Flipping the bird at answers

I didn’t get arrested last night, which was nice. A good start to my Sunday morning, compared to the recent Saturday morning when I woke up on my floor and couldn’t feel my hands.

The Friday night before that Saturday I got so pole-axed I couldn’t ride my bike. The police noticed this, along with the absence of my helmet and lights, both of which I own, but was not using at the time. It’s all a bit of a blur, but I know that I ranted at them about arresting real criminals, and that I must have visciously insulted their intelligence, because they cuffed me and threw my sorry arse in the back of the paddy wagon.

I couldn’t feel my hands the next morning because they applied the handcuffs with such force they crushed my nerves. According to my doctor, sensation should have returned by now, but I still have numb spots on my knuckles.

I’m telling you this because right after it happened I didn’t tell anyone, and it kind of started to fester. I was ashamed: I had gotten uncontrollably drunk, again, one week into my New Years’ resolution to live a more moderate life; I had taken out my frustration on two blokes who probably entered the force with good intentions and can’t help being stupid; I had been arrested, yet again, for Riding Under the Influence, disorderly behaviour, being drunk in public, and abusive language; this was not a cool arrest, like getting arrested for protesting or for defending your friend in a fight.

The first time I got arrested for being an idiot was the night of my first Voiceworks launch, after I took speed and wound up at Worst Floor, before deciding to walk in the wrong direction to my house and managing to fall asleep in the median strip of Eastern Freeway. Apparently one of my friends rode past me on their own way home, but didn’t recognise me and rode on – I was a new kid on the block, and he was yet a new friend. The police didn’t recognise me either, but they figured I would come to harm if I continued laying comatose on a huge freeway of Melbourne, so they woke me up. Boy was I grumpy.

Again with the swearing and the insulting, until there were three (3) squad cars blocking two (2) lanes of the freeway, six (6) police officers and one (1) willfully remorseless boy with his hands trapped behind his back in the gutter, but not before one of the nicer cops had said to me, “Wow, you seem really smart – did you go to uni?” because I had been trying to build a case for them letting me go.

“No I didn’t go to fucking uni, you twat. I dropped out! You don’t need to go to uni to get a fucking education. Did you go to uni? I see that you have successfully buttoned your shirt. Well done!”

Or some shit. I can turn into an absolute idiot when I’m drunk and annoyed with the police. Other times I can be funny, like the time, also in Melbourne, I got caught RUI about to descend a hill I didn’t recognise. I had stopped only because I wasn’t sure I wanted to committ to the hill, because I actually didn’t know where I was, and if I discovered that I was going in the wrong direction at the bottom of the hill, I would have to go back up the hill, and my legs weren’t working too well, so I put my feet down and tried to think.

I was surprised when the red and blue lights started bouncing off everything right at the time my feet hit the asphalt. I had been zigzagging between the inner-city footpaths, and apparently they had been following me for quite a while, laughing their arses off. They were nice blokes. They helped me get my front wheel off so my bike would fit in the back of the paddy wagon with me, and drove me home. Just like the railways-authority guy who drove me home after I got caught fishing off a train bridge in Port Augusta. Some authority figures actually have souls, and a sense of humour.

Some of them don’t. Some them are obviously bitter about not getting into the army, or about being teased at school, or about being closet homosexuals, or about being displaced in the family by their younger brother at age 1.5.

(I have let my ill-considered aversion to authority get the better of me again. Those sorts of childish ideas are exactly what get me locked up in the first place. I do actually have a few ideas about why they shouldn’t be arresting me for behaviour that is potentially harmful to mostly myself while actual criminals continue to run about, advertising their criminal affiliations on signs in their backyard that read: “Trespassers will be severly bashed – The Finks”. True story – I have a poorly lit iPhone photo of this from around the corner in Campbelltown.

I have allowed myself that tangent because it illustrates that my reasons for being a drunk idiot with cops are dumb. I don’t want you to be reading this under any illusion I think I’m justified in teasing police officers.)

Again (immaturity aside), I’m telling you this because I’m trying to parse the experience and I felt weird about not telling anyone, because I have this philosophical project underway at the moment, called my life, which I have taken to capitalising into the proper noun “The Heuristic Life”, in which I try to push the boundaries of honesty in the hope I learn enough from the mistakes of myself and others that I eventually reach Nirvana in three or ten or one billion lifetimes from now. (I didn’t even tell my closest friends, until I told Kelly, and then Lucy, and then blurted it out at the party last night, to Gladys, who is actually a guy – I do have some male friends.)

Perhaps I should also explain that this aversion comes from spending my adolescence as an inadvertent thug, gate-crashing north-east-Adelaide house parties that would eventually be broken up by the police when the Eminem got too loud. You know this song, right?

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And these lines from it:
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Got the rep of a villain
For weapon concealin
Took the image of a thug
Kept shit appealin
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Well, yeah, that’s me except without the guns. And, as I wrote on Facebook today, these lyrics “remind me that my time spent as an inadvertent, adolescent thug was mostly a manifestation of being bored among unfortunate surroundings and social influences, from which I have been able to escape”. And I guess I’m a soldier, in the sense that I keep trying to be better at life even though I seem to consistently fail at it sometimes. (Ya know, soldiering on.)

The way I do this is by turning these experiences into something positive, for example: perhaps I could research, think about and maybe write something about authority structures and how police engagement with youths can either improve or hinder their development. At school I had interests other than smoking weed and ending fights, but many of the guys I hung out with didn’t – they had nothing to pull them out of their north-eastern public-school funk, and most of them still live there, going to The Gully, knifing people, or smoking weed in their dads’ back sheds. And they probably still hate cops for busting up their parties. Maybe if cops were nicer to young men, less judgemental, we would feel as though we could go about making (knifing, bong-smoking) mistakes and learning from them, without being pigeon-holed as thugs.

I don’t want to hate cops forever – they probably do lots of awesome stuff that I’m unaware of because I’m clouded by this tendency to get fuck-eyed and yell at them. Of course I’m going to hate on cops if I continue believing I have been unfairly treated, but I deserved the crushed nerves, I really did.

The other positive thing is that avoiding getting thrown in the drunk tank involves dealing with my “binge alcoholism”, as I’ve started to call it.

Anyway. I didn’t want to tell my friends this had happened again, because I figured I should have learnt my lesson by now: I’m 27, and I’m smarter and more self aware than this behaviour suggests.

Things are changing, though.

In the first instance this year – the Friday night – I managed to talk my way out of the cell instead of passing out on the concrete bed and waking up as remorseless as I had gone in. (Actually maybe they got sick of the echoing I was causing by standing at the door and repeating my anti-establishment polemic in as loud a voice as I possibly could. They let me out, anyway, and didn’t press charges.)

This time, last night, I got away with a hefty expiation notice. The guy was a douche, but he seemed legitimately sad when I told him his life was a sorry waste of time if this was all he managed to achieve on a Saturday night. Fuck I’m an arsehole sometimes. But when I realised he was actually sad, in general, I couldn’t bear to carry on giving him shit, so I kept my mouth shut and contented myself with flipping him the bird as I left. He still looked sad, and I still feel like an arsehole.

So I’m parsing this here in the hope that it will remind me to remain accountable to my resolutions to stop getting arse-numbingly drunk and being an arsehole just because the beer is free.

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Other Outstanding Achievements
Another repeat episode of stupidity from yesterday is when I accidentally left the air-conditioner on before I went to the beach. I did this before and almost established a fly colony in my kitchen.

I left the house at about midday yesterday, and returned home at about midday today, so today I’ve turned off the air-con and am sitting here sweating my arse off, because I deserve it. If you don’t like sweating into your keyboard, don’t be stupid and leave your air-conditioner running for twenty-four hours while you go on a beach date and then nearly get arrested for being a fucktard.

At least I only smoked one cigarette last night, I guess, and thanks to Clare J Strahan I’m confident that yesterday I chose to smoke, but that from today onward I will continue to choose not to.

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How Not to Rhyme
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UPDATES

Intellectual Synchronicity
After I got back from the beach tonight I went across the road to The Prince Room for some Chinese takeaway and found some interesting articles in The Daily Telegraph, of all the papers I could be unfortunate enough to find when the only alternative is Who.

There was this article, about a politician getting busted for ecstasy possession. This reminded me that I once nearly got busted by undercover cops with a jar full of mushroom caps in my pocket, so I should probably be thankful I’ve never been to proper jail before. (That’s the nearest I’ve come to serious trouble with the police before, and they left me alone because I did the right thing by not even giving them any, let alone selling them to them, because I was worried I would be responsible if they freaked – they were really good mushrooms.)

When I flicked to page five, where this cover story was continued, I found this article, called “Show a little respect for police and authorities”, beginning with the précise “AUSTRALIANS have always had a troubled relationship with police” and continuing with “Our first constables, the “Night Watch” introduced by Governor Phillip in 1789, struggled with a lack of respect from the public as they sought to stamp out drunkenness, theft and disorder across Sydney”.

Apart from making me feel better, this no-doubt common news story, combined with the one about the pill-popping pollie and my own experiences and the consequent post, constitutes a case of intellectual synchronicity I think I’ll chase up, which just means that I will try to do at least some preliminary investigating and thinking about the ideas I mentioned above, about how authority institutions such as the police force influence the development of citizens. For example, I heard the other day you can’t call it ‘the force’ anymore – you have to call it ‘the service’. Pfft! But maybe this isn’t true.

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Der
On the way home from the beach I also realised that today and yesterday I noticed an inordinate number of police cars in my vicinity. Perhaps I should have taken these anomalies to mean I should be careful where I engaged in reckless endangerment.
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Why It’s Okay to Get Pole-axed Sometimes
I wrote about this once already, but one of my friends reminded me this evening that we have had maaaaaaaany drunken nights together where we didn’t get busted for anything. He reminded me that I am actually quite a good, fun-loving drunk, most of the time. Funny how we tend to hang onto the bad things we do and forget about all the good things we do. I do anyway – I don’t know about you.