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Indeed. For as it is, the thing surpasseth Human Understanding. How many Philosophy students has Locke so far forced to throw their hands in the air with bitter imprecations before wandering off to join the Army?

And supposedly he wrote in simple, clear, easy to understand prose! Surely no functionally illiterate 1st year Physics student abuses the comma like Locke. He should have been drowned in a vat of his own unnecessary commas.

“Reader, I here put into thy hands, what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours: if it has the good luck to prove so any of thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading, as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed. Mistake not this, for a commendation of my work; nor conclude, because I was pleased with the doing of it, that therefore I am fondly taken with it now it is done.”

Quite. That’s merely the introduction… believe that it gets infinitely worse. The time is nigh… the essay is due. My essay, that is, “An Essay Concerning An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”. Perhaps the punctuation will come out in the wash.

“Don’t do the whistling, pal,” he snapped. “I don’t like the whistling. I’ll take you outside and leather you.”

Whoo. Welcome to Glasgow city centre. As he lumbered away a pimpled sales assistant regarded us with bovine bewilderment. I can only imagine the bizarre relationship he conjectured between the Raincoat Mafioso and I.

I was not particularly taken aback, myself. Incidents like these are common when you live in the thick of things, as it were. Roughly 27% of people in the UK “think that people deliberately try to irritate them”. [1] Many of these people are to be found stumping suspiciously around the city centre of Glasgow, mumbling to themselves and eyeing strangers under beetle brows. (That is, their eyes are under beetle brows, the strangers are not crouched under beetle brows. That would indeed be genuine reason for paranoia.)

Statistics aside, the place is teeming with violent Freaks and Weirdos of all descriptions. If one wants to fund organised crime, all one need do is linger in the streets after dark. Soon enough, someone will be along to relieve you of your wallet. It’s no trouble at all.

The more worrying contingent of the Dangerously Insane are those to whom money is no object. I have lived in several major cities, but Glasgow is the only one where it’s likely that someone will stab or beat you for no apparent reason at all. The joy of the brawl is often an end in itself… which is naievely beautiful, in a way. Good clean fun, none of your filthy lucre. Mano a mano, the thrill of the thing… fisticuffs as an art-form.

There is a philosophy that asks, “how much can you really know about yourself if you have never been in a fight?” Which is very possibly an excellent question… but self-knowledge is cold comfort if most of what you know involves your broken ribs and cracked kidneys.

Story after the jump:

The thing about living in America, besides the Superbowl and Thanksgiving and all that other crap… is the certain knowledge that statistically you are bound to rub up against the Second Amendment sooner or later. The Second Amendment is a short sentence with a long history of debate and litigation, but in a nutshell it highlights the need for “a well regulated militia” and “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”. I don’t pretend to know much about well regulated militias, but I know all about the second part.

It will be a cold day in Hell when the Second Amendment is junked – too many people have too much at stake, and it allows for some very big business. It was a cold day in Michigan when I had my own particular personal experience of the fruits of that wonderfully twisted piece of legislation.

It was a cold day, and the sun was crushed by a harsh expanse of hard blue sky, painful to look at. The sidewalks were solid as diamond underfoot, and here and there the glint of black ice. I was walking through an area of Detroit that the VisitDetroit people would have you believe no longer exists. Maybe one house in three had windows instead of plywood or trash bags… because as a rule Drug Dealers don’t require much light to work by, and windows are for faces to look in at.

I was on my way to the nearby Homeless Shelter, where I had a voluntary position as General Food and Clothing Dispenser, an often dangerous and intimidating position for a short white kid to hold. There are only so many arguments you can present to a seven by four foot black man, with a crazy glint in his eye and visible halitosis, as he tries to rip you off for an entire box of sports socks. Things start to turn ugly very soon, and if you don’t keep between him and the door you might as well forget getting out of there without at least a stab-wound or two.

I was walking fast… although the area had a certain picturesque “crack-haven” appeal, I was pretty certain that it wasn’t somewhere to linger. I walked this route just about every day, and I had a nasty suspicion that the odds were mounting against me. I usually took the precaution of carrying a $5 dollar bill in my pocket, it being the case that if you claimed to have no money on you at all, a mugger would roll you just to make sure. For sure, police response times were supposedly fast in this area, but that necessitates someone actually informing the police. I wasn’t confident that anyone apart from me would really want to go out on a limb and bring the cops into this neighbourhood. Hell, I wasn’t sure that the cops themselves would want to venture into the area without waiting for at least a tank as backup.

I turned a corner and saw nothing particularly out of the ordinary. A row of battered cars, “hoopties”, probably personally commissioned by Henry Ford himself. A large man staggering in the middle of the road, smacked out on his drug of choice. Another shitty, depressing street in inner-city Detroit. I started up it, walking with the recommended “potentially hazardous situation” walk: shoulders squared, eyes in the middle distance, a walk with purpose.

As I came towards the man in the street he stopped his mumbling and brought his red eyes to bear on me. Shit. Keep walking. He slouched over to the sidewalk and stood there swaying a little, staring at me silently. I slowed up… what was there to do? It would look really pointed now if I crossed the street. I tried to pass between his villainous bulk and one of the cars which angled up on the sidewalk where someone had parked in a hurry, or maybe too messed up to have any depth-perception left.

Suddenly he erupted into movement, blocking me with a swift sidestep that belied his bulk. He started crooning in a disturbing falsetto, “Yo honkey, I know you got some money for me, you gotta help me out man, gimme some, gimme some…” I didn’t trust my voice not to crack, so I silently pulled the five from my back pocket and handed it over… he let it drop to the sidewalk without even looking at it, still staring at someplace above my eyes. He was too far along the Night Train to be satisfied with mere pocket-change. His particular trip required something special… wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He didn’t want one pair of sports socks, he wanted an entire clothing line.

“C’mon honkey, don’t gimme that shit… I know you got more than that…” He was starting to get louder and whinier. I wasn’t feeling great about the whole situation, I didn’t have a backup plan if the $5 didn’t cut it.

“I-I-I don’t have any more money, bro…” I stammered. Calling a black man “bro”” is only wise if you are, in fact, a brother. They do not see it as a sign of solidarity. To them, it is demeaning… and in America just about the last thing you want to do is demean a black man. To my extreme relief, he didn’’t seem to notice. I was only relieved for a very short while.

He reached inside his coat and pulled out The Gun. Holy Shit. That’s what a gun looks like up close. I hadn’t actually seen one this close before. He waved it in my face slowly, letting me catch every detail of its shit-crusted exterior. “Why you gotta play with me man? You want I should just pop you? Huh? Huh?”

Just about the only thing I was glad of, at this point, was that I’d gone to the bathroom before I came out. I shook my head slowly… I was deeply confused and uncertain. There were no precedents in my sheltered life for this eventuality. It was not as glamorous as one might have expected. The idea of being “popped”” was no longer as amusing as it had seemed back in Scotland. We stood there looking at each other, out of options.

It was then that something entirely wonderful happened, from my perspective at least. The moment shifted, the demons inside his head collided, and he lost interest. Just like that. A light went off behind his eyes, and he focused behind me and lumbered past slowly, muttering to himself under his breath. I headed in the opposite direction at Olympian speed.

There are many illusions on the street. For a moment, as I had stared at him, he was a God… he had the power of life and death. Chances were that the gun wasn’’t even loaded, but the illusion was the thing. This is what the second amendment boils down to, and to a certain extent the illusion of power is the defining characteristic of being American… “I’m an American citizen! You can’t arrest me! I pay my goddamned taxes!”

I don’t expect that the gunman had paid much taxes in a while, but for a while he was the Big Man. Might is Right, in the jungle and on the international political stage. Two weeks later I was sorting underwear and wondering why anyone would donate a thong to a homeless shelter when he stumbled in the door. Our roles were reversed. As I kitted him out with the regulation allotment of pants, shirts and sundries I wondered if he would recognise me. I was a little nervous… for the moment the power balance was in my favour, but it could change in a second. I held the underwear, but he could easily trump that with his firearm.

I was lucky. He didn’t appear to have any recollection of our little incident. I watched him warily as he left with his bag of goodies. I was safe, for the moment. I never saw him again, as it happened… but he left an indelible mark on my psyche. I was not scarred by Fear, because the whole thing was too remote from everyday life for memory to be triggered. Besides, I came out on top, in a sense. $5 is a very cheap price to pay for a quick jolt of that kind of adrenaline rush.

No, the mark he left was subtler, but deeper. My natural buoyancy, the sense of control and superiority that I pampered, was tempered by the realisation of how quickly power can change hands. Sure, I was on my way up, and he was on his way down… but it would be foolish to assume that this was a constant. There are no constants, especially where the second amendment is concerned. An idiot, or a dangerously crazy bum, can kill you stone dead whilst suffering from illusions of power…… and the only way to avoid this is to keep a clear head, and have no illusions yourself. Even this may not save you, in the final clinches, but at least you will know what is happening to you.

I have always seen myself as one of the lucky ones. I was lucky then, but I learned my lessons. One of these was “Don’t Expect To Walk Around The Ghetto And Not Get Shot,” but the other was far more important and timelessly relevant. You never know what the other man has in his pocket, and you should never assume that you and your well-being are just as important to him as they are to you. This does not mean “trust no one,” but it does mean that you should know exactly who you are dealing with at all times, to the best of your ability. If you must make assumptions, let one of them be that everyone has some kind of gun in their pocket.

“Your jacket, man.”

“What?”

“Your jacket, open your jacket.”

“Why?”

“I need to search you, man.”

This, apparently, is default entry procedure for the Cell, a small pub/club in the south side of Glasgow. “It’s for your own protection,” the bouncer told me as he ran his hands down my sides in a clearly perfunctory fashion. Conservatively speaking, I would have had to have been hiding at least an AK-47 under my jacket for him to notice. One ponders.

And then one gets inside, and it becomes a little clearer. It would take at least a couple of magazines to make this place bearable. If one had a smaller gun, say a Glock 9mm, (or if one were feeling ironic, a vintage Luger) you wouldn’t be able to get off more than a couple of shots before the beasts were all over you.

The Cell on a Friday night is teeming with human detritus, curious monuments to how far the race can degrade given the right combination of genes. Great hulking jellies of testosterone poured into popped-collar polo-shirts lumber around the floor, eyes dully gleaming deep in their cro-magnon foreheads. The linoleum is slick with their drool. They hunt in herds of anything from 2 to 8. If one listens carefully, under the pounding beat of the music one can hear their livers sob. Their poor abused livers.

This is fairly standard for Glasgow clubs, as are the… women that jerk around the place. Nauseau-inducing expanses of shivering orange flesh, they gyrate woodenly to the music, in some vague approximation of rhythm. Some callous swine somewhere must have told them that it was an attractive sight. They also move in packs.

The whole experience is definitely predatory. This is not a comfort zone. It only gets worse when one ventures to the bathroom. This is presided over by a tall African man, who has a whole arsenal of deodourants and creams laid out beside the washbasin. I had to wait about 5 minutes to wash my hands, as a mildly cretinous gentleman alternately jabbered at the attendant and preened himself. I might have told him that it was a lost cause, but he looked dangerously unsettled. At any rate, who can tell what attracts the members of the opposite sex that frequent the Cell? I spurned the make-up and aftershave and left as soon as I could.

Back in the main body of the club, there was a fight taking place. Possibly some territory issue. I sought refuge outside, thinking a cigarette in the cold air might clear my head and reinvigorate my trampled senses. I was horribly wrong. The smoking area was full of a true cross-section of those inside, and not only that, their conversations were now audible. These people lead horrifying lives, “murder and all-bran, and rape.” I felt like an interloper on a vast sub-strata of society, bubbling under the surface.

It was time to quit the Cell for good.

Imagine staying in a hotel where the staff are rude, there is no bar, there is no cleaning service and the other guests are generally noisy, intoxicated and cretinous.

Welcome to Student Halls of Residence.

I wonder if the guy in the room next to me is bulimic. He makes vomiting noises once or twice a day. It’s deeply unsettling, especially late at night.

I wonder what all the emotional shouting matches that my flatmates have are about.

Living in Halls often fills me with blind rage. I wouldn’t mind that my flatmates play music so loud, except that their taste is viciously corrupt.

Why must they make so much noise? Why, Lord? Why must they torment me with their sickening idiocy?

There’s an ice cream van that comes around some nights. It’s sinister, hearing the fairground music so loud under your window. They must be selling drugs. This is not ice cream weather.

A random selection of the nonsense contained within this… thing that I’ve written:

The defamiliarisation of the regular day to day events, as simple as eating, or excreting, allows Amis to showcase the human ability to adapt to new situations. Morally speaking, this functions almost as an indictment of the laxity of human adherence to standard morality.

Yessuh, them’s sure some fancy words… pity they don’t make sense in that particular order.

“In Time’s Arrow, Amis combines a post-modern use of narrative defamiliarisation with an insistence on the need for moral vision”. By what means and to what effect does the text attempt to achieve this combination?

Say what, Jack? I’ve read the book, and it appears to me that… well… this question doesn’t make sense. If anything, I’d say that “the post-modern use of narrative defamiliarisation allows Amis to explore his particular brand of moral vision”. The narr. defam. isn’t an end in itself, which is what the question seems to suggest.

How do I handle that one, eh? Well, I think I’ll just type down any old rubbish that comes to mind have to try to answer the question faithfully. 2000 words… a race against time. The thrill and excitement of the deadline. Powerful, lifechanging stuff.

Is it Christmas time? No. Someone has messed up. The wires are crossed. The “commercialisation of Christmas” doesn’t bother me, insofar as it means that I get stuff. It would be plain foolish to deny that the accumulation of “stuff”, whilst not my primary aim in life, is one of my favourite hobbies. Everyone likes “stuff”.

No, I don’t mind that at all. But what kind of warped calendar are these people working on? Christmas does not begin on the 30th of November. Since Sextus Julius Africanus published that jolly little pamphlet Chronographiaia in 221AD, it’s been the 25th of December. Who are these illiterate tinsel-sniffers to argue with Sextus?

Let’s look at the pros and cons of this particular tree.

Pro:

• They’ve gone slightly further in their dubious justification of the obscene cost of living here.

Con:

• It looks like a prepackaged piece of trash.
• Its position means that its impossible to make any shots from about a 30 degree radius round the pool table.
• There are no presents under it.

I can’t actually see much thought to it. It looks terrible. Is it there to remind us that Christmas is coming? People in solitary confinement with nothing but a bit of chalk could have worked that out for themselves.

I’d prefer that they wasted my money in better ways than erecting meaningless symbols. They sure as hell aren’t celebrating the birth of Christ, and I don’t notice a big movement back to Saturnalia either. If it is a pagan religion type thing, then I’d far rather see some sacrifices. Ritualised bloodletting would be preferable to (and far more exciting than) this shoddily decorated concession to blind tradition.

I think it was put there by the same people who manhandled a new fridge into my flat at about 6am this morning, cursing and farting. I’m out of sync with these pigs. This entire building has a very poor spirit. The staff are disgruntled drones who clearly despise students, and the residents are bland and uninteresting, traits which skyrocket with every sip of poof-juice they ingest on their nightly revels.

Damn it, let them have their tree… but I want my share of whatever it cost to install the thing.

The beauty of the deadline is that it forces you to choose an ending. Endings are the hardest things to write… possibly because they are never really endings, after all, merely convenient exit points. A story has its characters, and they will live an infinite amount of time after you have written them. If a character is purely conceptualised, even in the most wooly tangent, life has been breathed into them. An essay is merely a tiny mouthful of the ocean of material, an ocean which is increased by the essay, and which will continue to grow indefinitely after the essay has been printed. The sum of all knowledge, in other words, is like a constantly spreading cancer, feeding on itself. It is impossible to kill anything, in the wider sense. If one could remove something completely from existence, erasing all trace of its past, present and future… then nothing would have been removed.

Confused ramblings indeed… the approximation of wisdom. Seemingly unneccessary tangents make up a good deal of University, and are the key to a happy career in procrastination. Which brings me back to deadlines.

I understand from the vague correspondence that I received the other day that an assignment due later today has had its deadline put back to sometime in December because its wordcount had been slightly increased. Reading between the lines tells me that this decision was a result of the recent Student-Staff liason meeting. Upon further investigation I discovered that one student had spoken to the student liason, asking him to bring it up in the meeting. It could be argued that “one student” wouldn’t exactly comprise a massive population in any kind of student opinion survey.

The thing that bothered me was the fact that someone actually cared enough about the extra two weeks to mention it. It’s just plain aggravating that someone will actually use those 14 days… and then get a mediocre mark. From what I can see, people that spend four weeks on an essay generally tend to get the same marks as people who do it the night before. Why is this? It seems unfair.

That’s the thing about the deadline thing… in the real world deadlines can never be put back like that. You can’t ask people to put back deadlines just because you “don’t think it’s fair”. The only way to evade deadlines and still get paid is to do it completely brazenly… and this will work seldom, if ever. What are we learning here?

We’re learning that lecturers cater for the lowest intelligence percentile in the class. We’re learning that hard work counts for nothing. That life, like the lecturer, wants you to “pass”. That one persons opinion can change the fate of an entire class.

Well, apart from the latter, none of these are helpful lessons. The latter is only helpful in a sort of “inspirational poster” way.

The thing which we might learn if we thought about anything other than grades and drink and sex and Eastenders is the most important of all… People have an ingrained sense of something being either “fair” or “unfair”. University is supposed to be when one is at one’s most open-minded and receptive of new ideas… and yet the vast majority of students refuse to even try to account for the fact that they have an inbuilt system of morality, or “fairness”. The few attempts at explaining this, without being completely un-pc and accepting that there may be some kind of Higher Power, are laughable byproducts of half-understood pop-philosophical crap. If I had the mental stamina, I would try and detail the main ones, but to be frank it would pain me.

The problem with refusing to think on an elevated level is that this is the one Question for which there is a Final Deadline. This is the only deadline that we need fear. The Great Scorer may or may not increase your personal deadline… but for that to happen you need at least to give the question some thought. Your deadline could be in five minutes… there is no time for procrastination.