I wrote this one ages ago, in Mexico I think, and wasn’t sure if I had published it or not? I looked online but could not find it so ta-dah, here it is. I once wrote about waking up out of a coma to be on anti-depressants, I was on them for a long time until a friend looked at my Blister-Pak and asked me if I was depressed? I told her no and she asked me why I was taking them? The next time I was at the doctor I asked and was told that everybody that has had a serious accident like the one I had are placed on them automatically. I was weened off of them and now I experience pain, and joy, like a normal person. I once wrote that “anti-depressants don’t stop you from being depressed, they just mask your depression.” I have also once written that “the coincidences in life make me nervous”. Is it a coincidence that I wrote about anti-depressants and then, years later, was prescribed them?

A woman that I pay to look after me once said, isn’t it fortuitous that you have always written stories? She had a point, I have forgotten more than I will ever remember but it was the same woman that told me that the accident I was a victim of was my fault. She actually said something about me ignoring the safety induction. I wrote what she had said down and then tried to forget about it. I was not able to forget about it so the next time she came to work I actually confronted her about it. I told her that since she was training to be a nurse she had better watch out with what she said and how she said it. I told her that she was thinking about Union controlled building sites and that most of the builder’s I had worked for actually operated just outside of the law, there is only a safety induction if you are working on a Union-controlled building site. I asked her if the accident was my fault, how come the builder I worked for was picketed and forced off of all his building sites forcing him to relocate in an Australian state that does not currently have a workers compensation scheme? I told her that she had better watch out when she finally gets a job in a hospital, I said if you go around telling patients things like that you told me you would be fired.

She went on and on telling me that she would have never have said that. I told her that she did as I wrote it down to remind me. Another of the women that looks after me calls me “Mr Forget”, but as I write down all the important things I should not be forgetting I should actually be called “Mr Writes it Down”. After I had told her how she had made me feel, well actually in the middle of me telling her that she should watch her mouth she burst into tears and left the room. Hang on a minute, I thought to myself, you insult me and then you are the one to start crying. I realise that quite often little girls will cry in front of their parents and then they will stop telling them off so that is what I did. She had made me feel like shit and when I defended myself she started crying so I stopped defending myself. The weaker sex? Yeah right/write

This is probably written in Mexico because I have written another story about all the pharmaceuticals you could buy there without a prescription. I actually bought some muscle relaxants and got drunk taking them. The chemist’s there are drug dealers.

I love this story and I love it even more now I have been able to take a step back and look at my art objectively and alter it to make it more real and palatable

QUITE PATHETIC REALLY
 

It’s quite pathetic really. I’m sitting in a cheap hotel room thinking that painted brick blocks and cracks in stucco are really art that nobody else understands. Feeling creative is akin to masturbating. Sure, other people may get off observing but it only truly satisfies the self. In the end I am only playing with myself. It’s like some kind of mind self-sex. Highly stung misfit’s love to preserve the ego for later self-gratification. In the end it all adds up to, and is only, art for art’s sake and that just rides the tides like caffeine and electronics. You can only achieve immortality through application and we all know that mean’s dropping your pants; that means you will engage in some form of exhibitionism. If you don’t watch out only a few people will ever appreciate the race against self-preservation. Anti-depressants will undoubtedly suppress any thoughts of artistic grandeur into moral subservience but then what could you do? Turn a blind eye? If every step and blade of grass is a masterpiece, where can you possibly let your pride take you from there – group showings of whisker-riddled basins and prostitutes trying to warm a crowd, a married couple fighting about her flirting with another man and an ugly woman enjoying the congress of their sexual politics? There will be no end to it. So forget about the green glow of fluorescent tubing and the unlit serenity of the abandoned alleyway, it’s all in your head and that is where it belongs. It is hypocrisy and over simplification I know, but if you hiccup you’re trying too hard.

          Andrew Stuart Buchanan