The Caped Crusaders Win Again!

When Zena first asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a children's chapter book, my first reaction was to ask her if she was having a stroke. When she subsequently failed to collapse or speak in tongues, I spent some long moments staring at her while I waited for the delivery of the punch line. This also failed to happen.

Well, sort of. The punch line was there - it just wasn't funny. Have you ever heard the one about kids and how they get cancer? I hadn't, and the sheer outrageous injustice of it made me suppress my qualms and agree to be told more about what the hell anyone could possibly want from a combination of me and stories with morals, talking animals and other such garbage.

WABIAD Awards Ceremony 2016

As it turns out, it's all about stories. Once upon a time, a kind-hearted bus driver saw some bald children in the street and decided to give them a lift. Upon discovering that these children were literally deathly ill, he took it upon himself to become their personal taxi driver, ferrying them from place to place and, eventually, organising outings and activities for them. As with anything else, money was required, and he found himself also raising funds to sustain his frankly excellent initiatives.

Fast forward a few years, and this seemingly innocuous act of random kindness had evolved into a fundraising powerhouse, pumping vital quantities of cash into research programs dedicated to treating childhood cancers. And this is roughly where I come into the story.

Like most fundraising organisations, The Kid's Cancer Project has many strings to its bow, and one of them is the Write a Book in a Day challenge. You've probably heard me talk about this before, but for those who haven't, here are the basics. We get a team of people together and, in twelve hours, write, illustrate and bind a kid's book. Excellent people such as yourselves sponsor us to do this, either as the only way to escape our constant requests for money, or because they don't actually believe we're going to be able to do it. This money, every cent of it, goes to The Kid's Cancer Project.

I've been involved in this process for the past three years and it's taught me quite a bit. I've realised that collaborative writing is not only possible, but potentially very satisfying. This is surprising, as generally I'm incapable of collaborating even with myself. I've learnt that people have very definite ideas about what should go into a kid's book, and even more definite ideas about what shouldn't. I've learnt that you wonderful people out there in internetland can be astonishingly generous, that there's also a seven o'clock in the morning, and that being thanked for stuff is deeply embarrassing - none of which I was aware of before becoming involved.

But probably the most important thing I've learnt is that none of this stuff actually matters. What matters is the realisation of the existence of a war between human ingenuity and the insanity of pain. At any given time, there are people consuming their power, substance and mental and physical energy in the effort to create a world in which children no longer suffer from cancer. My writers' group, NBWG, has won the national best book award for four years running and I don't really care. As far as I'm concerned, every time we punt in another book and the cash we raise sponsoring and flogging it, it's another incremental win for those people in those labs. The researchers who are, when all's said and done, the real caped crusaders in this fight.

If you want to get involved or give money, click here to visit the Kid's Cancer Project, and here for Write a Book in a Day.

The New Pornography - A Vision of the Future

Pornography is one of those words which doesn't so much have a monolithic definition as it does a broad collection of meanings underpinned by discrete collections of vague, culture-specific values.

When I come to power, lexical shenanigans like this will not be tolerated. A definition will be chosen and its usage aggressively promulgated and enforced. But the quality of mercy is not strained and so on, so the chosen definition will be a deliberately broad one, as a society cannot be totalitarian unless it is also somewhat inclusive.

Pornography: (n) Any material or representation, literary, visual or created by digital or mechanical means, which has been designed for the sole purpose of creating strong sensations in the audience.

Of course, we'll have to get the professional lexicographers in to clean this up, and maybe to suppress the etymology (pornes: prostitutes, graphy: come on, that's pretty obvious).

Sure, there might be some minor downsides to the enforcement of this new verbal rigour, but think of the benefits. Under my regime, everything created merely for sensation would be subject to obscenity laws. This would mean that publications like the Daily Telegraph would be wrapped in plastic and bought furtively at $14.99 a pop, and it would be highly illegal to expose anyone under the age of 18 to a Miranda Devine column.

In this new world of mine, I envision this redefinition of pornography sweeping across multiple walks of life, even unto political speech. Politicians like Corey Bernardi, Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump would be debarred by law from speaking in public. Those wishing to hear about their ideas would be compelled to do so in dark mirrored booths, dropping coins into a suspiciously sticky slot for every ten minutes they wish to spend furiously titillating their frenzied sense of outrage.

But by far the biggest advantage would be the sheer scope and variety of those who would be relegated to the obscurity of the porn shop. Hate speech consumers of all stripes would be forced to rub shoulders, amongst other things, within the narrow compass of the fringe, awkwardly avoiding each others' eyes as they browse the shelves, or await the onanistic ecstasy of absorbing the concussed parrot ramblings of Pauline, or the sloppy false syllogisms of Trump.

And perhaps, while they're waiting on line, they'll talk. "What are you here for?" a Hansonite might say to the angry Islamist next in line, which could spark a brief waiting room conversation involving the White Supremacist and the Young-Earther pretending not to browse their shelves. And in this situation of enforced, awkward intimacy, they could be brought to discover their essential sameness - the strong bonds of irrationality and hatred which they share to such abundant extent - and thus be brought to peace, if not with us, then at least with each other.

Competition and Those Small People Other People Sometimes Produce

I think I should get a trophy for cropping the penis out of this picture of Agon

When I was five years old, I was a bit of a klutz. I wasn't very good at catching, couldn't run very fast and was basically a bit of a disaster waiting to happen. As I recall, my major talents were limited to walking into doors and falling flat on my face from a standing start.

On my fifth birthday, I remember being in a park with a bunch of children (I don't know where my parents sourced them from, but they seemed friendly enough) when somebody came up with the idea of having a running race. I believe I came second or third last, which made me very unhappy. My parents then organised a re-run of the race in which I was allowed to win. While I knew very well that this was a hollow victory, I was very pleased to accept it. This is because winning matters.

I was reminded of this when, against my better judgement, I agreed to catch up with an old friend at their male offspring's primary school athletics carnival. Despite there being nothing to eat, drink or set fire to at this event, I was still managing to have a fairly good time until I happened to notice that a race had just ended. It appears to have been a multi-directional dash over about thirty metres, ending at a forlorn tape line which only one intrepid mini-me had actually managed to hit.

I wasn't all that concerned at first, until I noticed that every single one of the eight children who had participated was placed on a specially built podium, and each given a ribbon and medal proclaiming them 'winners'. My friend just shrugged, telling me that this kind of thing was pretty well ubiquitous in Australian schools right now.

As you might expect, I have a serious problem with this.

Being unwilling to photograph other people's children,
I have sourced some random ones from Google.
Credit goes to Huff Post.

Let's leave aside the fact that the 'thinking' behind this kind of thing is often tea-candle, crystal-healing nonsense. Let's also leave aside the question of how beneficial it is to teach our precious proto-people that winning is meaningless and that therefore no effort to do so is really worthwhile...

Actually, let's not leave that aside.

I remember, years ago, stumbling across two Classical Greek ideas that have to do with this: 'agon' and 'arete'. These are probably best translated as 'competition' and 'excellence'. Central to the Greek conception of moral living was the idea that a citizen was required to strive for excellence, and to test this excellence in competition with others. This, more than anything else, was activity which would further the development of the individual and the polis. Now, these ideas aren't perfect. For a start, their foundation was breathtakingly sexist, and the idea of agon seems to have fuelled several centuries of incessant internecine warfare, but they have nevertheless been absorbed into the Western psyche.

This absorption has led to a great dichotomy in Western cultures - the conflict between the often self-effacing Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the brash, fame-seeking competitiveness of the Classical mentality. I've always been quite comfortable with this as I feel that, properly managed, one can nicely balance the other. In our rush to construct a more inclusive world on post-modern lines, I think we may have forgotten the 'properly managed' part.

I should point out that I'm not one of the weirdly angry brigade of people who seem to want children to suffer as much humiliation and disappointment as possible. But I do think that this kind of 'inclusion' is just flat-out lazy. It is eminently possible to inculcate a culture of healthy competition, where winners are reminded that their status is temporary, and losers that they could very well be winners tomorrow. This does, however, require a lot more work than just printing out a bunch of participation ribbons.

Here is your reward. May you find it fulfilling.

I can hear voices off telling me to just calm my tits down - that it's just kids running in more or less the same direction for no reason, which brings me back to my Kim Jong Un moment on my fifth birthday. It's not 'just' anything. Moments and memories like these inform our view of the world - lessons learnt from experiences like this are formative. The lesson I learnt was to never again allow myself to be in a position where I needed to be humoured in order to win. That what was required was maximum effort, and that this was by far the best way to improve my relationship with myself. God only knows what lessons are being derived from these non-competitive competitions, but I doubt they're particularly positive.

I guess it's not that big a deal. I suppose that it doesn't matter that we seem to be bent on creating a culture where we stroke ourselves for imagined victories, while simultaneously convincing ourselves that our various failures were in fact triumphs of the spirit. Sitting here in the West with our enormous piles of ill-gotten, disproportionate wealth, and our ludicrously high standards of living, it occurs to me that remaining competitive isn't really all that important. I'm sure that the rest of the world will ignore our self-indulgent non-competitiveness and allow us, out of similar generosity, to simply keep all that we have. Ideas of service, of striving for greatness, of competition - these are probably not the keystone or foundation of our civilisation. It's probably high time we dropped them in favour of a pathological unwillingness to hurt anyone's feelings for any reason at any given time.

I'm sure I'm just blowing things out of proportion, and that the values we inculcate in the very short are not at all performative when it comes to the shape of our future.

Von Clausewitz, Friction and Abandoning a Manuscript

How can someone that smart wear epaulettes that stupid?

Von Clausewitz, in his seminal work On War, outlines a concept called 'friction'. Friction can be viewed simply as an aggregation of every crappy little thing we chalk up to Murphy's Law. The new contractor shipping rounds that don't fit the guns. The dysentery that cripples every battalion passing through a certain market town. The subaltern who doesn't know that data gathered about a Russian road in summer is worse than useless in winter. All the small and large things that go wrong - all the 'fires' that managers spend most of their time putting out.

Anyone who's managed a project (and who hasn't, these days) knows what friction feels like. It could be said that project management is just warfare by other means. Actually, it really can't, but I couldn't resist making a Clausewitz joke. Anyway, friction is that feeling that forces outside your control are throwing themselves in the way of your progress. That grinding, maddeningly frustrating sensation of progressing only one step for every three frantic attempts to surge forward. And there are times when the friction is so great, so unbeatable, that projects are abandoned altogether. The cost of combating friction becomes higher than the potential gains of project completion, and it's time to hit the classifieds and start looking for another job.

I think we can apply this principle to the writing of a novel - more specifically, to the question of when it's time to tear the whole thing up and start again. Let's take the novel I'm currently writing as an example. I had an idea, and a bunch of subsidiary, or connected ideas, a major theme, plot, subplot, peripeteia, anagnorisis- pretty much all the good gear needed to cobble together a story that takes tens of thousands of words to develop. Sure, I was missing some key stuff as well. Like the middle third of the plot and any firm idea of how to get to the climax, but I had enough to get started. In treading that fine line between proper planning and neurotically paralytic perfectionism, I felt justified and not a little bit virtuous about my decision to just start writing.

The first few thousand words progressed well. In the way that only fully realised literary prose or unadulterated stinking garbage can, the sentences tripped over each other in their race to appear on the page. And it was then that the friction started. What I had hoped for was a gradual clarification of the way ahead as each of the stepping stones of the rising action fell into place. The idea was that momentum would carry me through to the completion of the plan as I progressed along it. What happened instead was more like trying to drive water uphill with a broom.

Connective or process passages ballooned monstrously as my characters and chain of events frantically resisted any efforts to send them along the track of my thoughts. Every scene designed to move the plot had to be first violently wrestled into contact with it and, even then, came out as stubbornly static and lifeless set pieces. Every word, line and paragraph which came out served only to obscure rather than serve my narrative, but I pushed on, clutching at the straws of minor achievements in order to justify carrying on. It'll all come out in the wash. It'll be all right on the night. It takes a while for my genius to reveal itself. These and other scraps of delusional idiocy sustained me on a path that was necessarily doomed to failure.

One of the things which was confusing me was that I had all the component parts needed to construct the first act of my novel. Looked at from a certain point of view, there was no discernible reason for the dysfunction of all these component parts. Looked at from the point of view of the very intelligent and invaluably honest person who I often inflict my early-stage works on, it was pretty obvious. It was shite. What I had done was to take all the parts needed to begin a story and, thanks to my own head-up-the-arse syndrome, put them together upside down and backwards. To give you an idea of just how badly I'd muffed it, I point to the fact that my 'first problem' or catalytic action was scheduled to occur about twelve thousand words in.

Now, in this instance, what I did to discover this was to waste the time of another person in order to discover the blindingly obvious. What I should have done was remember Von Clausewitz, his stupid neck stock, his even stupider epaulettes, and his brilliant idea of friction. The sheer magnitude of friction being encountered in the creation of a work that was practically already written should have alerted me to its deep structural flaws long before I hit the ten thousand word mark.

They say the wise learn from the mistakes of others. In that spirit, I tender this idea for the benefit of any wise people who may be out there. Pay attention to friction. If writing a story feels like pulling out our own teeth with other people's fingers, it might be time to stop, take a step back, and ask ourselves why. Because while writing isn't meant to be easy, the kind of difficult represented by friction should be seen as an enormous, alarmingly red flag warning us to think again.

Silence and the Cult of the Sword

I knew a man who spent five years in total silence and isolation, contemplating on the sword. In some circles, he was thought to be taking the soft option by choosing to have an actual sword with him - an object on which he could focus his meditations.

Think about that for a moment. Five whole years, alone and in silence, trying to think about one thing and one thing only. And the fact he had that thing with him was considered to be tantamount to cheating.

I took a year-long vow of silence once. Of course, being a cream-puff city boy, it was pretty watered down. No lonely cave in the Wudang Mountains for me. I was allowed to carry on with my daily life, and to say functional things. I could do stuff like eat every day, answer direct questions, tell bus drivers where I wanted to go, and so on. What I wasn't allowed to do was volunteer information or contribute to conversation in any way. And I was absolutely forbidden from telling people what I was doing.

What I learnt from this is that the vast majority of what we say in daily life is utterly meaningless. And if you stay quiet and really listen, you can hear echoes of the lie buried in every human statement. The false, tinny resonance of the construction of persona, of people convincing themselves and others that what we say, think and do is important - that we are important. You discover just how much of our time is devoted to convincing ourselves that there are excuses for failure, and that our shortcomings are no fault of our own. I also learnt that keeping your thoughts entirely to yourself for a year is a very good way to go completely insane.

I think the point of it all was to gain a real appreciation of just how important contact and communication are. In the same way that no-one appreciates the value of food like those who have experienced starvation, the result of living with this kind of silence is the realisation of our own appalling weakness - our absolute dependence on the other. It's rather like that throwaway line in Fight Club. "What can you really know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" It's the idea that we can have no real understanding of our limits until we have visited some of them. It's impossible to push the boundary if you don't know where it is.

One of my old instructors used to goad us with this every time we thought we'd perfected some new technique. "Are you satisfied?" he would ask. "Are you happy with yourself? In that case, let me congratulate you on having reached the pinnacle of your life's achievement." The idea was that without that central seed of dissatisfaction - without that troubling sense of being able to do better if we just work hard enough at it - life is over.

And this brings me, finally, to the point. I hear a lot of chatter about 'mindfulness' these days, often from people who are engaged in utterly mindless activities. Now, don't get the idea that I think of myself as one who leads the existence of the purely mindful. I'm well aware that, for the most part, I lead the existence of a fucking idiot. The point is that I am aware of it. That I do not excuse it in myself, and that every time I fail (which is most of the time), my sole hope of redemption lies in the full and frank realisation of that failure.

I'm usually at peace with the adaptation and dilution of Eastern ideas as they're absorbed into Western culture. What a lot of angry purists forget is that this is a two way process - just look at the mongrel versions of 'Capitalism', 'Democracy' and the 'Protestant Work Ethic' which exist in China. But mindfulness is one that I simply cannot let pass. In the form it takes when absorbed into the fatuous self-help culture of social media and daytime television, it is completely worthless.

Mindfulness is emphatically not about finding a way to be 'happy' with ourselves. It's about the understanding of rigour, the knowledge of our incompleteness, of the impossibility of perfection and the absolute requirement to strive for it anyway. It has nothing to do with scented candles, crystals, personal milestones, or any of the other garbage we use to loudly pat ourselves on the back in the full view of those around us. And it is absolutely not an escape from the slings and arrows of daily existence.

It's an absolute. A way of being that aims to strip away layers of self-deception, not add more. Adapting it to fit an infantile culture of self-congratulation is not just futile, it's a breathtaking desecration of one of the most important ideas ever conceived.

Truth in Fiction - Understanding 'Write What You Know'

Chancellorsville

Of all writing advice, I think the most frequently misunderstood is 'write what you know'. So many people I speak to, including students, seem to have the unshakeable belief that this means we cannot write about anything if we do not have direct experience of it.

This just isn't true. 'Write what you know' strikes me as being nothing more than the perennial idea that we should be expressing various kinds of truth, boiled down into a vague and less than helpful aphorism. I'm pretty sure what we're mainly talking about here is psychological truth. That for detail, visualisation and procedure Professor Google will do, so long as we are able to match our inner truth to these externals.

So while we may not have direct experience of selling dimebags of cocaine on the streets of New York, if we understand the corrosive effects of despair and crippling anxiety, it might be possible to produce something like Clockers. If we understand how it feels to be utterly overwhelmed by fear, then we can probably, after quite a lot of research, write a war story.

A scene from the Spike Lee adaptation of Richard Price's 'Clockers'.

This is exactly what Stephen Crane did in order to produce The Red Badge of Courage. In this story, we follow the fortunes of a private at a battle which may or may not be Chancellorsville, watching as he first fights, succumbs to battlefield panic and cowardice, then is redeemed by turning off his finer feelings and giving in to the animalistic nature of violence. The theme is the fallacy of Romantic conceptions of heroism, but the effect is one of total realism. On its publication, the novel received rave reviews, with many Civil War veterans utterly convinced that Crane must have been writing as a veteran of that battle himself. This despite the fact that Crane was twenty four, had never seen a battlefield, and was born several years after the end of the war.

So how did he do it? Crane himself, when called upon to explain it said, "Of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field, or else fighting is a hereditary instinct, and I wrote intuitively; for the Cranes were a family of fighters in the old days." Which sounds like two parts bullshit to me, but we can hone in on the bit about the football field, as many of the emotions experienced in group violence of any kind can be directly and realistically transposed into any other.

Team sports can provide insight into many kinds of organised group violence.

It's pretty obvious, though, that this alone will not be enough. We need to think outside the square a little, like Crane did, and find feelings and reactions within our experiential grab-bags which might apply. Take this passage, for example, where his narrator is appalled to discover that the line from which he fled actually held, thus making his desertion an even more criminal act of cowardice.

"Thoughts of his comrades came to him. The brittle blue line had withstood the blows and won. He grew bitter over it. It seemed that the blind ignorance and stupidity of those little pieces had betrayed him. He had been overturned and crushed by their lack of sense in holding the position, when intelligent deliberation would have convinced them that it was impossible. He, the enlightened man who looks afar in the dark, had fled because of his superior perceptions and knowledge. He felt a great anger against his comrades. He knew it could be proved that they had been fools." 

Who isn't familiar with this kind of angry self-justification in the face of moral failure? We feel it and use it almost every day, and its inclusion in this narrative context lends the story a surprising weight of authority.

But the mainstay of the novel is in its study of fear.

"He yelled then with fright and swung about. For a moment, in the great clamor, he was like a proverbial chicken. He lost the direction of safety. Destruction threatened him from all points." 

"He began to exaggerate the endurance, the skill, and the valor of those who were coming. [...] he was astonished beyond measure at such persistency. They must be machines of steel. It was very gloomy struggling against such affairs, wound up perhaps to fight until sundown." 

"The lieutenant sprang forward bawling. The youth saw his features wrathfully red, and saw him make a dab with his sword. His one thought of the incident was that the lieutenant was a peculiar creature to feel interested in such matters upon this occasion."

We are repeatedly confronted with startling moments of psychological truth. In the face of many moments like these, we find ourselves willing to accept the vagueness of Crane's battlefield details, the obviously fictional sequence of happenings and encounters, the characters who appear with such serendipity in order to illustrate some aspect of the developing theme - none of this really matters in the face of the fact that the narrator is reacting truthfully and realistically to his circumstances. 

It takes some intelligence, and a lot of research and fact-finding, but yes - it is eminently possible to write convincingly about unfamiliar setting and situations. It's not so much about knowing something before we write it, but rather a process of discovering within any situation that which we already knew, and then writing to that knowledge.

Strange, Unhappy People

Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Barry is a poet. He used to be a bare knuckle street fighter, slugging it out for a pittance in the car parks of pubs, most of which were shut down long ago as raucously violent blots on the community. The world in which he grew up is long, long gone - the robust, optimistic, mono-cultural blur of the eighties. It seems he hasn't really noticed, though, because his focus has turned almost entirely inward, as it always will when your whole life becomes a process of getting, using and then getting more drugs.

For the past few years now his drug of choice has been methyl amphetamine, otherwise known as 'meth', 'cold' or 'ice'. This isn't something altogether new, though - no victim of the so called 'ice epidemic' is Barry. He's been shooting up heroin, methadone, dextro amphetamine and cocaine for decades. The thing about ice is that it's relatively cheap, in plentiful supply and, taken in toxic psychosis doses, will last for days and days. The other thing about ice, I'm told, is that it appears to have the property of staving off heroin withdrawal sickness. I can't personally verify this, but I have noticed that other background addictions like nicotine simply fade from notice while the ice buzz is on.

In drug-taking circles, Barry's a lifer. He's been around forever, and everyone knows him, so he's plugged into all the little communities of the more serious end of drug subculture. These are many and varied, and on any given day Barry could be hanging out with twenty something homies, ageing hippies, bikies, homeless buskers or middle-class underbelly tourists. It doesn't really matter much who he's with - it's all the same. The community of pipe, and especially of needle, is a strangely unifying one. The distinctions of culture and 'tribe' are all wiped out by the over-riding sense of otherness which comes from the sustained and serious use of any drug, and especially one so heavily stigmatised as ice.

The last time I saw Barry, it was in a drug house in Manly. This house has been raided and shut down for a while now, so I can safely talk about it without compromising or endangering anyone. It was pretty typical of such places - filthy carpets, perpetually blinded windows, walls yellow from tobacco smoke and an absolute bare minimum of battered, donated furniture. At any given time there'll be a handful of men, and maybe one woman, sprawled, hunched, squatting or pacing in various attitudes around the room. Every face is a study in constrained patience, or absent bliss, because it doesn't matter when you rock up at a house like this, everyone has either just received a delivery, or is holding onto themselves as they wait for another one.

In either case, obsessive, repetitive activity becomes deeply satisfying to minds flying on ice. Mobile phone games, assembling or disassembling stolen bike parts, folding paper, flicking through television channels or browsing for porn - it's not important what the activity is, it suddenly becomes the most important thing on the planet. From a distance, if you squint, a room full of ice users can look a bit like a meeting of twitchy mad scientists who have forgotten that they're not alone.

All this tends to change when a new person arrives, assuming that new person brings a fresh element of some kind with them. In Barry's case, he normally sweeps into a house in a hectic wave of energy, beat poetry and beers in brown paper bags which he will share with the house. This is usually guaranteed to start a general conversation. Sure, not everyone will be able to look up from what they're doing, but they'll be listening and contributing. And that's probably the most surprising thing about ice addicts and users. If we're to go with the received image, we could be forgiven for thinking their days are filled with random nihilistic violence, robbery and beating up on their mothers. The reality is, though, that these people spend the vast majority of their time sitting around talking to each other.

One favourite topic for conversation is personal history. A staggering proportion of these people have suffered serious sexual or physical abuse at some point in their lives. As a result, they often have an air of disassociated numbness when it comes to their own selves, and their accounts of their past lives are intricately woven tapestries of fantasy and fact, by turns funny, pathetic, bitter and manic. Like the story Stevo used to tell about the first time he went to jail. He'd been driving a stolen car and had been stopped by the police for some innocuous reason. All was well, and they were about to drive on when his mother, drunk out of her skull, pulled up. While she was in the process of being breathalysed and arrested, she turned to Stevo and loudly pointed out that he did not own the car he was driving.

Conspiracy theories are also practically ubiquitous amongst this set. Weirdly intricate frameworks of power and interest are constructed into a sort of murky, confused world view. The CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, various police forces, banks and governments are co-opted into a narrative whose burden is that the whole world has connived to block them from attaining personal success. Often, their knowledge of the organisations they suspect doesn't go much beyond knowing their names, but that's not really important. The point is that the game is rigged, the power sits with others from whom it cannot be taken, and it makes perfect sense, therefore, that they have opted out of life.

Other than that, they tell funny stories about themselves and each other, bitch and gossip, share Youtube videos and Facebook memes - yes, just like normal people. Because essentially, that's what most of these people are: perfectly normal, damaged and discouraged people. Of course, it can be said that their existence is entirely without meaning. Their whole lives are taken up with nothing beyond the acquisition of money in service of the acquisition of drugs, and they can spend days and days sitting in one stinking room talking nonsense to people they don't really know or like.

But when you think about it, you can't help but wonder just how different that is from any other person's life. We work, save and spend on furniture, holidays, alcohol, over-priced meals, all of which are consumed in the company of people we may not particularly care for, but to whom we hold on because a person is supposed to have friends. While many of us are happy, some of us sublimate our despair with these frivolities, and I simply don't see the difference between that and what a meth junkie does. Except, of course, that the acquisition and consumption of ice is by its very nature criminal, and the people who do it criminals by extension. And then there's also the fact that constant drug use is a much quicker and more visible way to kill oneself than, say, sugar.

Sometimes, when I see an addict twitching down the street shouting at himself, or searching frantically through a bin, I'll recognise someone I've seen in my travels. This forces me to reconcile the insane hobo image I see with the thoughtful, gentle and tortured person I may have spoken to, years ago, when I was on the same trajectory. I think that if everyone had to do this - had to see beyond the dirt and strangeness and into the actual person, they might be less quick with their judgements, and with their dismissal of these people as people. In the words of Palahniuk, "We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world," so who are we, really, to decide which of us is more or less crap than another?