It had all started with a malfunctioning telephone. Or perhaps it was my mind that was malfunctioning. The details were hazy, as they usually are, but I am pretty sure that a beast of madness was helming my ship.
I had a respectable career – at least for a loser – running an arthouse cinema in the outer boglands of London. I had been there for many, many years and slowly over time I was driven insane by the monotony of it all. They day had started much like any other; I arrived to work at 7am exhausted, having been there until 3 the previous night. Keen moviegoers queued outside the doors, waiting impatiently to catch the latest Colin Firth costume drama. It was a 12 hour shift, as it usually was. I was grateful it wasn’t more.
The glacial winter got right into my bones, and no coffee nor radiator could fix the chill that resided inside of me. My “office” – the projectionist booth – was always kept about the same temperature as a fridge for technical reasons. As a result, most of my day was spent inside a giant bomber jacket salvaged from the family cupboard of forgotten treasures. On the really cold mornings, I would steal scarves from lost property and mummify myself inside them to stay warm.
As far as cinemas went, it was a woebegone shit hole where everything went wrong. On this particular day 2 screens had shut down, the central heating had blown up and somebody had taken a shit in one of the men’s urinals.
These were the least of my concerns. As I battled the daily torments that negligence and stupidity created, I was also fighting head office and downstairs simultaneously. I’ve always had a Batman complex, where deep inside I believe that my purpose in this life is to defend the underdogs and thwart sadistic dictators. At that juncture in my life, I had very little else to sustain me aside from the belief that the purpose of my life was to do something noble.
As the economy in London whipped everybody into a panic, high street businesses were asphyxiating on their own shit and dying – which for the most part was a good thing. The world is a better place without Woolworths.
The downside to the slow death of retail were that the survivors were chomping at the bit to survive. Like any miserable dog bashed into a corner, the only recourse was a snarling violent mess that only really damaged the bystanders.
The cinema shared a building with HMV, a horrific company that took great pleasure from belittling and abusing it’s staff. One such staff member was fired for tweeting about how much he hated his job.
I hated HMV. I hated everything about them. They represented the type of egotistical manual wanking titfucks that represented everything that was wrong with the world. Retarded dingleberries who would have been killed off by Darwinism 100 years ago somehow lubricated themselves up the rectum of the system and held onto their power with the savage despotism of Hitler. I couldn’t abide by it.
I couldn’t work for an arthouse film company that espoused bollocks about supporting the independence of the arts, and I couldn’t work for any partner company that sold Hunter S Thompson books in the foyer yet aligned themselves with the philosophy of the Nazis. Modern business in a recession had turned into some kind of 3rd world autocracy where everybody’s basic rights were sewn up by buzzwords nobody understood. ‘Bringing the company into disrepute’ ‘social networking policies’ – I was no lawyer, but none of this appeared to respect anybodies basic rights of freedom of speech and other such old fashioned values of decency.
I had intended to collect evidence of such atrocities (pictured above) and blow them out of the water. But in the end, nobody really cared. I even dated an employment right’s lawyer for a few weeks to try and get enough legal leverage to kill the fuckers. But it was not meant to be. So in the end, I destroyed a telephone. I hadn’t even intended to go down with a telephone; it was a very spur of the moment decision. It was making some kind of terrible noise (possibly ringing) so I tore it to shreds with my bare hands and got fired. I was fairly apathetic about this decision. I’d been accruing ‘fuck you’ savings since management had changed into the hands of a terrible little imp formerly from The Ivy, and I had smelt a shitstorm brewing.
So the end of this particular story is that I was the first of many people to get fired, perhaps justifiably, however I caused such a bru-ha-ha what with dating a lawyer at that time that they paid me off in order to disperse of me. I took all my money and moved to California. Without the lawyer.
Meanwhile the remaining employees at Curzon went all Hunger Games, rallied the support of the press and even got Viggo Mortensen to champion their cause of being paid next to nothing and being treated like shit. I had been a good employee for 10 years, but 10 years of shitty pay and being treated like dirt is enough to make anyone kill a telephone.
But all’s well that ends well. I’ve spent the last year on a beach in California smoking weed, and Aragorn is championing the workers at Curzon. The faggoty little imp from The Ivy who fired me was fired himself, and is now working at a gay bar in Soho, so he’s probably happier too. HMV are apparently going into administration and hopefully will burn in Hades before their shares rise again. Business will continue to ram it’s dick up the arse of the underdog, but this underdog is deep off the grid now.
I have gone into the wild.
Nomadic Desires 