How To Make Enemies And Hate People
“So we cannot know ourselves or what we’d really do with all your power…”
The train journey hadn’t been the problem. Sure it had been long… And awkward… And I’d had what could be generously described as a sackful of ‘living essentials’ to drag round everywhere I went. But a train is by its very nature a very simple thing to use. You get on it, you wait, you get off. Anything else, such as delay or explosions, is blissfully someone else’s problem. “Train caught fire you say? Well have fun with that, in the meantime I’ll just continue to sit here and try to remember that I need to change at Stockport… Stockport was two stops ago you say? Fuckbox…”
The train journey hadn’t been the problem. The problem was simple logistics: Trains rarely stop at the exact destination you need to be. Hence the period between station and destination… That was the problem. The map didn’t help. It had obviously been made by someone who assumed that they knew the area of Salford and had been given an explanation of what the concept of a map should be… An explanation they seemingly didn’t understand. If the map was a person then it was the sort of person that when faced with something that they had failed to mention, say a pathway or a road, would give you a reproachful look and say “well of course there’s a pathway there, I mean it’s been there since the War… Everyone knows that path’s there.”
I tried explaining to the map that I obviously didn’t know that the pathway was there because I’d never been there before, but I then realised I was drawing unnecessary attention to myself so I sharply cut-off my reprimand mid-sentence and settled for fixing the map a look that suggested it should think about what it had done… And it should think it long and hard.
Finally, after nearly an hour of wandering around darkest Salford with a laptop in my hand and a sackful of miscellaneous junk now surgically attached to my back, I had arrived at Castle Greyskull… I had arrived at University.
I looked enviously at all the students who had been driven from their respective homes by their respective parents. I decided I needed to have a talk with my own parents about the art of fine parenting. Leaving me to haul my things to Uni myself while they decided to drive up the rest of my belongings the next day would definitely fall under the column marked “BAD”. The main question now went something along the lines of: ‘What the fuck do I do now?’ The general consensus from everyone else was that I should be making my way to the back of a line and wait to enter a small room near the entrance of the complex. Now, while I may not be Jewish, I can’t say I’ve ever trusted long lines that lead into small unmarked buildings. Still, people seemed to be coming out of this one and enough people were giving me strange looks already because I’d just realised I could have saved 20 minutes off my journey if I’d travelled down a different road and was once again shouting at the map.
Looking back now, I don’t think that I was suitably in awe of what the building did contain.
They say that first impressions are the most important. This is bollocks. In all but the most extreme cases your first impression is completely misguided. The extreme case in which it isn’t however makes up the first Case Study of my first student home. Chris Street was ugly. Deformed ugly. By the time he arrived in our house, there was already a crowd of us in the kitchen attempting to get to know each other (by a process that would later be developed into the standard way employed by Salford students to get to know other Salford students: What course are you doing? What year are you in? Don’t you think are Union bar is a crock of shit?) We all naturally assumed that Chris had Down’s Syndrome and the girl that was with him was his SCOPE volunteer. However he didn’t have Down’s Syndrome… He was just ugly. Naturally my first impression was one of dislike. And this was the correct impression to make… Years of being freakishly ugly probably has the effect of twisting a man’s soul until he is just a hard shell of humanity with a rich, deformed, chocolaty centre. Castle Greyskull had an intercom system linking all of the phones together. One of the first nights there he would call my phone, wait till I answered and then hang up. It was obvious it was him because he found it hilarious and the walls weren’t that thick. Unfortunately stupid people never think their evil schemes through and so he found himself scuppered when I unplugged the phone. Poor kid didn’t think to do the same thing when I set my modem up to phone him every hour throughout the night.
But that was the future. I hadn’t yet entered the building. I was still stood waiting in line.
When you live with someone for a year, your first impression is almost always rendered obsolete. Take case study two: Dan Penson. Once I arrived in House 49, my first year lodgings, he was the first person I met. As we struck up a conversation my first impression was positive. When I remember Penson now my impression is one of a stupid cockney knobhead who does nothing but sit in a room quoting random bits of Family Guy and then giggling like a twat, not of someone I once had a conversation with that didn’t result in me wanting to punch him. The same can be said about Fitz’s first impression of Karl Unwin, which was proven to be very misguided after the phrase “you could get shot for that where I come from” got driven into the ground (which didn’t take long.)
I knew none of this yet. The line outside the building had shrunk and I was now inside of it and not treating the surroundings with the reverence they may have deserved.
Eventually Karl would get forced upon me and James. After a couple of weeks everyone disperses out into groups. For a while our group was me, James and Karl. We would sit around and discuss important topics about current affairs, the nature of the Universe and whether Airwolf was better than Knight Rider or Thunder In Paradise. Actually most of the year was spent smoking drugs, watching M*A*S*H and throwing Chris’ plates down the rather large set of stairs. Eventually though, we called Karl into my room, thanked him for the effort he made in being our friend, wished him well in his search for future friendship opportunities and told him that Thunder In Paradise was simply the wrong answer.
I’d not met Karl yet though… Or James. What I had done was reached the front of the line. I was given a set of keys to House 49. I was given the keys to that particular house purely on the basis of chronology. If I’d have taken that road and saved 20 minutes in getting to Uni my life would have been completely different. If I’d not had harsh words with the map that had led me astray my life would have been completely different. Your life would be different too, because you wouldn’t have been reading this. In fact you might have done something productive like cure cancer. In fact I want you to stop reading this now and not come back until you’ve cured cancer. I’m not having the thousands of people dying from tumours resting on my head just because you’re too lazy to sort it out. Still, there would almost be something deep and meaningful about this fact if I weren’t so inclined to tell the Universe and its infinite probabilities of chance and fate to just get over itself. I mean that is no way to run a place. Imagine if you went to hospital needing a kidney transplant only to be told that kidney transplants were half an hour ago and now it’s the turn of appendectomies and if you want a new kidney you’ll have to wait three days. Actually that’s not far off how hospitals are run.
And so in this quagmire of fate and chance, how was it that me and Fitz decided to share a flat over the coming years? Well, we got pissed in a pub somewhere and just decided to do it without really thinking it through…
Meandering: Phil
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~ by Octaeder on March 14, 2006.
Posted in Stories From: House 34
