Green Themes

We made a lot of stir fries in Fife Park, which is to say that Craig and I made a lot of stir fries. We made one almost every night for the first few months. Craig was especially particular about how to prepare his stir fries, and we laboured together each day to meet those exacting standards.

Cooking a stir fry in Fife Park was an exercise in patience. On their maximum settings the hob rings turned a kind of mild orange in colour and heated things more or less to the point they’d eventually dry out, if not cook in any conventional sense of the word. We’d spend an hour or more of our day devoted to the preparation of such a meal, with a good sauce, making it all from scratch out of basic ingredients. They were healthy, substantial meals and damn tasty, but the main point in their favour was that they were not pasta. After the first year, pasta needed to spend a while off menu.

I was glad of the stir fries because, despite Craig’s insistence on perfection, it was good to get something healthy inside me. Frank, for example, did not eat stir fries. Frank used to eat Tomato Soup and toast. Sometimes he would eat nothing else for days. Occasionally he’d splash out and pour a can of baked beans over a four pack of sausage rolls.

But for the Grace of God, I say; if it weren’t for Craig, I doubt I would have fared even so well as that. I am an atrocious animal. Left to my own devices, I would probably have eaten Frank’s leftovers with a tin of Tesco Value peach slices. […which were down to nine pence a tin during the price wars of ’99/2000.] 

I eat bad things. I eat wrongful things, in the name of hunger and of discovery. I will eat things that are barely even food, things that don’t look like normal food, things of unknown provenance and uncertain status, things, in short, that normal people would probably not want to touch with their bare hands.

That’s how, one mild autumnal night, after eating a stir fry and a semicircle of cremated pizza, I got more stoned than ever before. It was a very interesting experience. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, and I was glad when it was over. Afterwards, I wanted to do it again.

On the night in question, Frank had decided to crumble half a nub of resin and use it to season his thin-and-crispy margarita. Inside of a few minutes, the kitchen smelled of gear. In fact the whole house and a good proportion of FifePark smelled of gear. It was a wholesome, herby smell. I think that was the first time that I ever thought of hash as a plant product rather than some evil concoction made in a lab somewhere by some post-modern Jekyll.

On the other hand, it was also quite a recognisable smell, and I was worried that someone else might recognise it. I opened a lot of windows and hoped for the best.

‘Quinn, it’s getting cold in here,’ Frank said. ‘Will you shut those?’

‘But,’ I motioned, while whispering forcefully, ‘the whole house smells of gear.’

‘Yeah, it’s good isn’t it? Don’t you think that it’s a lovely smell, Quinn?’

‘Well,’ I said, taken aback. ‘Yeah. It’s nice. But what if someone else smells it? What if the warden comes round?’

The warden kept walking past the house. He kept walking right in front of our windows. I shut them.

‘Fuck that fat pie-eating cunt,’ Frank said, as he passed once again. And that was that.

I went up to my room for a while, to calm my nerves. Frank looked after the Pizza.

Sadly, as he’d already spent the afternoon smoking the rest of the block, Frank’s idea of time was not in accordance with the pizza’s requirements. By the time he opened the oven door to ‘check it out’, it would be fair to say that it was the pizza itself that had checked out, and gone up to the great Kinness Fry Bar in the sky. What remained was nothing more than a small, sooty disc with melted cheese in the middle. One charred semicircle looked halfway edible, and Frank set to it. I had the rest.

Fresh off the back of that, and long before it would have any chance to kick in, Frank suggested we hit up some awful homemade bong. I agreed to this, for whatever fool reason I had at the time.

[The only other time I’d seen smoke so thick and yellow was when I had tried to reheat a French loaf in the microwave. Within a few seconds it had set itself on fire. You could carry the smoke outside in a bucket. The house stank for a day. The bread, on the other hand, tasted okay, as long as you avoided the parts where it had turned black and shrivelled up.]

Then, after about forty minutes, with the gear coming at me from both directions, we decided to go into town with some of the DRH crew. There was one man too many for the taxi, so I volunteered to walk it. I didn’t think I could handle a taxi ride. It was coming on pretty strong, and I wanted some fresh air. The walk was interesting, although not the most interesting walk of the night.

I got to the Vic, eventually. I felt a little sick. Craig and Frank were playing table football, and I tried to join in but the sheer stimulation of the speed and the movement was too much. I went to the bar to get a drink. A vodka and coke, I decided. Small, sweet, easy to drink. My mouth was dry.

The bar was incredibly orange. The glowing electrical lights hit the creamy walls behind the bar and turned my vision orange. Everything that I looked at, while it retained its original colour, had been tinted with this orange. The bar staff didn’t serve me for a long time. I was probably not making eye contact.

I looked around, and the whole place felt like it was outside me, in a brand new way. Outside me, but so was I. Unimportant. Just a part of an evening, no longer the subject. Not even my own protagonist. It is odd to have your whole conception of the world turned on its tail, to the degree that your whole life in front of you suddenly seems to have only the importance of a vibrant mural adorning the wall of a popular student pub with badly painted Scottish celebrities. [They’ve painted over the mural now, but I’m still here. I call existential victory.]

Eventually I got my drink and the paranoia hit bad while I was waiting for my change. I had an overwhelming urge to run away. I felt like I was about to be caught for some heinous crime and locked away for it. I can’t imagine that there would have been much worse than locking me away in a state like that. I dug in my heels, and collected a handful of coins. I pretended to check them.

‘Act normal,’ my subconscious was screaming at me ‘and you might just get away with it.’

I went back into the next room, and hunched up in a corner, with my vodka and coke within arm’s reach. The next thing that I knew, Paedo was talking to me about quake. Paedo’s real name was Pedro. I think he had been badly introduced to us in a noisy room, and the name had stuck.

Now he was talking to me about Quake. Paedo still played the original Quake, and don’t be deceived; that was almost as old-school then as it would be now. Not many people were still spending five hours a day playing Quake in their rooms at the turn of the millennium. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t reply. I took a sip of the mixer.

I tried to dig my feet into the ground and say something, but the room had sloped off into the distance. My eyes watered. My tongue felt heavy in the bottom of my mouth. I started to talk to him, and then stopped in mid sentence. I knew that I hadn’t finished speaking, but there was simply no movement in my mouth. A moment later, I had forgotten what I was trying to say.

‘Dude,’ Paedo said, as he often did, ‘You’re wasted.’

I was aware of every square millimetre of my thumb and finger skin in contact with my cool glass of vodka coke. My head was tight and felt oppressed. The stimulation from simply talking, moving and breathing was too much. I felt claustrophobic. I could feel the material of my jeans moving against the inside of my legs in a rhythmic timing with my drawn out breaths. Every neuron seemed to be firing at once, and nothing was being filtered out. There was just too much to process.

‘Fucked,’ I said. ‘Going home.’

It was one of the crazier walks of my life. [And I’m known for that.] Every sound on the street seemed to be magnified in amplitude and would echo inside my head for just a fraction of a second. I could see perfectly, but the world that I was seeing seemed to be a very long way away, and quite outside of my reach. It was like it was happening somewhere else.

Shadows seemed to move at the periphery of my vision, reminding me of the time that I had stayed awake to see three sunrises in a row. On the last night, I had seen things. In the shadows, at the edges of my vision, where nothing was very clear, things had been moving. This was even more intense. Where I might once have stopped and wondered if I had seen something in the shadows, now it was writhing and squirming, even when I turned to look directly at it.

Eventually, those things moved out of the shadows. They weren’t that terrifying, as it turned out. One of them was a red bike, moving horizontally across the road. I cannot explain how that made sense, but at the time it was perfectly understandable. That was how that bike worked. Why question it?

I had thoughts, as I walked. Deep theological and philosophical musings. They flitted in and out of my mind at massive speed, barely forming themselves into words, often appearing merely as pictures.

Answers came, and went as quickly. The thoughts raced, but I couldn’t hold on to them, they rushed through me like a river, each with the force of a previously unknown universal truth, vanishing downstream. Like rivers of the mind; never the same, always present, never the same. Meaning infusing the least pattern, the least moment, and then gone. 

It was like hearing a new a tune as you drift into sleep, and wanting to remember it, but knowing that you have no way to write it down, and that its memory will be gone by morning. I had these thoughts, these answers¸ so it seemed, and I knew that they would all be gone in a split second. I tried to turn one of them into some kind of mantra that I could repeat, and likely remember. I could keep it by repeating it, over, and over.

It’s very easy to see why some people feel attuned to God, in that state – or come to believe in some kind of universal, spiritual oneness. But it’s not evidence of God’s unadorned closeness to humanity. If it shows anything, it shows how many levels must exist between us, and how unsurpassable might be the void. Especially when you’re fucked.

I half-ran the rest of the way back to the house, and scribbled the mantra down on the first piece of paper I could find. It was a blue post-it note. Satisfied, I stuck on some music and got into my bed.

The music was incredible. Like nothing I had ever heard, incredible. I listened to music that I’d always listened to and it sounded totally different. It was like I had the world’s most selective graphic equaliser in my head. All sorts of different sounds, some of them little more than background noise in the track, became a part of the music. Instruments were all connected and moved in time with each other, moved through each other. I listened to a few random tunes, I listened to a couple of Hendrix tracks, and then – finest of all – I put on all of OK Computer. The bass lines passed through the melodies, sweeping the other instruments in and out of the limelight, and I felt at that moment that I had never heard anything so well conceived or created.

I listened to Media Sift (Through Heart Rises). As I listened to Media Sift, it never occurred to me how much it would come to represent the whole year in my life, and not just the year, but the act of looking back on it.

with each day and each look back / i remember the voice of young love / and old folks i hear no more / 'till very soon the vision's unsure / i remember arriving home / to old rooms i see no more / 'till very soon it sounds unsure / until the only remnance fades from mind

I fell asleep a little before the end of the CD. When I woke up I was a bit dizzy, but had pretty much recovered. It was mid-afternoon. There was a blue post-it note next to a glass of water. The writing was messy and urgent. The message was surprisingly relaxed.

‘Don’t worry,’ I had written. ‘You won’t remember any of this in the morning, but it will all still be true.’