3) Beam Me Up, 2010
2008-2010 was rough. I take custody of my brother in 2008 after my mother moves out to the other side of the country, the idea being that he can finish his final two years at the same school without too much upheaval. He can't go that wild, surely, and I'll be about, and what's the worst that can happen? Apart from, of course, you leave an 20 yr old to look after a 16 yr old, and the 20 yr old is at uni all day and working nights in a shop to help pay the bills, so the 16 yr is left to his own devices and gets massively into drinking, drugs, gambling and spending days watching endless repeats of Friends on E4. I spend my uni funding on rent, I come home daily to find he's skipped school to get stoned, and from Friday night to Sunday morning our house looks like the set of Skins. I'm trying to parent someone who doesn't want it and I'm trying to be a flatmate to someone who isn't old enough for the social responsiblity. Him and all his friends are constantly getting deliveries of plant food to the house and what I see of it isn't fun at all - they're aggressive, arrogant, volatile and never know when to stop, so there's a few scary situations. I'm not going out as much as I would like because I'm responsible and there's no chance I'm escaping our small provincial town when I've got the guilt from all angles being piled on me about doing the right thing by my brother. I'm hardly drinking, still not trying anything else: how can I tell him to behave if I'm not doing it myself?
I graduate in 2009, a 2:1 in English joined with Journalism & Creative Writing. The whole project feels like a waste of time. The English side of it is boring outside of post-modernism classes, and the journalism side is having the concept of a blog repeatedly explained with "in conclusion the internet is going to change journalism" essays, and the creative writing side is mostly peer assessment. I skip all my dissertation supervisions because I haven't done any work because I'm working 24 hrs a week on top of uni, and yet my 10,000 word submission on feminism in techno gets me the best mark I've ever had at uni. I go to Grad Ball and a classmate brings over some friends who've never met a gay man, they ask stupid questions about do I find my own dick arousing and I wonder why I bothered trying to take myself seriously if nobody ever was going to.
By 2010 I'm no longer interested in newspaper journalism, and music writing already feels like a door closed to me, I don't have time to maintain a blog or the confidence to pitch. I'm working all hours in my retail job, and still trying to monitor my brother who by this point still isn't acting any more rationally. Meanwhile my classmates are getting jobs with newspapers or moving into postgrads. I go to the doctor and get prescribed six months of fluoxetine, and I try to sort myself out by going sober the entire time. It works, kinda, and in September I get invited with some uni mates I'm still friends with to go visit one of them who is working in Paris.
Paris is great. We go for four days and thanks to the ash cloud we stay for six. I have an awkward yet thrilling holiday romance with a colleague of the friend we stay with. We drink wine and eat baguettes and take a boat cruise down the river. I look the best I've ever looked in my life and I've somehow saved enough money that the trip is properly enjoyable, none of this watch-your-pennies fear that blights adult holidays. Everyone looks glamorous and chic, it's like a fantasy retreat from real life which isn't going anywhere nearly as well as it should.
We go to a club on the last night and they're playing r&b and disco. Deep cuts from Beyonce's first albums, Shola Ama in non-remix form, the Cher version of Take Me Home, and this. One of the great things about disco is that it has an in-built sense of hedonism - not just its historical context that you get from knowing about Paradise Garage and Studio 54, but it's inherent sense of groove and decadence. This sounds luxurious and rich and strident in a way that my everyday life was completely lacking. Of course, I knew this song from keeping up with the nu-disco revival in magazines and mixes, but nobody else did on that dancefloor, yet everyone ended up singing along to the hook halfway through. Dancefloors are places of escape - and for a night it was exactly what I needed.
