But soon a reliable source informed me that after a hard day of wiping their bottoms with £50 notes atop platinum-plated shitters, many city boys retire to vast, vapid bars on the edges of the Square Mile, London’s old financial hub, to watch sport. So off I went to watch football at the Barracuda Bar on Houndsditch.
As I strolled purposefully, some bike couriers near Aldgate looked at me like I was off to sell shares of a company that makes tainted baby food to rich, trusting widows. And I soon learned that the Barracuda is a South African bar. By halftime it was too much to bear.
THURSDAY
Today I realised that since I’ve been dressing up like a fop, I haven’t taken the time to enjoy music—not on my iPod, not at work, not even at home. I hadn’t even noticed. My theory is that this suit is sapping my ability to feel joy.
By early afternoon I needed a good meal, and being a modern man of means I opted for the exotic and worldly delicacy known as Oriental fusion. I thought it would be prudent to bone up on my “Eastern culture” now that the Chinese are set to rule the world. I know this because the articles in my new daily read, the Financial Times, have been hinting at it quite a lot.
By the time I had finished my lunch it was about 4 PM, and I contemplated heading back to work. But I was pooped. Instead I went to a fancy bar to relax, sip on a couple Rémy Martins, and enjoy a choice variety of D’Angelo tracks. I can’t drink too much brandy—it makes me gag—so I switched to whiskey, which makes me retch slightly less.
No one spoke to me, even though I was wearing the right stuff. I think I might have been missing the lingo. I found myself contemplating the logistics of jamming a portfolio of mergers and acquisitions up one of their arses.
The truly prosperous must be in tip-top condition so they don’t tire from fucking over as many proles as possible. With this in mind, I trotted along to an upmarket gym for a game of squash. I was feeling pretty sozzled, but no one likes a quitter, so I staggered through 45 minutes of painful degradation.
I tried to smoke another cigar after the match to regain some poise, but it made my oesophagus feel as if I’d been fellating exhaust pipes all day. I went home drunk, unwell, and unhappy
FRIDAY
This morning I felt like a gold-leafed piece of shit. My diet of overrich food, cigars, brandy, and beer top-ups was clearly taking its toll. In an attempt to repair my discouraged body, I ordered some sushi for lunch. I ate it on the street, which was not very dignified, but I had a cigar for dessert. This time it got my head straight.
Disappointed with my lunch, I went to the city boy’s favourite retreat—the titty bar. Talking to girls makes me nervous, so strip clubs are something I have studiously avoided until now. But being an abuser of the weak and a champion of the commercial means paying to look at a vagina (and maybe even a butthole) or two on a Friday afternoon.
The Griffin is one of those pound-in-a-pint-glass sorts of places. Mixed in wonderfully among the motocross and snowboarding displayed on numerous massive screens via obscure Sky channels, surprisingly attractive girls disrobed to a Nickelback soundtrack. During one awkward silence I heard the blokes next to me say, “As far as sports go later in life, cricket really is the only option.” Unless it was a metaphor I didn’t catch, these guys didn’t have much use for naked woman gyrating to awful music. Turns out I didn’t either, so I went home and felt relief wash over me like a bucket of cheap lager.
Now that my time as a city boy was over, I loosened my cotton yoke and tended to my blisters, all the while gorging on free-trade biscuits and tofu. Being a capitalist pig is far too much work.
ANARCHIST DIARY
BY JAMES KNIGHT, PHOTOS BY JAMIE LEE CURTI S TAETE AND MICHAEL OTERO
MONDAY
Everyone knows that no true anarchist would live in a place where you pay for things like hot water, electricity, and slaves of the state to come and take away the bins. Accordingly, my home for the week was a squat off Walworth Road in south London. I’d given myself a budget of £5 to last the five days, so for lodging, free had to trump comfort.
After settling into my bed on the floor and washing my face in a pool of stagnant water that had been in the sink for nearly 24 hours, I decided I needed a style update. It was an easy decision: LA posi-crust-hardcore punk from when more than ten people cared about Final Conflict.
I left the squat and lurked around a branch of the corporate pharmacy chain Boots awaiting an opportunity to nick some green hair dye. Boots supports vivisection. It is also fine with squirting shampoo into bunnies’ eyes and making them wear lipstick on their skin and electrodes on their brains. I had absolutely no qualms about stealing from this out-house of the bourgeoisie.
Of course, I had to have a mohawk. But the only implement we could find at the squat to shear my hair was a pair of blunt stationery scissors. This gave me an appropriately DIY (that is, awful-looking) appearance.
Punks don’t care much about things like health and safety and hygiene, so bleach was applied directly to the remaining strip of hair by my new squat girlfriend, Karley. The only precaution she took was wearing a mangy goalkeeper’s glove during the application process. It was all satisfactorily punk.While the bleach settled I learned a new skill
While the bleach settled I learned a new skill: sewing. No self-respecting crusty leaves home without a Los Crudos patch, and I made an adequate attempt at affixing some flair to an old denim jacket with cut-off sleeves.
Washing the toxic chemicals from my hair in the freezing shower was uncomfortable, but I kept up the don’t-give-a-shit pretence until the dye was splooged all over my noggin and I realised that my forehead was rapidly turning green.
TUESDAY
Luckily the dye didn’t stick to my skin like it stuck to my hair. It was like a rather punk tuft of grass had sprouted out of my skull. Night one in the squat had involved surprisingly little debauchery: my squat-mates had a TV and watched politicians spewing their filthy lies through the corporate media machine on News at Ten. I drowned out the elitist bullshit with a scratched copy of Conflict’s The Ungovernable Force on a record player from the 1960s that somebody had brought back from Berlin.
Aside from waking up on the floor and feeling like I’d never be able to walk again, it was quite a letdown. There was no all-night weed smoking or heated political discussion. There wasn’t even a police siege.
To amend matters I decided to pack up my sleeping bag and have a drink at the Foundry—a bar-art space-slop-house for Spanish cycle couriers with tribal tattoos and the single-dread-lock-that-looks-like-a-turd-log-jutting-from-the-back-of-the-head hairstyle. Surely I’d find like-minded souls here? The answer was no. But there was an organic ale that tasted of mud and parsnips.
After stealing six cans of cider from a nearby newsagent, I walked across Hackney Downs and went to borrow my friend’s dog, which was overly pleased to have someone with Astroturf for hair to play with. When we got back to the squat he savaged my mobile bed in excitement.
Factory-manufactured dog leads are tools of oppression, so I lassoed the mutt with my belt and headed out wandering. It was pretty fun watching people cross the street with looks of total panic on their faces, but the police car trailing me all the way back across the river to South London was not so enjoyable.
ANARCHIST CRITERIA:
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