True Story

At midnight on 9th June 1983 I settled down in front of the TV at my friend Stephen’s house to watch as the outcome of the general election began to unfold.
At this point I had not slept for 70 plus hours but the drugs in my system and the drugs in my pocket would ensure that I would not sleep for at least another 24. My ganglions oscillated in anticipation at what would undoubtedly be a gloriously entertaining night!
I was not yet old enough to vote but had already figured out that to do so was a delusional self abasing and utterly idiotic act of submission.
Stephen was a pretty unorthodox and cynical guy, yet as with so many other seemingly smart and insightful people, he was inexplicably fooled by the lie that political engagement can be achieved by marking an X on a piece of paper. Of course, he had also swallowed whole the ludicrous notion that the real problem was the Tory Party which at that time held power and that all we had to do was vote in Michael Foot’s Labour Party and the march towards Socialism would be underway.
Stephen was an unusual and fascinating person, but in this regard he was a lumbering, dull witted drone, obediently carrying out the demands of his ruling class masters.
A few hours later as the results began to come in it was obvious that Labour were heading for a crushing defeat. Eventually, Stephen’s face descended into his hands as I laughed uncontrollably at the idea of millions of members of that scourge group of the eighties – the Liberal Left – and various other myopic left wing fools crying into their muesli later that morning.
At one point, so swept away was I on a tidal wave of schadenfreude, that the only action that would meet the occasion was a nice tippy toe bit of dancing and so I proceeded to pirouette joyously around the living room.
Ah I hear you cry, what about poor old Stephen? Was it not mean spirited of me to rub his nose into the dirt of disappointment that he had created for himself? Absolutely not, it was a righteous and entirely appropriate celebration. Still, for those whose sympathy for Stephen is making this a troubling read, fear not for a solution was at hand.
And so at around 5am, a fly on the wall would have rubbed it’s chin in interest as it looked upon Stephen stood in the centre of the room, his trousers around his ankles, with me kneeling down behind him injecting a solution of amphetamine sulphate and heroin into a vein on the back of his knee. The effect was remarkable; within seconds Stephen was feeling much, much better! Indeed the feeling was way better than anything that would have been induced by even the most colossal of landslide Labour victories.
The futile act of participating in bourgeois politics was supplanted at last by direct action. Real radical politics aimed straight at the root of the problem, which in this case was a brain addled by decades of propaganda peddling the most damaging and insidious political lie of them all.