[Marilyn Manson]

The other day I was happily browsing through my local newspaper/carpet-furniture warehouse trade paper, when I was startled to come across an article of personal interest.

It was a sort of mini-article really.

I can’t even remember what it was about, fundamentally.

What I do remember is that it featured a chap I used to be at school with.

He is called Scott. He is a lovely chap. You could never dislike Scott. But what piqued my interest was that he was pictured holding his daughter. She was reported as being eighteen months old. Eighteen months. He was also reported as having a wife.

**** me.

Up until this point I didn’t know Scott was in a serious relationship, much less had a child and a wife. I had seen him on a social basis last about a year ago and this subject had never come up. I knew he had a good job as an archivist, but that was it.

As I say, **** me.

I don’t think I can really convey how much of a shock this was to me. It was an emotional cluster**** of epic proportions. Here I was, a jobless, prospectless, loveless, batshit-insane ex-coke fiend and here were other people who I knew well from early adolescence onwards going about their business, becoming mature members of society and actually nurturing offspring. It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem proper. I was thrown into a mire of self-doubt. What the **** was I doing with my life? I was, in short, utterly head****ed. I was as head****ed as if Mukhtar Safarov had inserted his penis into my ear and pushed it all the way in until it touched my brain.

Yep. I had ****ed up my life in grandiose fashion. This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out. Something had gone wrong. At some point I’d diverged from a more or less normal existence and into the sort of life where you feel it’s utterly normal to swear at strangers and have animated conversations with yourself in public situations. The sort of life where you regularly find yourself drinking large amounts of alcohol before noon. And not wine or G + T’s or anything like that. No. I mean the sort of stuff that is produced when you ask the barman “What’s the strongest stuff you’ve got for two pounds forty?“ I clenched the top of my skull and tried to pull my scalp over my face.

I felt very old all of a sudden. I was, after all, on the cusp of being half-way to thirty. A fogey. And what did I have to show for it? The princely sum of precisely ****-all, that’s what.

Then came the realisation: it was the answer. It was so clear to me: go out clubbing and get utterly ****ing muntered out of your skull.

Which indeed I promptly did.

I know I will come under withering personal attack for having the sheer chutzpah to expose my intimate thoughts and emotions on GD, but who honestly gives a ****? We spend our entire lives alone and we die alone. That’s the top and bottom of it. It’s not true that life’s a bitch. You’re life’s bitch.

So, in conclusion: bottles of the much-acclaimed alcopop 'Wee Beastie' are very good for dulling the crashing pain of an alienated existence in a godless universe and **** you, you cynical sour-faced soulless bastards.