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Part 1

Slithering Into the Stratosphere: A Memoir.

The first problematic catalyst in my meteoric rise into mediocrity was that I discovered the joys of drinking in the afternoon and avoiding lectures. In retrospect, missing lectures was probably when I was at my happiest. I would go and sit under a leafy tree in Kelvingrove Park, wearing a thick, knitted jumper and read books in the sun and pretend that I was literate, urbane and well-read. This was so that other students would accept me into their sacred brethren and hold me to their fluttering collective bosom. Sadly, they just ignored me and thought I was a pretentious wanker, and then proceeded to continue in their unerring orgy of snakebite and unprotected sex without even coming up for air, and rightly so.

The overall result of these seemingly pre-ordained years was a lot of lonely hangovers, a lot of staring hatefully at healthy, good-looking people and an average degree with an average degree classification (BA Ord, in case you are interested), no practical experience whatsoever, no membership of societies or clubs and no extracurricular activities, unless you count weeping, listening to Leonard Cohen, vomiting and some occasional, casual self-harming (I was such a bloody drama queen).

It now it seems almost inevitable to me that every day will be exactly the same as the last one, an exact carbon copy, a perfect repetition of the last, with the same shit daytime television programmes: I don't give a fuck if I have cash in my attic or that I can transform my living room with a few inexpensive throws and a few scatter cushions from IKEA or that I can make a claim for an accident that may have happened at home or at work, or if I was miss-sold payment protection insurance, I don't want to go compare, I don't give a shit about Meerkats. I just don't fucking care about any of this, it seems like nothing will ever change. I'm just sitting here waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen and it never will. I am so bored I want to pull out my eyeballs and throw them against a wall. I'm convinced they would make a delightful squishing sound. Nothing will ever excite or challenge me and every morning I wake up I am just one day and one more breath closer to death.

Part 2

The Great Big Celestial Conveyor Belt In The Sky

That's another thing I've been thinking a lot about lately: death. A cheery subject I know, but I can't seem to stop it from dominating my thoughts and no one else seems to want to talk about it. You see I have a lot of time on my hands, not literally time on my hands, because that is not possible and would signify some form of severe temporal anomaly and we would have to immediately call Stephen Hawking, but I'm beginning to think more and more about death on a daily basis.

Recently, I have become infinitely more aware of my own mortality. I am becoming painfully aware that one day, perhaps one day soon, I will just stop breathing and cease to exist. Boom. Dead. Game Over. No try agains and no continues: that's it. Over. Bye Bye, thanks for playing. Sorry you didn't get the chance to actually achieve anything with your life, perhaps you shouldn't have spent so much time, so many precious hours on the laptop playing computer games and looking up porn. Too late, you are gone.

Click.

Double-Click.

Why is this taking so long to load?

Game Over.

Perhaps you should have asked that guy/girl out from work, because you will never get the chance again and in a year or two she won't even remember your name, only a vague story that she once new a guy that died tragically, something about a gas leak, or a bus, or an escaped lunatic with a meat cleaver, or you tripped over your laces and hit your head on the pavement and split your head open and then you selfishly spilt your damp squishy brains all over the pavement and you totally ruined some woman's beautiful new shoes.

Or something like that, I can't really remember, I can't say that he was all that memorable, of course there was that time he got really drunk at the office Christmas party and thought he was in the toilet and then went for a piss without remembering to open his fly and then he just pissed all over himself in front of everyone: oh how we laughed! And then we instantly uploaded the photos onto Facebook with our shiny new soulless smart phones. Ah the joys of modern technology! It's the only way that we talk to each other. Doesn't it just make you want to pull out your hair and go and live in a cave? No? Just me then? Shit.

Another thing that troubles me greatly is that everyone around you is going to die one day (I promise this won't just be a list of depressing things that annoy me, I will get to the point eventually). Even the ones that you love and you think are invincible. Sadly, the people you love are mortal and finite, there is nothing physically special or unique about their physiology, they have no groundbreaking genetic resistance to this disease, although I'm sure they are delightfully lovely people, they cannot avoid death, even if they hide from it or try to run away from it, or postpone it: death eventually claims everyone. Everyone. Yes even him. And her.

And your primary school teacher that taught you how to spell and how to tell the time, in fact she was pretty old, she may already be dead, I haven't seen or heard anything about her for a while; have you? Maybe she hung herself, or stuck her head in the oven because she just couldn't stand another day of teaching ungrateful, whining children any more.

It's possible, you never know, stranger things have happened, and other clichéd remarks. Your first ever dentist that gave your first check-up and then gave you a sugar-free lollypop or a sticker and you wore it with such glowing pride because you had official verification that you had 'nice teeth', there was even a manically smiling yellow toothbrush giving you an encouraging thumbs up to prove it. Maybe he had an affair with his attractive, curvaceous temptress of a dental nurse and then his wife found out and then ran over him with the Four by Four, you never know, stranger things have happened.

The first person you ever kissed and the first person that you ever fucked. Yup. They are also going to be goners, someday. I found out recently that one of the girls I used to go to school with died recently under 'suspicious circumstances'; or that was what people said the police report said anyway. There was some story that she got involved in drugs, which inevitably led to her turning to prostitution, which inevitably led her to be being found on the bottom of the River Clyde.

Thankfully, she was all in one piece, it wasn't monsters we were dealing with, just your regular run of the mill gangsters, or something like that. The story was along those lines, I don't really remember. She wasn't even that good looking really, or notable in any way, she was just there, taking up space and using up oxygen.

She was kind of plain with mousey hair and a poor complexion, she had quite a pronounced limp if I remember correctly, but I probably don't, but I do remember that in class she barely spoke, they say it's always the quiet ones you have to watch. They are the ones that are awkward and nervous and uncoordinated and have strange marks and bruises on their legs during P.E, they are the ones who are seen inexplicably vomiting up their lunch into a bin after lunchtime, they are the ones that snap after one too many scathing, humiliating comments, they are the ones that will ram a sharpened pencil into the back of your neck (I still have the mark to prove it) when you least expect it and then they will be taken away by the Assistant Head and the Janitor and you won't see them again, until you read about them in the paper and you nearly choke on your warmed croissant and your Iced Latte from Starbucks.

Once again I seem to have got a little distracted, my most humble apologies fair reader, I beg of you a thousand pardons. Everyone you have ever met, or will meet is going to die, eventually. I'm sorry to repeat myself, I'm sorry to repeat myself, but does that not freak you out? Just a little bit? I lie for hours just sweating about this semi-profound realisation. The ones that smile a lot and come to your graduation and take photos of you and put them in ornate photo frames or the ones that you open presents with on Christmas morning, or the ones that you go to the pub with. Yup. They are all going someday.

We are all on the same celestial conveyor belt, with the same inevitable conclusion. In fact, these days I'm beginning to think that is the only thing that you can rely on, that one day you will stop breathing and then your heart will stop, maybe even a machine monitoring your vital signs will emit a screech in response to the lack of vital signs, or maybe someone will have unplugged the machine, or put a pillow over your face, or injected something noxious into your veins, who knows.

But, one day, this will happen, in some form or another and we can all expect the same result, the onset of rigor mortis and then gradual decomposition. Then we may end up encased in wood and wrapped in what looks like velvet, eternally sleeping in the ground, or if we are lucky we might be incinerated into ash and then displayed on the mantelpiece in a mid-price container and we can act as a low-scale family attraction or a depressing conversation starter at parties, which will cause people to nod sadly and look compassionate, they may even bite their lower lip and crease their eyebrows together and then say something nicely and neatly pre-packaged and predictable that they have heard concerned actors say in movies like 'I am sorry for your loss', then they like the concerned actors they are themselves, they will desperately try to change the subject: all together now 'I…AM…SORRY…FOR…YOUR…LOSS'. Well done class, medals and chocolate biscuits all round. I genuinely just had a vision of myself with a conductor's baton at the front of a class of admiring students. I am a borderline megalomaniac, in fact it may not even be borderline, with severe delusions of grandeur, so please don't listen to a word I say.

To get back to the topic in hand, I'm sorry to break it to you, but they are all going to die too, one day, one day in the future, or maybe tomorrow, so you had better tell them you love them now, just to make sure that they know. In fact go and do it now, no really, on you go, I insist, I don't mind waiting.

You didn't do it, did you? You just kept on reading and you weren't sure if I was being serious or not. There will be plenty time for that tomorrow, or another day, we hope. That's OK, I probably wouldn't have done it either; I hate this kind of touchy feely, proselytizing bullshit, just get to the fucking point. So let's all go paint a rainbow and hold hands in flawless harmony and pretend everything is lovely and perfect in the world. Please, pass the valium and lets go back to sleep.

Honestly, I'm not intentionally trying to depress you or be overbearingly nihilistic, because I'm not even really sure what that means. I think my point, if I have one at all, is that we just can't really know or predict what is going to happen tomorrow, or ever, so I guess in a twisted way, I intend these affected affirmations and half-baked averments to be life-affirming.

In the sense that you should maybe do these things before you can't, before you stop breathing and your heart ceases to beat and you will never have the chance to say these things again because you are interred in the cold ground or encased in a smudged gold-plated urn, in dire need of a spit and polish. Just so that you don't have regrets, because I have many of them and they will follow you around, creeping and tiptoeing just over your shoulder and they will whisper horrible things in your ear when it gets dark and you are alone.

So please, if even for your own sake and your own peace of mind, go and tell them you love them, please. You still didn't do it, did you? That's OK, I can't force you to, I wouldn't do it either; it's a stupid hippy, tree hugging idea anyway. But, well done if you did, I'm sure you will feel better for it, now that they know. I don't mean to preach to you or anything, because after all what do I know?

I'm a total hypocrite and I can't even begin to conceive of what real suffering feels like and I don't do the things I am suggesting, so why should you? You absolutely don't have to do anything I say, I can't force you, no one can and I certainly don't want to coerce you or persuade you or guilt trip you into doing something you don't want to do, in fact, on second thought, it's probably better that you don't, since I have already admitted on numerous occasions that I don't know what I'm talking about. Just ignore me ranting on and on about nothing, throw your laptop against a wall and go and do something worthwhile, go take a walk in the sunshine, or play football with your children in the garden surrounded by honeysuckle and a white picket fence, please, be my guest, you will feel better for it.

The people you love may even possibly check out before you make the big jump into holy hyperspace. That is a really freaky thought. I must apologise, I'm not intentionally trying to be morbid, these are just things that I think about and the things that stop me from sleeping at night and the things that make me think FUCK, I'm wasting my life, why am I even typing this? What am I doing? I should be out in a sun-drenched meadow with a beautiful (or as beautiful as I can find that will have me) girl in a flowing cotton summer dress, putting daisies in her hair and I should be singing to her and climbing mountains and looking at happy cows and then building a big fire and dancing around it and then falling asleep in her warm embrace under the infinite, hanging heavens.

But I'm not. I'm sitting here in front of a glowing laptop, wasting your time.

Am I really the only one that thinks about these things and becomes completely and utterly terrified? Really? Am I? Shit. Maybe I should just be locked up or put in a convalescence home or something, maybe they could put me down like the family dog that has been run over by a truck and left to die, bleeding worthless and alone.