Death - North America - Monkey X

It's 2.23pm on a bright and sunny Monday - and we all know what that means! Thasright: it's the smiley happy Monday afternoon news...

1.

So people are always, like, “why are you so death-obsessed, man?” - to which I say, “it’s my age; it’s because I enjoy thinking about these things; it’s my nature.” But if you think I’m bad, you should talk to my dad: he brings it up at least every other time I see him. This week, he was going on about his funeral.

“I don’t give a shit what it’s like – no bloody religion – it’s just got to be as cheap as possible. You can bury me in a cardboard box if you want. Or get Martin from Keighley to build a flight case. Dig a hole in the woods and stick it in there.”

“You know what I think,” he says, getting all conspirational, like he’s about to unleash one of his pearls of wisdom, “I think when the coffin goes behind the curtain when they’re going to cremate you they take the body out and use it again. They’re not going to burn a couple of grand’s worth of wood, are they? Think about it. Bollocks to that.”

This is a man, by the way, who firmly believes the effects of all drugs are pretended – that people fake being high because it’s what’s expected of them, and makes them look cool.

A customer enters the shop and interrupts the conversation. He holds out his hand to reveal a little piece of metal and asks if he can buy a replacement.

“I don’t know,” says my dad, “what is it? I can’t bloody see it.”

“It’s off a Floyd Rose trem,” he says.

My dad bristles and blusters. “There’s only three people in this world should have been executed: Hitler, Stalin, and Floyd bloody Rose. Why on Earth would you want a Floyd Rose trem on your guitar? You should take it off and put something bloody decent on instead.”

They’ll say many things at me old man’s funeral. One thing they won’t say is: “he wasn’t a character.”

2.

I dreamed of California this morning: three scenes with three different groups of friends. The first we were in an apartment just up the coast from LA; the apartment was so close to the water, set up on rocks, that you had to keep the windows closed, otherwise the waves would come in (I found that out the wrong way). Second scene I was with two women and so excited I jumped on top of a bus shelter; almost immediately a cop roared up in his blacked out future-wagon and put some cuffs on me. I was distraught; all that effort to get there and then blown it in a moment of careless outlandishness. And apparently it was worse ‘cos some Hispanic woman was claiming to have been injured by my jumping. But they looked her over and she was all right and they let me go. Phew. Final scene was just ambling along amongst a nice crowd, some musicians playing, a couple of people I knew and some hugs.

Main thing I remember thinking (in the dream) is, damn, I hadn’t got rid of all my English possessions before leaving; and wasn’t that the whole point of going back there?

3.

You may wonder why I’m so hard on American cops. Then again, you may not; you may know full well how extraordinarily rubbish they are, and how much better policing is in other countries. It’s such a shame, you know, what with being “number one” at pretty much everything else, that the boys in blue have to let y’all down [some tic].

I so wish I could find that clip of UK police pulling over a coach-load of airport-bound cage-fighters, having received a tip off of drugs onboard. They talked to the guys nicely. They said, listen boys, we don’t want to ruin your weekend, play along and we’ll make sure you get your plane. The guys with the white powder came forward. They received their orders to appear in court, and were allowed back on the coach. One who dilly-dallied looked like he was going to mess it up for everyone, so the cops said, the rest of you go on without him, get yourselves checked-in, and we’ll give him a ride there when we’ve finished with the paperwork. It was beautiful, man.

An ex-pat UK friend of mine was once surprisingly defending the US cops and all the killing they do. “They never know,” he says, “whether the guy they’re dealing with is carrying a gun. Imagine what that does to your mindset.”

It’s a decent point, and I guess goes some way to explaining things, but it’s not just the killings, is it? It’s the whole mentality. I mean, it’s not fear of death that gets them issuing good people $200 jay-walking tickets on deserted streets at 2 in the morning. It’s not concern the safety of others that has them pulling over suburban moms and dishing out $400 tickets for doing 36 in a 35mph zone (just, coincidentally, as budget time approaches).

Anyway, I’ve gone on about that enough, I reckon…

4.

A friend says to me, “One thing that’s struck me: it’s as though you thought America owed you something, and you don’t seem to have that in the UK. You’re a different person when you’re there to the one you are here, and I really think it’s to your detriment.”

“What do you mean?” I says.

“Well, I get the sense that you expected everything to fall in your lap when you were over there – and, in a lot of ways, it did. But you wanted it ALL. You didn’t put the effort in. Yet you land here and suddenly you’re all hustle and bustle looking for work and things to do and places to live, and that makes you happy; just imagine how bonkers you’d be if you didn’t do that in Leeds. If you sat there waiting for things to happen. If you stared at he city and expected it to provide you with your needs. Think about it for a minute.”

I do. I think. And I realise he’s right.

“There’s nothing here, is there? How weird! The county of my birth – a place I’ve spent so many years in – and yet there’s nothing here. No real friends – you know, friends that I see on a regular basis – and nothing in the way of opportunity. And yet why do I feel so much more content? Because I’m doing things? Because I’ve got my routine and my busy-ness and never have to go more than 24 hours without having something to do, and therefore not having to think too much?”

“You had too much time on your hands in the States. You needed a job. The routine is a good thing, my friend. A man goes too long without a reason to get out of bed, he’s bound to go doolally.”

“And I guess,” I said, “that, because I’d made all that effort to be there, I was wanting something extraordinary, as though that’s what was required to make it all worthwhile. But here – well, no effort – s’just living – and therefore nothing much required either. If I spend the days frittered away in nothingness in Leeds I don’t mind too much – but frittered days in the US felt like a dreadful waste of time and life, and made me manic for something more.”

“’Perpetually insatiable.’”

“And yet so easily sated here. But not forever. The volcano’ll bubble at some point, I’m sure.”

“England’s always been like that for you – I remember even going back fifteen years and how you’d say being in Wakefield was like being one of those space probes that builds up momentum by going round and round a planet until it slingshots out into space at incredible speed.”

“Yes,” I say, “I get that. And it was fun back then, in my carefree and adventurous youth. But now it’s sort of terrifying. Where will it all lead? When will it end? It’s not just the routine and having stuff to do that makes Leeds more tolerable, it’s the comfort of knowing that everything’s taken care of. You know, healthcare and all that. Being able to legally work – or support in the unlikely event that I can’t.”

“Do you ever get sick?”

“No.”

“Have you ever wanted for money, or something that money can buy?”

“No.”

“So it’s just fear, then? Of the unknown, of the future? Of something that may or may not happen, but most certainly hasn’t happened, and there are no reasons to think that it definitely will.”

“It could be fear – but it could also be caution, or wisdom. There’s a pretty fine line between them.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. I have a think for a minute.

“But, yes,” I say, “I am afraid. Afraid that I’ll end up like one of those sad, wandering hippies, lost in space, all gaunt-eyed and should’ve settled down a long time ago, but now it’s too late. It’s all very well being like that in your twenties and thirties – but you meet those people in later years and…well, it’s nothing I want to aspire to, let’s put it that way. What would be nice would be to have an example of something to aim for; to see a vision of a man sixty years old and think, that looks like a good place to be. Is that maybe what you’re supposed to do when you’re forty? Start thinking about where you’d want to end up for the last leg of your life? But I never meet those people. It’s been a long time since I saw someone I felt like emulating.”

He breathes a big breath at this. “I hear ya, man; I totally do. I feel exactly the same way. I guess that’s when you’re beating your own path and creating your own future. But it is scary, especially when you factor in all the pressures – and temptations – of finance and material comfort and relationships and the simple fact of needing to exist somewhere and do something for the next however many decades.”

“Jesus went out into the wilderness and thought, ‘man, what the hell am I doing? I could be knuckling down; I could be comfortable; I could be using my magic powers for a life of luxury and ease, living like a bona fide king. And instead I’m chucking it away for an uncertain existence of poverty and adherence to this weird unseen spiritual presence that pretty much no-one else experiences. I must be mad; what should I do? What should I do?’”

“You’re not comparing yourself to Jesus, are you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous; it’s just a fitting analogy, that’s all. A common frame of reference.”

“A great example of being in a position of choice.”

“Exactly. But I think we’re getting a little off topic here; we were talking about an ordinary bloke in Leeds, and you were making points about America.”

“That’s it, really,” he says. “I’m just pointing out that it seems weird how you can be so content to live such an empty life in your homeland, and yet go so crazy to live a better life elsewhere. And wondering what the reasons are for that. Comfort, yes. Familiarity, okay. A healthcare system that you never use but I guess must provide a certain level of reassurance. And having routine, being occupied, not thinking too much. All that’s part of it – but, more than that, the idea that you wanted something from the US that you simply don’t expect of England, and so you’re bound to feel more dissatisfied.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” I ask. “I’ve been thinking about how striking it is that I’ve lived in Leeds all this time, and basically have no friends, and yet I can land in somewhere like Oakland, knowing no-one, with no plan, no idea what I’m doing, and within seven hours I’ve met three guys I feel completely on the same page as, and guys I’d call ‘buddies’. How I can stand by the side of the road in some small-town in California with my thumb out and get picked up by someone I’ll then have an amazing few hours with, and whose life I’ll hopefully have impacted for the better. How I can roll into a town like Grand Junction, again knowing no-one, and be so embraced and welcomed, and be off hiking and soaking in hot springs and having wonderful conversations and meeting all sorts of people.”

“What do you think that’s down to?”

“I dunno: probably just the accent” (I joke).

“I think it’s something more than that.”

“I guess,” I say, “and that’s what concerns me. I dunno: all that nuttiness out there, and how I was crying out ‘to be among sane people’. But now I’m among sane people…”

“Maybe you just have to accept – ”

“That I’m a nutty one too. That saneness isn’t for me. And it’s not sanity, anyway, this English secularism and materialism: it’s adherence to a narrow band of life, and it feels sane because it’s not interesting, not exciting, not pushing any limits. Just ants scurrying around moving little bits of dirt.”

“Can I pull you up on one thing?”

“Sure, man, you know I’m always open to a challenge.”

“When you say ‘England’, what do you really mean?”

“Good point. I guess I just mean my life in Leeds; I’ve good friends in London. People I have fun with. Interesting conversations. There’s a bit of life down there.”

“But then you’ve lived there a couple of times…”

“And, yeah, the noise got to me. The ugliness of the city. And that I wanted more – to do the Master’s; to go to Israel; to go back to the US and Mexico. And one more thing too – that it was winter when I left. That it’s winter now. That I always get antsy for change around January/February time, and have done lots of my moving and leaving then.”

“Winter blues?”

“Possibly. Plus that whole thing of how Christmas and New Year and my birthday gets me thinking about what’s been, and what’s to come.”

“You left Grand Junction last January, right?”

“Right. And the year before that I was in Saskatoon, but wanted to leave. And the year before that I was in Leeds, but making plans for Greece.”

“Why did you leave Grand Junction?”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that. I mean, there was the whole ‘nun with a gun’ thing, and the completion of my quest, but also there was this sense that, okay, I’m happy here, I like it here, I could work and play a bit of soccer and maybe do some refereeing and…”

“And it’d be just like your life in Leeds.”

“Exactly. And so I thought – rightly or wrongly – well, what’s the point in that? It didn’t feel like progress. And it didn’t feel like the smartest choice given the things I didn’t have there: legal opportunities to work; chances to develop a career; sensible possibilities for romantic relationships and family (given my illegal status) – which were all things I thought I wanted at the time. Plus, there was also this mistaken assumption about my life in Leeds: that it would be what it had been between 2011 and 2013, when I was very happy there, and had a lot going on. But all my friends had moved to other places. And I was no longer at the university, around which most of my activities revolved. Plus I guess I’d changed too.”

“So you left Grand Junction because you were happy there?”

I laugh. “Kind of, yeah. But mostly, I suppose, because I was mistaken about certain things. And because, having solved the mystery, I thought I was done. And because I wanted to go to Boulder. And then, having been to Boulder, I wanted to go to LA. And that’s when everything really fell apart…”

5.

I said a few weeks back how striking it was that, after all my adventures in North America, I’d come back to England and nothing had changed. The same people sat at the same desks doing the same jobs. The same cups and saucers in the same cupboards. But that wasn’t strictly true: some things had changed. Number one, they now advertise sex toys on mainstream TV. And, number two, all the women – well, 90% of them – were wearing tight-fitting black jeans with slits across the knees. It was wildly surreal. It got me thinking, who started all this? On what date? How had it spread? I mean, there must have been a point where no-one was doing it; and then, suddenly, there appeared that first ‘Monkey X’.

6.

I’d also said that, not only had nothing changed externally, nothing seemed to have changed internally too. That was an even bigger shock – you want something to show for 18-months of extreme living, right? But there I was, back in the same job myself, and the only difference for all that time away an increase in age and wrinkles. Thing is, whatever changes there were, it was more a case of deduction rather than addition – not something gained, but something let go of.

The whole thing reminded me of how a friend used to say: “Buddha said, ‘I have gained nothing from my enlightenment – but there are many things I have lost.’”

7.

That reminds me of something another friend once said: “Buddha said, ‘Buddhahood is found in the Yoni.’” (‘Enlightenment is found in the vagina’ – that is, ‘have sex’.)

I thought, that doesn’t sound very Buddha. In fact, in the Vinaya Pitaka he is reported as saying, “It would be better for a monk to put his penis in the mouth of a viper than in a woman’s vagina.’” So how to explain the apparent contradiction?

I did a bit of research. I traced it back to various New Age blogs, where it seems to have begun appearing a couple of years ago. A bit like Monkey X, I guess one of them must have started it and the others blindly followed. For it is, in fact, a saying from a dubious medieval Japanese cult whose practices involved human skull rituals and sex with children.

Not my cup of tea, thank you very much.

8.

If you want to see what a viper-bitten penis looks like, by the way, I believe there are some pictures online of what happened when an unfortunate Indian farmer chose the wrong time to take a leak.

I haven’t seen them myself. I think I’ve just about learned the lesson of refraining from viewing that which can’t be unseen.

9.

What’s your favourite urban myth debunked this year? Last year, mine were all about the moon, and this year I think it was learning that people in the distant past didn’t believe the Earth was flat. Weird, huh? I’m pretty sure most of us were taught the whole, “sailors thought they’d fall off the edge of the world” thing in school – but apparently it’s not true, and was an idea started in Victorian times by a handful of authors and repeated until it became the prevailing view of ‘them daft superstitious folk what lived in the past’.

More Monkey X stuff. Interesting that that keeps cropping up. Almost makes me think there might be something in the whole ‘Hundredth Monkey’ idea. But that story, alas, is also another piece of creative myth-making and misinformation. Shame.

10.

I got my eyes tested this week: quite a shock to be told to “read the top line” and be confronted with a horrible blur of what I assume were letters. Damn bloody laser eye surgery! I’ve half a mind to write and ask them for my money back – in which case, I’d probably be quite happy with the whole thing.

Money, money…

Anyways, now that I’ve done that I suppose I can find out if I’m going blind or not: probably go again in a few weeks and see what the score is then. Certainly, I know there are street signs I could read a couple of months back that I can’t read now. And the poor chaps I refereed last Wednesday… wink emoticon

11.

Funnily enough, there were some things I missed about having bad eyesight after I’d had them lasered, so at least there’s something to look forward to. I missed, for example, the feeling I used to have of walking around in my own little bubble: I couldn’t see much of anything that was more than ten feet away, and so I was much less distracted. People would say they’d seen me and waved but I’d just ignored them. Walking down the high street I was in ignorant bliss of all the loud, bright signs telling me to buy stuff I definitely didn’t need.

I also remember very clearly how distant clouds on the horizon looked exactly like mountains, and how happy that made me, living in this mountainless land. Plus, the time I saw this cute black kitten and how it gladdened my heart. What a lovely feeling! To come across an unexpected kitten!

No matter that, on closer inspection, it was actually a discarded plastic bag. The feeling was real, right? And that’s what matters.

Every cloud and all that…

12.

Facebook’s a funny thing, isn’t it? That you can write, for example, “I think I’m going blind” – and 99% percent of the ‘friends’ that read it respond by either ignoring it or clicking ‘Like’.

(I’m being wilfully misconstruesive, of course; I didn’t write only that, and I know ‘liking’ something doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is ‘liked’. But still…)

Another friend posts a sorry tale of some musical instruments stolen, and there are plenty of ‘likes’ for that one too.

I really must dig out the screenshot I took of a conversation where I wrote, “What’s the story with so-and-so and this horrible, heartbreaking accident they’ve had?” – and the mutual friend replied with a giant thumbs up.

13.

My eye test didn’t cost anything; I can probably get some contact lenses for free too. I love England, and all the great offers businesses have here. I love Google, and being able to type in “free eye test” and a few hours later I’m sat in the opticians chair with strange bits of metal strapped to my face. And I love the NHS as well, and being able to walk in and get whatever check up I fancy for nowt too; now I notice my bus ticket has an advertisement for colon cancer screening on the back. Might as well get that done while I’m here; I’ve long thought it might be the cause of my demise. I wonder how crappy a way to go that is?

(No pun intended – though neither was it deleted/edited once recognised.)

14.

And there I go again, circling right back around to death. You just can’t get away from the bloody thing! Let’s finish with a joke:

“You know,” says the sage, “there’s no difference between living and dying.”

“Well why don’t you die then?” says the cleverclogs.

“Because it wouldn’t make any difference.”