Diary of an up and coming sociopath

It occurs to me that I’ve never shared some of these things with the world before. Some of those life-changing discoveries that utterly destroy your mind and leave in its place, something similar, but more crystallised than before. I often refer to this process in passing when I’ve discovered a new slice of pop culture that’s redefining the whole spectrum as I ingest it, but there are some that go right back to the beginning. Case in point:

“Okay, I’ll go instead. When I think of the sun, I think of an Australian surf bunny, eighteen years old, maybe, somewhere on Bondi Beach, and discovering her first keratosis lesion on her shin. She’s screaming inside her brain and already plotting how she’s going to steal Valiums from her Mother. Now you tell me, Andy, what do you think of when you see the sun?”

This is the paragraph, from Generation X, that made me take the book to the counter and buy it, beginning a fandom of all things Coupland that lasts to this day. I forget how old I was, we’re probably talking about 8 years ago at the very least. Old enough to remember the generation x but young enough that I wasn’t really old enough to be part of it. Old enough to know it wasn’t where I was headed, that’s for sure, but it was certainly a stop on the road to wherever I ended up.

The feeling isn’t exclusive to books, obviously. I remember being in Walton on the Naze, of all places, in 1998 on holiday at my Nan’s with my family and a couple of my cousins, and at one point in the car I heard a song on the radio that caught my attention. It was just a couple of lines, in fact, that went “This is the noise that keeps me awake/my head explodes and my body aches” which, you crazy guys will remember, is a line from “Push It” by Garbage. I was probably aware of them at the time, I mean, I was certainly listening to indie music compilations by then because I was stealing them away from mum when she brought them back from work, but this is a defining moment where I was utterly molested by the ideas and sounds that were being shoved into my ears. Just from those two lines. Nothing remotely similar happened for years afterwards. I mean, I came to recognise Radiohead as great, and I took in the brilliance of many other bands, but nothing struck me like Garbage did that first time. Nothing, that is, until I watched Fight Club (at Si’s house, as I recall) and the Pixies kicked in over the end credits. I think it was just the sound of the guitars that grabbed me. It seemed all so abrasive, and yet, not. I bought the live Debaser single from the CD stall at the Coventry covered market a short while later and never looked back.

I don’t want to harp on too much about how my life has been altered by my obsession with this kind of art, because I’m sure it’s not that interesting, but I feel like it’s something that should be externalised while it’s all still there. I should talk about comics, of course. I’ve read comics for a long time. A really long time. Practically since I can remember, though back in those days it was the Beano. I forget what got me into american comics specifically, I have a strong belief that it was the X-Men cartoon, but I forget what got me into that. I probably just caught it randomly. It was always just a disposable thing, though. The soap-opera drama of superhero comics that doesn’t really stick with you, like trashy fiction or pop music, you don’t find much in it, at least at that age. Then, I bought the Generation X Underground Special.

Generation X was an X-men spin-off named for the Coupland book, but otherwise unrelated, and using that title, a guy called Jim Mahfood released a comic which used Marvel’s mainstream characters in a distinctly alternative way. It was my first exposure to independant comics, and it was indescribably new. Mahfood’s art was totally unlike what I’d seen, the stories were unlike anything I’d read, and I must’ve read it a hundred times since that first one. There was one specific story that grabbed me, though, and to this day Josh and I agree it’s a high point. It was a story about Chamber, a mutant whose lower face was blown up when his powers manifested, and who is left with glowing energy there which he hides beneach a neckscarf. The story was just about how Chamber sees the world, and how he thinks it sees him. It was a character study on a focus that I’d never seen before in comics, and it ended like this:

Something about that ending, especially in the context of the story, was so melancholy that it became an instant favourite. I don’t remember a comic that ever made me feel that way before this one, and since we’re probably talking 1996-7, it was a revolution for my appreciation of the medium. Once again, it’s something that didn’t happen again for a long time, not until I found a graphic novel called Channel Zero in a box under a table at a Memorabilia festival, costing £5 and teaching me what the medium could actually do when it put itself to it. Channel Zero was so good, the day after buying it I took it to school to read at lunchtime because I didn’t want to waste any time in getting to the end.

These things are all big influences on my entire life. They changed the course of it in big ways, and continue to do so. If only I could understand what made them great, maybe I’d be a bit closer to getting there myself. Who can say? Understanding something like this is, as I often claim things are, a constant struggle.