Conveniently Cocaine Jesus has seen fit to 'tag' me. I'll be frank - there is something about participating in this which makes me shudder, feels degenerative, reminds of what it means to be a teenager, but also reminds me that even this blogging nonsense can be snobbish. However, it's convenient as I should post and perhaps won't get Fucking in the toilets of the Zoological Museum to you this weekend - then again I might write and paste it in tomorrow. So, I've been placed with the task of writing eight facts about RuKsaK. Instead I'm going to write them about me, Paul. This is, naturally, an opportunity to be as pretentious as I like - and I do like.
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First of all, on a philosophical level, I'm genuinely not sure there are eight facts about me. I'm not even all together convinced there are any. It goes one of two ways for me - there are no facts about me, or there are trillions upon trillions - enough to make the star count of the universe seem like a handful. So, that makes my job easy - I can write whatever the fuck I like.
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1. I've been arrested half a dozen times. Those range from being eight-years-old and creeping into the back entrance of a shop to steal off with a box of twenty-four chocolate bars to drunken violence which I barely remember to being without correct permits in Moscow. I know what a cell is like as a result, but I don't know how it is to spend more than twelve hours in one.
2. I've enjoyed sex since roughly three years before losing my virginity. In many ways I consider those 2am spillages of sperm into my slightly pre-teen pyjamas the start of my life. Before it I was the tadpole. Wet dreams turned me into a frog - or a toad is perhaps more appropriate. If I live for another hundred years, the most amount of time I spent not thinking about sex will remain in the first eleven years of my life.
3. I lost my virginity - which is not essentially the same as having sex the first time - so, I mean my hard penis was inside a vagina for the first time (say what you will about my definition of losing virginity, but it's the one I, and most of the world, is sticking to) anyway, I lost it outside, in the grandstand of a disused football field at 2am in the morning. I was seventeen and it was my mother's birthday. Believe it or not, but my daughter, my first child, was born seventeen years later on exactly the same date. I'm not a numerology fan, but it's figure that haunts me.
4. The girl I lost my virginity to died in a motorcycle crash roughly ten days after dumping me. It ate my insides from within, like I was being microwaved. I still think about her, but don't love her any more. As a person who collects stories she's become one of favourite acquisitions. She is to me what a gold-plated pig is to a collector of pigs. That's as brutally honest as I can be - so brutal it's not so honest after all. I believe it's what professionals call a coping mechanism.
5. I'm married and I have two children. This fills me with as much joy as it terrifies me. I consider this balance not only incredibly healthy, but intrinsically appropriate to being. My love for my family is strong enough to convince me I never loved anyone or anything else. A strong love lays waste to previous affections.
6. I am afraid of birds. I dislike insects, but birds make me afraid. I have told myself this stems from killing a nest of new born chicks by flipping them onto the floor from a bush and dropping bricks on them. They were crying for their mother and had no feathers or even fluff yet - they looked like pockets of skin with twigs stuffed sewn them. I have no idea why I did it, but I aged several years during the ten minutes it took. I'm still sorry.
7. The only time I ever felt something more than tolerance for my father was when he was returning a library book. I asked him where he was going and he told me he was taking the book back and that it had been a good read. It was by Clive Barker and I'd been reading Dostoyevsky in the adjacent armchair recently. He looked kind of meek and ashamed. Other than this moment, our entire forty years together have swung from outright distaste for one another to a bearable tolerance - identifiable by the mediocre, incredibly safe conversations we have.
8. I would live in a cage stuffed with birds to alleviate my fear of death. I think about it daily and ultimately it's an obsession which will eclipse the one for sex. In fact, it will not eclipse it like the moon gently glides in front of the sun. It will devour it like a mangy dog gnawing on an old bone. Sex and death are the most ancient of enemies.
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There you go. I'm now told I have to do this for eight people. Here they are:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My father
The girl I lost my virginity to
The four birds I killed in that nest
The boy who grew into me
The number seventeen
The grim reaper
Me again
If you are not in the list above, feel free to do the same. It'll make me fell less like my father walking to the library that day if you do. Thank you.
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PS - there is now a photo on RuKsaK photos for the first time this year - as crap as ever, just the way I like my photos.
