no doubt that nuclear energy is a big mistake in this age of global terrorism. A plane smashing into a nuclear plant could be a catastrophe.

Just imagine how many tens of thousands of terrorists, each consuming twenty tins of beans, it would take to sabotage a field of Wind Turbines?

3.11.01

Mexican Pyramids and religion – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

So we’re living in the USA and we decide to take Christmas off and drive down to Mexico City. Our neighbours all think we’re nuts. Why would anyone want to go to Mexico for Christmas? Besides we’ve got little kids and it is obvious that we won’t survive. We’d all be killed. There are bandits down there! It’s one thousand five hundred miles! There’s a dirt road. It’s uncivilised. It’s a Third World country! We can’t take the little kiddies to their deaths in some third world country. We should stay in the USA, party and consume!

We smile. We’re off to Mexico.

We set off with our van and a tent, three kids and some Mexican money. You don’t need much. It’s cheap down there.

Petrol is forty-four cents a gallon. That about twenty pence! Wow! It’s over £2 in England!

Don’t eat the food. Our neighbours told us. They are distraught. Live out of tins. So, as soon as we are in Mexico we buy tortillas from roadside vendors and they are brilliant. And we ate the salads washed in local water.

Don’t drink the water our neighbours tell us. It is full of bugs. So we drink the water.

Don’t stop for anybody under any circumstance, they tell us. We will be robbed and murdered. So we stop when we’re flagged down going through the mountain. These guys have a car that has broken down and they need a push. We give ‘em a push and they don’t rape Liz, shoot the kids or me, or even rob us. They smile and wave thank you.

The roads are lethal. We will inevitably be killed on the road, they informed us. Well admittedly the road does suddenly come to abrupt ends every now and then, when we round bends so that we find ourselves bouncing along rutted dirt tracks at seventy miles per hour. The main road is a single lane death trap. Mexican drivers can be a little volatile, fast and erratic. One day we watched as we picnicked at the side of the road as a car careered off and into the desert at about a ton plus. But the driver and passengers were alright. They reversed back onto the road and drove off as if nothing had happened. Admittedly there are little shrines every few hundred yards down its entire length where other drivers have met their demise. But nothing happened to us. We loved it!

It was tough walking through some of the poor Mexican towns with money and a camera. Our camera was worth more than some of their entire lifetime earnings. We could change lives with a single contribution.

There were roads with beggars. They didn’t pester you like in India. They sat despondently, almost hopelessly. They had little wooden bowls. There were old misshapen ladies, cripples and kids. If you put something in their bowls they ate. If you didn’t they starved. We put some in but still felt guilty.

We reached Mexico City and went up in the revolving restaurant to survey the smog. There was a lot of it.

We went out to the pyramids at Tehuacan. We camped by the pyramid of the sun. We woke to the sun rising over the pyramid of the sun. We climbed that pyramid and the pyramid of the moon. We stood at the top and imagined human sacrifices. The pyramids used to be painted red with huge carvings and plaster frescoes. They were scary places but incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring. You could imagine the music blaring, the crowds gathered and the sacrifices to the gods. The steps were supposed to have run with blood.

I could not help thinking that it was the same god all those years ago, before Mohammed, before Christ – the same vicious, demanding, blood-thirsty god! Same people! Same superstition. Same fear! Same sacrifices! Same stupidity!

Nothing changes!

We don’t get any cleverer!

We still are just as superstitious and stupid as ever we were!

Oh, of course, I am so wrong! I forgot! This is the age of Christ, Mohammed and the rest! Not some primitive superstition! Not like the gods of Rome or Yahweh, or the Earth Mother! No. Not some superstitious human creation of a messed up human mind. This time, unlike all the past times, it is real! I shouldn’t forget that, right!

But as I stood on top of that pyramid and thought about all the blood running down those steps I saw all human-created religion from all cultures, over all time. Nothing changes. It’s just wrapped in different clothing.

So we came down the steps where religion had killed countless thousands of innocent fools and headed for Taxco. A town up in the mountains. We stayed and had Christmas away from Christ and the commercial god of avarice. We stayed in a beautiful old hotel and listened to the firecrackers. And the kids ran through the streets with their Panyattas and smacked them with sticks to break they open to get the sweets inside and it was wonderful!

11.11.01

 

My idea of straight and your idea of straight might be totally different. I’m amazed at how straight I’ve become. It quite shocks me!

I wonder if I’m quite so willing to put my life and mind on the line?

11.11.01

 

Human beings are the same the world over. There’s thick ones, and ignorant ones, rich, poor and nasty ones. There’s good and evil ones. There’s violent and aggressive ones. The majority of them are pleasant, friendly and helpful. You just gotta find your way around and get along with them. I’ve always found that if you smile, are friendly and treat ‘em fair then they do the same to you.

I guess I’ve been lucky and never run into the real bastards yet!

11.11.01

 

The trouble with honesty is that people can find it so disappointing. To reveal all about yourself is to destroy your image. A radio programme has better pictures than a T.V programme. Everyone has his or her image of you. None of them are right.

The reality has got to be less than the imagined. The mysterious enigma is more intriguing than the openly blatant.

I am a crazy Zen beat hipster from Merton in Surrey on the Thames delta in the deep south.

31.10.01

Research – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

 

Life is about experience. What else is there? You gotta get out there and experience everything! Change your mind! Go everywhere! Meet everyone! Find the best minds and rap the hell out of them! Do everything once and avoid the ruts! Avoid the humdrum! Avoid the rot and decay. So much more than fun! So much more than sex! So much more than children!

There’s a galaxy out there! It spins! There’s a mind in here! It thinks. It spins. I wanna know what makes them spin!

11.11.01

 

I did research towards a Master’s degree.

It seemed a good idea at the time. I was working as a laboratory technician and I they gave me day release to do it.

Research sounds fun. Research is not fun. Research is the ultimate in boredom.

As an entomologist I negotiated to study the eutrophication of Lake Windermere through the presence of Chironomid Midge Larvae fossils in sediments – the afore-said-mentioned Chironomids being indicator organisms – an indicator organism being an organism that can be used to determine the quality of the water in a lake or river.

You see! Now that even sounds boring! But I can tell you that that does not sound one tenth as boring as actually doing the research! That is real boredom!

When Malcolm Mclaren sorted out ‘Boring’ as one of his key words and phrases, along with ‘Never trust a hippy’ and ‘Anarchy’, he did not know what he was talking about. If hanging about on street corners, with no employment, no prospects, no money and nothing to do, is boring, he ought to try research identifying the fossil head capsules of midge larvae. That’s boring enough to ossify what’s left of your brain.

I was studying Lake Windermere but I did not even get to see Lake Windermere! They sent me a slab of mud!

And when I started I didn’t have a clue as to what one Chironomid larval head capsule looked like compared to any other type of midge head capsule. I’d never even heard of Chironomid midges! I wouldn’t know what one looked like if it flew up and bit me – and they most probably have!

Still research was research and I got stuck in.

What fun!

I negotiated for someone to send me a complete core sample of mud from the surface through to the boulder clay sediments laid down when the lake was formed. It was thirty metres long. A great long brown turd of mud.

The basis for my work was that the mud was laid down sequentially year by year. So by studying what organisms lived in the water, and hence were preserved in the mud, you could tell what conditions in the lake were like at the time the mud was deposited. The boulder clay was the earliest stuff. The turd got progressively more organic and rancid as we went from glacial to present time.

My first job was to cut the huge tube of mud up into ten centimetre chunks and bottle each chunk in alcohol to preserve it and then carefully label it. I put these on a shelf in a sequential order. There were hundreds of jars, each one representing a period in the lakes evolution.

My next task was to learn to identify all Chiromid larvae from the diagnostic characteristics of their head capsules, which were the only part of them preserved in the mud. Each different species had distinctive arrangements of their scraping plates. Each different species lived in different oxygen tensions.

The first problem was that no one had ever bothered to describe them all. I had to search through all the literature and gather stuff together. I had to take photomicrographs of head capsules and describe them myself. When I knew all the different types and how to identify them, which took a year, I moved on to being able to find them in the mud samples.

I had a binocular microscope, a pipette and hundreds of slides. I’d put a squirt of mud in a dish along with ethanol, peer down my binocular, tease out the grains of mud with a needle and carefully find every head capsule that was present in the sample. I’d make these into slides and identify them. This took hours. The room was full of the fumes of alcohol, xylene and Canada balsam (used to make the slides).

Only when my supervisor was satisfied that I could find each and every one of the head capsules in the mud sample was I allowed to attack the mud stored in the jars on the shelf. You see, some head capsules were large and easy to find and some were small and irksome. You had to find them all to get accurate data. If you missed some the data was skewed.

See, I told you it was boring.

By the end of two years I was the world’s third leading expert in Chiromid larvae. Fucking hell! I’m not sure where I would be now? Perhaps, unbeknown to me I am now the world’s leading expert, the others all having died of boredom.

You are most probably dead from boredom just reading about it.

If you want to really know what boredom is try doing research. I can promise you it is not scintillating.

Then I was let loose on the mud. I had to take samples every so many metres along the sample and record a hundred fossil head capsules at each level. The idea was that the lake started as a pure Alpine lake and then gradually silted up to become the putrid eutrophicated mess I was these days. I was to plot that progress and make comments on what had happened to the oxygen levels as organic material built up in its pristine glacial waters.

Sounded easy enough.

It took me a year to do. The preparation of the slides using xylene and mounted in Balsam was tedious and also a health hazard. It stank and gave off fumes that filled your head with muzzy carcinogens. Your eyes went crazy staring intently down a binocular microscope for hours on end. It was horrendously boring.

Only when you’d got all your data could it become remotely interesting. The culmination of three year’s work was to analyse the changes in species and plot what had happened to the lake.

Wow! That was weird!

Contrary to work carried out on pollen and crustacean indicators my research did not show steady progress from oligotrophic conditions, through mesotrophic conditions, to eutrophic conditions. No. The lake didn’t start pure and sparkly and gradually silt up through the centuries. It started pure and then rushed into being eutrophic. There was nothing gradual about it. It even started to get a bit clearer later on and then silted up again. I found that fascinating.

I handed in my report.

It was a highly detailed report with flow charts and photomicrographs and bar charts. It was bitchin’. Even if I say it myself. I was proud of it.

A Master’s degree can be done in a year. Mine took three. But it was the Biz. I had stuck it out.

My supervisor was a really interesting man. He actually enjoyed assessing reports. He started off by reading the report backwards for spelling mistakes. Bear in mind that this was before the age of computers. It was all typed. If there was a single mistake and you had to type the whole page again and there were no spell checks. He found a few, well actually a few dozen per page.

He then read it for grammar. Then he read it for sense.

I received my report back from him covered from head to foot in corrections.

I retyped it all. I am a prolific one-finger typist. Then I resubmitted it.

He went through the process again and came up with a few things he wanted changing. Then he consulted the oracles as to the validity of my findings.

We had a meeting.

“Very impressive bit of research, hrrrmmph.”

“Thank you Doctor Watson.”

“Trouble is that it conflicts with other research carried out on the lake.”

“I know. But those are my findings. My overseer was satisfied with my results. They are accurate.”

“I don’t doubt that. It is just that I cannot submit them without further proof of their accuracy. They do not conform to research in other areas done on this lake.”

“What do you mean, you cannot submit?” I was getting annoyed. I’ve been three years doing this. I’ve been overseen and checked all the way. My results are accurate and my conclusions are valid. Surely this is something for me to discuss at my Viva?”

“No. I can’t give the colleges name to research that is in any way suspect. You will need to back it up with further study. I suggest two more core samples. That would amply back up your findings.”

“Two more core samples!” I was horrified. Even with my increased speed, I was looking at two more year’s work! Two more years of xylene fumes and pawing cross-eyed over a binocular microscope. I was horrified at the thought of it. No way was I going to do that! I argued. “I don’t want to convert this to a Doctorate. I just want a Masters!”

“Oh, this will be a Masters.”

“You are not seriously suggesting I spend five years doing a scabby Master’s degree?” I was angry.

“I think that is what will be necessary to enable us to have full faith in its credibility.” He replied in a calm and reasonable tone. Doctor Watson was an extremely refined man.

Our first baby, Dylan, had just been born. I was a father now. I had responsibilities. I was working as a laboratory technician on extremely low pay while I did my Master’s degree. We were living in a very dingy little bedsit but we had been offered a house in Hull. Liz’s Grandma had died and her mother had offered us a whole house! That seemed like a dream. I didn’t need this hassle with my research. I needed to get it out of the way and get on with my life.

“Look. I don’t need this,” I explained to him in my best controlled manner. ‘I have written up a valid bit of research. It is more than enough for a Master’s degree. I am not going to do any more core samples. I’ve had it with all that! If it isn’t good enough then fuck it! You can stuff it up your arse!”

I wasn’t furious. I wasn’t out of control. It felt really good.

He stared back at me aghast. He was a professor with refined tastes, a man of decorum and manners. Nobody talked to him that way.

But then, I was heavily into ‘fuck it’!

I walked out.

I went down-stairs and wrote out my notice for my technician’s post. The lecturer overseeing my research was a really nice chap. Derek had become a friend. He begged me to rethink. He urged me to go back immediately and apologise. He would see Doctor Watson. He would explain. Maybe we could compromise on one core sample. It wouldn’t take that long. He would help. We could publish the results anyway. I did not have to throw it all away. He begged me to reconsider. I apologised to him and thanked him for all his help but I had made my mind up.

I never went back to that lab. I left all my slides in the drawers, all my work scattered over the work surfaces and all my core samples on the shelves, and never looked back.

Fuck the Masters degree.

I served out my notice, all but the last three days, when I went down with a heavy dose of hepatitis.

And that’s how I came to move to Hull and become a teacher!

31.10.01

 

The trouble is that we all let ourselves down. We can’t live up to the ideals we set ourselves. We fall short.

31.10.01

Breaking in to the Rugby Team – extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’

Posted on by Opher

I was five foot three and weighed eight and a half stone. I was tiny and as light as a dandelion clock. The whole year group played rugby. They were big, burly kids. On Wednesday afternoon they were divided up into six teams and allocated to the three different pitches where they all played a game.

The five of us leftover were given a rugby ball and told to kick it around at the far end of the field, out of the way, where we couldn’t get into mischief.

I was right pissed off. I was tiny and thin but I was strong and wiry and extremely aggressive and nippy. I’d already been thrown out of cubs for being too wild. I was the champion of British Bulldogs. I was thrown out of scouts for being too wild. I was the sporting champion of my block. My whole life was spent running wild in the fields, up trees, in ditches, riding horses and up to all sorts. I was co-ordinated, determined and fearless. Yet I couldn’t even make the sixth team. It was insulting. I knew I was born to be a rugby player.

I put up with it for a few weeks but it was so boring kicking a ball around with six other non-combatants. They were useless. It was obvious that we were considered the dregs. Nobody even checked to see if any of us had any potential. As far as they were concerned, from a cursory judgement, we were too fat, too uncoordinated, too unfit, or too little to be of value on a rugby field.

After three weeks of boredom, I went to see the sports master Kallinack and complained. He brushed me off.

In frustration, I went home and demanded that my mum write a note. I was steaming. Kallinack read it grudgingly, weighed up whether he could put up with the hassle of sticking to his guns and grudgingly made a decision. It was of little importance to him. He put me in the sixth team and ousted some other unfortunate into the wilderness that existed behind the touchline.

I played like a man possessed, or at least a boy possessed. I tackled, wrestled, charged and fiercely contested for every ball. The teacher in charge had put me in as a hooker. I asked him where I had to be as I was a bit hazy about the rules. He said my job was to be where the ball was. That’s where I was.

I was under every maul. I was charging every kick. I was wrestling the ball off anyone who had it. I didn’t care what team they were on. That ball was mine. I was a demon. I had no regard for personal injury. The rules were a little bit of an unknown but I had five weeks pent-up frustration and unlimited energy to burn.

The next week I found myself promoted to the fourth team. Once again I was like a firework exploding in their midst. I wanted that ball. I chased it down and once I had it I was a fury. Nobody was getting it off of me. I ended the game bruised, battered and exalted. Many of the bigger kids were afraid of me. My determination more than made up for my lack of finesse or brawn. I was a midget H-bomb. They saw that I had no limits.

I walked off the pitch clutching that ball. I was loving this!

The next week I found myself in the second team. The second team were important, they actually played other schools. Somebody had said something. Kallinack gave me the once over and I thought I detected a little hint of admiration in his eye. I would show the bastard. I would teach him to leave me out on the touch-line. This time it was not so easy. We played against the first team and they had craft, speed and stamina, but I was a ferocious dynamo and I had something to prove.

It took me a few more weeks for me to break through into the first team. Trevor, the school hooker, had to drop out with bad burns on his back, caused either by someone putting a firework down his shirt or deliberately burning him with a lighted cigarette, depending on who you believed (he was a bit of a bad lad). I took his place as the school hooker.

Once I was there no one was going to get me out.

I played like a dervish. The centre of that scrum was mine. I didn’t care which side had the put in, I fought for that ball. I’d fling myself in there. If the other guy was foolish enough to get his legs in between me and the ball that was his look-out. I swung on my props and fought for that ball into their second row. My job was to get it back for my side. Every ball lost was a mortal blow. I wasn’t happy unless I hooked every ball and even if it was deep within their scrum I still fighting for it. This was where being small was an advantage. I could stand up and swing on my huge props. I could reach into their scrum and battle. It took other teams by surprise. It was normal to acknowledge second best when it was the oppositions put in. Not with me it wasn’t. I won a fair proportion.

The following season I was playing for my county. Nobody would ever write me off again.

21.9.01

The right to bear arms – extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

My Dad was a good driver. I don’t think he ever had an accident in a car. He enjoyed driving and drove assertively. I think that comes from having learnt to drive on a motorbike first.

11.8.2020

 

I was driving around in my old VW van and I couldn’t help noticing that all the strangest rednecks would keep waving and flashing me V signs.

After a couple of months of this, I asked what was going on. It seemed I had an NRA sticker on the windscreen. I was a real John Bircher now! The guy I’d exchanged the van with was an NRA man. Keep America free. It’s the right of every free man to be armed. They told me they were the good guys. They needed to protect themselves against the bad guys.

Among the bad guys, they place their own government. While I am none too enamoured with our own politicians and see the government as an arm of the establishment, I do not see that revolution is a good way forward.

It is every American’s right to be armed to the teeth in case, one day, they have to overthrow their own government. It did not matter if this meant putting assault rifles in the hands of the criminally insane, terrorists, criminals, gangs or madmen with a grudge. It did not matter that the State they were looking to overthrow was the one that they had elected or that it could deploy an army of hundreds of thousands, tanks, missiles, bombers and nukes; it was a basic right. The repeated mass killings in schools and concerts are an unfortunate side issue.

The irony was that the time when the government really should have been overthrown was the very time that these gun-nutters supported it most!

I took the sticker out of the windscreen.

19.9.01

Making a blood smear – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

I was teaching about blood to one of my High School classes in the Spring of 1980. I had gathered them all around me. We were going to make slides of blood smears – a popular lesson. This was the bit they loved. This was when the teacher fearlessly jabbed himself in the finger with a sterile lancet to demonstrate how it was done, and how easy and painless it was.

“Hey man, I missed that! Do it again.”

You had to do it nonchalantly as if it was nothing. You had to produce loads of blood. It hurt.

The kids were always attentive. They were nervous about making their own slides and pricking themselves, but they just loved to see the teacher jabbing himself and bleeding. You usually had one who could not cope with the sight of blood and passed out. It was a chance for the macho ones to show how it was done, but ironically, most of them were the ones most nervous.

I had all the class sit down, so that if anyone passed out they didn’t crash to the floor and smack their head, and applied the alcohol to sterilise the area on my index finger. I played to the house. You swung your arm round to get centrifugal force working. The blood built up in your fingers. You theatrically took the lancet and demonstrated where you were going to jab on the pad of your index finger. The back of the finger at the base of the nail was for cissies, besides it didn’t bleed so much. The forefinger produced a lot of blood.

This was the moment where all the eager eyes were feverishly focussed on you. You dragged it out before jabbing the lancet hard into your finger and squeezing a big dollop of blood out. It really hurt, inflicting pain on yourself is not pleasurable, but you smiled and told them it was nothing.

I could sense that the class were excited as I went through the act, but then I became aware that they were not really watching me. Their eyes were focussed on something behind me.

I looked around. There was Ruben ‘El Gangster’ Alvarado standing behind my ear holding a slide in one hand and a long stiletto flick knife in the other. He had not merely jabbed his finger he had sliced it to the bone. Blood was dripping freely on to the slide and pooling over to trickle on to the floor.

Ruben grinned at me.

I turned back to the class. ‘If anybody has any trouble getting sufficient blood for their smear, they should ask Ruben. I think he has some to spare.’

19.9.01

 

I am changing the world!

18.9.01

 

“Hey man, lend me your eraser.”

“No. Get your own.”

“If you don’t lend me your eraser I won’t let you use the machine gun tonight!”

19.9.01

Death – An extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

The crux of the matter, the root of the problem, if I can be allowed to mix clichés, is that we have a problem with death.

Death is something we don’t like talking about. We don’t even like thinking about. The fact that we are going to die, that our loved ones are going to die, is an anathema to everything we think and feel. It destroys the egocentric way we view the universe and makes it all pointless. How could the universe exist without us? Surely all this is here for a reason?

We see order in the universe and mistake it for a planned design. Death upsets that plan.

Death is disturbing. It seems contrary to order and negates purpose.

Our own death indicates that the universe really doesn’t care about us or need us. It carries on regardless. That seems illogical to us so we have invented an afterlife. Our deceased loved-ones are now with the angels or are now stars in the heavens.

That seems absurd and stupid to me. I prefer death. But many people find these ideas of an afterlife comforting.

We don’t even want to acknowledge death! It is too frightening a concept. Our whole lives are based around routine. Each day is much the same as the last. Life goes on. Nothing drastic is going to happen. We don’t doubt that we will wake up tomorrow.

Then – BAAAANG!!  We are knocked out of kilter by some religious madmen flying planes into skyscrapers. We watch in horror as the buildings collapse. This cannot be happening! Those buildings are permanent! Like mountains! It is not possible that anything that permanent can disappear so quickly and unexpectedly! That shows how impermanent we are! That shows us that death is real. We are going to die.

Buddhists meditate in graveyards to think about impermanence. They don’t avoid death. They try to accept it and come to terms with it. That seems healthy to me. They also don’t believe in gods.

If I had to choose a religion I’d be a Buddhist.

The answer is to pretend that there is no death, When we die we go to a better place. Problem solved. Death is a rebirth. Life is an interlude. No need to worry. We can go on thinking about all those everyday important matters. Life and death will take care of itself.

The next step is to get there quicker. If it is such a good place to go, after you are dead, let’s get there quicker!

‘Hey, injun, meet yer maker!’  Bang. Just like in the Westerns.

We are doing them all a favour by bumping them off.

Put your faith in Jesus!

But inexplicably, in the real world, these guys are flying planes into buildings because they are buying in to eternal paradise. That’s real commitment!

People actually believe these things.

Maybe I should start a new cult – ‘Nutters for death – the gateway to eternal life!’

I could have a series of decals made up with catchy mottos:

‘Put an end to all worries – kill yourself!’

‘In debt? Can’t solve your problems? Put a bullet through your head and wake up in heaven!’

‘Unhappy? Lost a loved one? Be reunited forever in paradise!’

‘Don’t like other religions? Think yours is the best brand? Show God you really care by blowing a whole bunch of them to fuck and fly an airbus into them!’ ‘God’ll love you for it!’

It’ll catch on!

We could sell the merchandise and turn a nifty profit.

Green plastic luminous exploding heads with ‘death for life’ on them.

Car stickers – ‘Make someone happy – kill a friend today!’

‘One God – kill anyone who says different. Save them from hell!’

‘Jesus loves you to death!’

There’s a big commercial franchise to be established. Surely we can’t allow the religions to corner the market?

But in reality, death is real. Death is the end of everything. All we have is the time between birth and death. We really have to make the most of it.

31.10.01

The Iran Hostage situation and war fever – extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Someone has stuck a huge pin in the map in my American classroom. That map is a map of the world, and I had stuck that map up on the wall deliberately. It was a statement of intent. I intended to broaden the minds I was temporarily in contact with, to widen their perspectives. A map of the world symbolised that. This was quite a strange thing to find in America for, when you are there, you could easily think that the rest of the world does not exist. All that is reported is American news. Even the sport is only a record of American victories with token mention of other countries. For fuck’s sake, they even call the baseball and American Football the World Series and World Championship despite the fact that no other country is allowed to compete. It is more than a little Americocentric. The pin has a big flag on it. Written on the flag in bold letters is: ‘NUKE IRAN’.

The pin is stuck in Tehran. You’ve got to give them credit for that. A few weeks ago and they wouldn’t have had a clue that there was even a country called Iran let alone a city named Tehran. At least they can now find it on the map.

These are my kids that have done that. We are in the middle of the Iran hostage situation. My great friendly American kids are all wrought up with war fever. They want to kill.

I am in a privileged position as a foreigner in their midst. I can be detached. I am not directly involved so I can bring logic to bear in the midst of emotion.

I look at the flag. The class look at me. I decide that today we will abandon Biology to discuss war.

I bring them around the front. Their eyes are already gleaming as they sense what is coming. If I had any sense I would have given up that stupid idea straight away and gone right on with the lesson I had planned but these were my kids. Some of them were very bright. We’d enjoyed good discussions. We’d gone through stuff on drugs, race and religion. We’d got through some difficult topics and built up a good relationship. I was sure I could handle this.

We were still in the midst of the cold war. I took the map off the wall and showed them where Russia was in relation to Iran. I asked them how America might react if the Russians took out Mexico. I mentioned Cuba. I talked of the effect of using nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, it seemed that this wasn’t the time for reason.

They howled at me. They stood on chairs and pointed and chanted. There was a pack mentality. They gave off a scent of madness.

I stood there standing in front of them, taking in their hysteria and was amazed. These were intelligent students but they were full of adrenaline and as high as kites. This was naked aggression. It was not directed at me. I was safe. But I had set loose a pent-up force that was now uncontained and raging and there was no way of getting it back in the bottle. It had to take its course. It was just that there was so much power in their rage, so much hatred, and it was like a monster with many heads and no brain. There was nothing to reason with. It had no ears. Its brain circuitry was fused.

There could be no discussion. There was nothing to discuss. The Iranians had dared to insult America by taking their people hostage. It was an outrage. They wanted them obliterated.

I could certainly see how easy it was for dictators to wind up their people. I could feel the group dynamic. When I’d seen all those crowds on the streets in Iran, Iraq and Palestine it had been just like this.

I had never experienced anything like it before. I felt as if I was trapped within Orwell’s 1984 and they were beaming in that period of group hate. This was the half-hour of hate. The aroma of adrenaline filled the classroom. The crowd were all directing hate in some sort of hysterical, self-perpetuating cloud.

Debate was not possible. It was not open to question. They didn’t even care if the hostages were blown to atoms in the process just so long as the whole world knew, and revenge was seen to have been carried out.

I had never experienced the irrationality of war fever. It was foreign to me and very scary. At that moment, it was obvious that Carter could get himself elected by a landslide, simply by sending in the marines or actually nuking a few cities, and hang the consequences. Instead, he had a fiasco of a rescue mission in the desert that went horribly wrong and got himself kicked out of office.

I respect him for that decision though. The alternative, if he had have gone in with full force, might have been another Vietnam or could have easily blown out of control into that fabled third world war. But it didn’t.

I repeated the lesson throughout the day with every class I taught. I never learn. It always met with the same impassioned response. America was beset with war fever.

I came home shaking my head.

That could only happen in America. The British were far too level-headed and rational to get carried away on such a jingoistic tide of emotion I thought. How wrong I was.

29.10.01

 

I have a dream of a world where enjoying yourself is not frowned upon and laws are just and equally applied to all – where a person has freedoms.

21.9.01

Prognosis – Extract from Farther from the Sun.

Posted on by Opher

I don’t mind being considered naïve and innocent. I don’t mind being considered idealistic and over-ambitious. As human beings increase in numbers to swamp the planet their effluent and pollution threaten the entire biosphere; as hundreds of species become extinct each day; as areas of natural habitat are destroyed daily; as millions of human beings starve; as wars and conflict rage out of control and threaten the destruction of the entire planet; as religions and nations spawn terrorists and war – surely someone has to offer a more sane answer?

Those smug rich bastards who run things, who look down their nose at do-gooders and environmental scum like me, who think that their way of life – snouts in the trough – has no end and that the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ are part of the natural way of the world, are surely not going to have the last say?

The human race is not going to be guided by such an arrogant, supercilious, ignorant, blind set of intelligent morons forever?

Is it?

That way is death.

21.9.01

 

We went to see the specialist at the hospital, just me and my dad. It was the meeting where the consultant gave us the results and told us what he was going to do about it. It was felt that dad had to have someone with him. I was that someone.

Dad had been in for the tests. They’d scanned and prodded, taken samples. Now was the day of reckoning.

Dad drove us to the hospital in his new car, his pride and joy – a blue Hillman Hunter.

I didn’t know it at the time but it was the last time that he drove me anywhere.

He was just the same as ever – driving aggressively. At one time a car pulled out to cross the road in front of us. Dad didn’t brake; he swerved around behind it and continued on as if nothing had happened. That was his way. I think it was the dispatch rider coming through.

The specialist was sombre. They’d diagnosed liver cancer. The swelling and tenderness was dad’s swollen liver. It was too advanced to treat. He was prescribing palliative treatment.

I took a minute to take that in.

They were going to let him die. How was that possible? He was my dad. How could he die? There had to be something that could be done.

There wasn’t.

Life doesn’t make much sense to me.

Death rarely seems fair.

We were both a bit stunned as we came out of that office. I don’t know if it had sunk in with dad. He chose to ignore the prognosis. He clung to the belief that they were treating it with pills. Pills could put anything right. The fact of death hovering there was not up for discussion.

Dad did not do death.

15.8.01

Published! – Extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Life is not a novel but a road movie. There is no script. We make it up as we go. No director. The audience is ourselves. The galaxy swirls. We curtsy and bow. We make up rules and try to live by them. This road movie is heading off into new dimensions.

29.10.01

 

My fiction writing is going crap. I am not getting published. I need to evaluate my style. I need to re-evaluate what I am doing.

I have a thousand handouts from my Rock course. It is obvious. I need a break from fiction to do something different. The obvious thing is to bring my Rock Music notes together into one huge definitive history of Rock. There are hundreds of histories out there but they are all crap. There needs to be a definitive version. I have the bones of it!

I set to work. It is easy. All the graft has been done. I trace the history and evolution through from 1900 to 1984, Country Blues and Irish Jigs to Punk and Toasting. I include little pen pictures of all the major exponents, seminal influences, precursors, obscure stuff, political and social issues. I illustrate it with flow diagrams. Finally, it is complete. I have the whole thing complete in 1500 pages making up four volumes. I am happy. It does the job and allows me the room to develop my own pet ideas, vent my spleen and do justice to unsung heroes like Roy Harper and Captain Beefheart. I even bring in my Beat poetry and literature. It’s all there. I call it ‘Rock Strata’.

I send it off.

A Literary Agent writes back – ‘This is good – I have someone interested! Come up to London to meet him.’

I rush up to London and we meet. The publisher is impressed. He wants to go ahead. He will be in touch.

29.10.01

He gets in touch. Yeah. It is brilliant. He will publish.

There is only one snag. It is too long. It is not viable as a publishing project. The finances, blah, blah, blah. Costs. Return. Expense. No profit. Blah, blah, blah. I really know my stuff.

In short, it needs to be cut down. He suggests 120 pages is about right. The publisher really loves the flow diagrams. Could I base it around that?

I am confused. We are obviously talking about a different book here. Do I want to do that?

I decide I do.

The summer holidays are on the horizon. I lock myself away, after all, I am going to be published. I have to devote myself to my art. Liz has to look after the kids and manage the house. She agrees.

I work feverishly to get it all down to 150 pages based entirely around the flow diagrams. I call this one ‘Rock Streams’. It is very different from the first one but I am satisfied with it. I send it off.

He is delighted. 150 pages is not ideal but it will do. He thinks that the flow diagrams are great and the writing is excellent. I need to go down to Devon to finalise, sign and discuss details.

I set off. On the way an old nutter pulls out in front of me from a side road and runs me off the road. I career up on to the pavement at 60 MPH and nearly smash through a wall. He doesn’t even stop. I give chase. The fucker nearly killed me! I catch him up and he pulls over. We have an animated discussion until my heart rate slows a little.

I arrive a bit stressed out and exhausted. My newfound editor shows me around. We talk contract and negotiate the deal. I sign. I drive back four hundred miles home. The deal’s not much –  £300 advance and 9% of all copies over the first 1000. It is not going to make me a millionaire. It is not even going to give me a return on the time put in. I might claw back maybe 10p per hour. But that is not the point.

I am going to be published.

November trundles into December and no cheque arrives. We have spent the advance that hasn’t yet arrived on the kids’ Christmas presents. We are desperate for the cash. I ring, I write. ‘Yes it’s in the post should be there in the next day or so.’

Christmas comes and New Year and no cheque.

Eventually, I get a sheepish letter. ‘Sorry. Project cancelled. Board reject idea. First time this has ever happened.’

I chuck the book in the bottom drawer and never look at it again.

29.10.01

 

Some are good decisions.

29.10.01

 

I have a good script for life. I have an idea that might work. It doesn’t hang around supernatural creatures that poke around with human destiny. It does involve freedom and difference. It does work through politics. It has some good outcomes to work towards. It is based around fairness and justice. It’s a very human plot that does not need tarting up with dogma and superstition. It is based on intelligence. It does revolve around empathy, respect, responsibility, tolerance and the right to be crazy and get pissed. There are no wars and cruelty in this plot. There’s plenty of love and argument and plenty of things to make and improve.

I like it lots.

Nobody goes hungry in my plot. Nobody is tortured. No animals become extinct. It’s very positive.

29.10.01