My Riot Pt. 2 I Need A Poo

...As I walked to Clapham Junction there was a palpable atmosphere of danger in the air, like a fizzing and pulsating, a sparkling in the skin roots. The people coming towards me from the ‘the riot’ were chatting excitedly, talking to others on their mobile phones; there were displays of passion, real experience, expectations set adrift. This was not reported on the news, the excitement and exhilarating fervour, it felt strangely to me like the last night of a music festival, that kind of loose and lethal comradeship. I carried on walking, passing a Police car with a gaggle of officers chatting to each other with folded arms, I was expecting them to stop me but they didn’t, so on I went past closed shops and houses, many people were hanging out of their windows trying to catch a glimpse and a story of something. 

All of a sudden I was in the centre of it all, it just appeared before me like the entrance to hell or the secret world only accessible through he back of a wardrobe. I saw shops on fire, windows being smashed, people pouring into T K Maxx and out again with concealed faces, many were wheeling stolen suitcases and struggling with armfuls of random products; Starbucks had been obliterated, strangely there was a man and two girls sat inside in the middle of the wreckage drinking from Starbucks cups. Was I scared? Not really, there were the people doing the rioting and then there were quite a lot of people walking through as I was, standing, looking and egging-on like kids watching a school fight; again they were taking pictures, chatting on phones, excited, energised, taking in the atmosphere, trying to remember all the details to tell their friends the next day. A fully interactive film right before their eyes; they had imaginary screens around their bodies as if they weren’t really there. It was almost like promenade theatre, I stood with a group as we watched a man throwing a fire extinguisher at a metal shutter – to be honest if this guy represented the radical potential of the working class to overthrow its oppressors, I wasn’t holding my breath – he wasn’t even making a dent, he eventually got so frustrated he started to kick it, hmm, I moved on.

I could have stayed there all night, it felt good to be where it was all happening – the only thing was I was really desperate for a poo and it was getting more and more urgent, I walked out of the scene, but not before I saw two young men helping an old man in through the broken window of a sports shop. It was this strange type of community that was also missing from the media, they embodied a kind of contradiction part thug, part gentleman. Not linear.

Yes, humans can be bastards and if you promise so much and give so little, something will snap. But on this night some of them were also loving and compassionate siblings, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers – some of them. They are split too, between the reality of their lives and their place in an abstract system of money and things. Are we being run by humans or an abstract system that we created and now can’t control? Death of the author. The pure energy and emotion expended that night, gave a glimpse of the dissatisfaction and potential force of the collective majority – but they were fighting for the wrong team, by stealing stuff they are reinforcing and securing the system that keeps them in the place they are trying to escape from.   

Mercifully, I managed to find a bar just around the corner that was still open, I can’t remember its name now, at the time I only had one thing on my mind. I went in did my business and then bought a drink in the bar and started to watch the TV as they was relaying events that were literally happening 100 foot away. I had a very strange shrinking feeling, it was so weird, all I saw was violence, evil, destruction, some guy trying to break a cash machine,  all accompanied by the monotone, morose voice of the newsreader, relaying the objective, but subtlety derogatory, truth into my face.  Dear emotion, camaraderie, absurdity and inspiration, I’m leaving you, I’m going to live with banality, safety, boredom and the same old shit. All the complexity, energy and multiplicity was taken away and put into reinforcing all the same crap to placate and subdue all those sofa dwellers, shaking their heads along with all the condemnation and linear expected world, tutting and booing together against the evil men on the screen. 

At the same time it was terrible, some individuals lost property and were robbed and scared and disgusted; I saw it all on the news – I didn’t know any of these people and my experience was different, I don’t want to say that my experience is the real and genuine one and the one on the screen was a sanitised trite version intent on reinforcing the views of the audience, but fuck it I’m gonna, kapow; complexity, inspiration and anything new interesting and challenging about what was going on was wiped away.

People’s opinions on the matter after the fact were dreary for fear they have an original thought, stock phrases repeated over and over, blaming the people whose fault it was, whoever that was, and condemning all the senseless violence and destruction; where’s the violence and destruction full of sense? The stale interviews with the rioters full of bravado, made a brief appearance; I would like to see how different they would be if their mothers were also present during the interviews; they may not be as evil and violent as one was lead to believe. We were inundated with people playing roles, reinforcing that reality we are all so used to, there is no Other, we have incorporated it all. Step out of your own head and take a risk, see that shop window in your mind, keeping you from freedom and smash that git with a brick. To be a criminal. The Problem is freedom, self expression is seen in terms of having more things, nice trainers, this is the real crime, it’s all the wrong way around: to create should be our goal. This was what my Riot taught me.