Going...


You never know who's going to be on the other side of the door.

Never.

You can guess. Many times I have started to fill in the 'you weren't at home' cards to find the front door opened. Many times I've scoured buildings to look for a doorbell, and found nothing.

At 9.00am, i rang doorbells and woke girls in lingerie up, semi-naked women answered the door half-asleep : I wasn't invited in for one quickie. I have been totally lied to by those 70's sex comedies.

Today, we parked in a ghostown. 10 shopfronts : 8 boarded up and covered in graffitti. Two others barely operational. You could smell the poverty. A gang of kids hung by the chipshop : 10 or 12 12-17 year olds, in identical lesiure wear styles. Baggy tracksuit bottoms. Branded sleeveless tops. Drinking generic cans, filming each other on mobile phones. It's not cruel to say that they'll always be nobodies. Never get out of these Asda Towns. Seeing the whole gamut of life, I realised that some people will never rise above what they have, and always think that what they have is the best they can ever get. The end of ambition is a terrible thing.

What is interesting is people : the only person who really spoke to me like I was some dumbass piece of shit was a high rankin' manager at a fair to middling business. I don't know why, but some people only see the uniform and not the person. He thought I was dumb schmuck nobody and spoke to me as if I was a barely intelligible piece of shit on his shoe instead of someone with a Masters. All he could see in his eyes, was someone he could boss around, bully, and denigrate because he thought he was Mr Shit-Don't-Stink. I wasn't even his employee.

In the end of it, he revealed far more about himself than he intended : his insecurity reinforced through his snobbery. Sometimes the thing that makes you think you're better than everyone else is the thing that proves you aren't. Time for an interesting letter to be sent, I think.
- posted by Mark @ 10:30 pm