Ruby Stark

We had agile project-management training at work today. The methodology we’re being taught has some sense: it involves lots of self-reflection and includes a vaguely realistic idea of what it’s like to develop software. However, I felt so absurd sitting there and learning that stuff. Along with shower-gel and bottled water and pre-printed Valentine’s cards, it’s one of the pinnacles of civilisation’s ability to distance itself from realness. When future peoples dig up our remains, surely they will laugh at our contrivances, at how we distracted ourselves with all this bilge as the ship slipped under the surface.

I longed to be sawing wood or pressing seeds into the earth or high-fiving with my impending niece or nephew, to be close to real life.

The ball-production game was pretty fun, though.

Dusk was telling me that pretty much the most environmentally and sociologically harmful thing ordinary people do is put their money in high street banks.

I opened an account with GLS Bank. They let you choose where your money is invested: schools, health, agriculture, ecology. Further, you earn no interest. Instead, that money is donated to charitable projects. My salary will be paid into this account.

This is not perfect: many charitable bodies and positive-sounding organisations are a complete horror when you look under their surface. Also, all my savings are still in building societies turned banks.

Today, I went to meet someone I’d been put in touch with by a mutual friend. We had ingwertees and kaffe lattes and talked. She was nice, and invited me to her birthday party next weekend.

I struggled back out and went to a noise gig at a squat in Friedrichshain. The place is on a corner, opposite another huge squat and around the corner from an occupied church. There are banners hanging from all the windows and graffiti everywhere and the area felt like a sort of squat paradise.

I went in, down the crowded corridor, squeezed into the gig room and watched a woman play a good set of ghostly noise and shimmering singing. Then, I stood against the wall and watched the next band set up and exchanged unsynchronised glances with a crazy hot person who I couldn’t figure for a boy or girl. They had a strong jaw-line and inviting lips and sly eyes. Finally, the guitarist and the electronics guy were ready and the vampire/angel/chiffon-wrapped singer began reading out a piece of text in German in a witch’s voice. The noise began and it was that harrowing, grinding, bassy type of noise. It crescendoed slowly and I began to feel slightly worried. The singer began painting strips of a t-shirt with black oil and handing them out to members of the audience. After twenty minutes, I realised I was actually rather panicked and walked outside. I remember once a friend from Northerncity, Tech Boy, came home from a Khanate gig and said he had to re-evaluate his life and then reportedly lay awake all night.

I smoked a cigarette leaning against the wall. Some people were standing around a barrel fire, adding smashed up palette wood and talking. Another group was gathered around the door. I looked up and watched the sparks from the fire and felt like this was land truly reclaimed by squatters, like it was another world. After my second cigarette, I felt calm again.

I went back in and watched the next guy, then left and went to the church and danced a little.

This evening, I walked along the road between my work and the bus stop with my coat zipped high and my collar around my cheeks and my hands in my front jacket pockets. I hadn’t slept properly for three days, and I felt blank and very cold. I felt like Richard Papen walking home from the supper where his friends had been plotting his friend’s murder in The Secret History.

I don’t know why, but I decided to put on Bruce Sterling’s Webstock talk. I fell asleep one night in hospital whilst listening to my iPhone, then awoke from a dream about being on a secret mission with some friends, and killing a policeman, and stuffing myself into a dumb waiter, and Bruce Sterling’s talk was going and I still had the dream feeling and that mixed with Sterling’s revolutionary words and him alternating his delivery from sombre Lee Marvin to the soaring music in that Godspeed You! Black Emperor song. When I think back to that moment of lying in bed, I get the same feeling of possibility that, unlike most nostalgia, comes from the associative trigger itself, rather than the time, and I think it’s the same for that Des Ark song and Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex and L’Auberge Espagnole.

Last night, I played a game of capflag with an assortment of squatters, anarchos and geeks. I met Whip and the other forty players at the tube and then we proceeded to the area near the abbey.

We divided into two teams, red and blue, and each got half the territory. Each team took their flag and put it somewhere in their territory that was accessible by at least three roads. They then agreed a jail area and the game began.

If you get the other team’s flag and return it to your base, you score a point. If you are touched by a member of the other team when you have the flag, you must drop it. If you are touched when you are in their territory, they can escort you to their team’s jail. You have to stay there until someone from your team runs into the jail and touches you.

The game is a very pleasing combination of stealth, camouflage and athleticism. You can sneak around the dark streets, ducking into doorways and behind cars and into shadows. You keep your distance so others can’t see your face-paint and then try to act like a tourist or passerby (civvie). You can run like the wind to get away.

I thought the game would feel chaotic and disjointed, but you hear just enough reports of activity from your team, and see just enough clashes from a distance to make things feel connected.

In the first game, I ran with Whip and another guy for a while. Whip then got got and me and the other guy ran with a third guy before we had to scatter. Me and the other guy found the Reds’ jail and planned a daring raid that became a waste of time when I blew through at top speed and discovered that everyone had just been sprung.

In the second game, I guarded the flag for a while, nabbed someone from a forward reconnaissance party and took them to jail. Then, the enemy effected a coordinated attack from two sides. In the process of fending them off, I nabbed another of their team and took him to jail. All the people in the jail got sprung right in front of us, so my guy became the only inmate. I was pretty flaked after three hours’ running, so I hung out and heard accounts from my team mates about a squatter group who are opening places in Mayfair.

I rang her the day before yesterday and then spoke to her again last night.

I said that I wasn’t happy any more. I said that the distance problem is even worse and I never see her. And so I said I don’t want to go out with her. She said she had been thinking of coming to London for the whole of January and I said that would be a wonderful way to end, but that I didn’t relish the thought of limping through two more months. She finally agreed and said that if we were thrashing through some sadness to get to a new phase then that would make sense, but fighting to get to the end is just silly.

I explained that I would have told her when I came to visit her in the forest, but that it would just make our last time together really weird and horrid. I told her how I had realised that a) I admire her because of her tree warriorship and b) that she understands me. I told her that I thought our second go at a relationship was much better than our first. I told her that I will miss fucking her. I told her that I will never forget the way she supported me when I died. I told her that, though the support of my family and friends was essential, it was her being there that gave me something to look forward to, something to be excited about.

She said she was walking around on some pallets in the forest and the moon was casting halos in the misty sky and making silhouettes of the trees and making the mud glisten. I lay in my bed and cried.

She said she didn’t want to hang up. We said I love you a few times and talked a little more and then said goodbye.

Afterwards, I talked things over with my little sisters in the bathroom and they were very sweet and supportive and gave me hugs. My Mum said she would probably have let things drag on in the holding pattern for a while and Emma said I am very “clear-headed”.

It is weird that I can say to Matte, “I am desperately in love with you”, and then break up with her.

This evening I went to a meeting at a squatted residential and social centre near my house. I want to get involved in more political stuff. The people at the meeting – mostly residents – were very nice and welcoming. They talked about house business and whether its OK for people to consistently freeload food from their socials. I think I might get involved in the cinema and the cafe.

I love how squats can be so different, but have the same order of mess and detritus, the same ill-conceived room layouts and over-flowing ashtrays. They always feel like dens.

And, for the millionth time, I have a feeling of possibility following a new experience.

So, more visitors today: my sister, Frost (stopped fancying her again), Dusk and Heather (an old, old friend).  We talked about how I refer to the day of my cardiac arrest as the day I died.  Reputedly, there was some confusion amongst my Twitter acquaintances about whether the death I tweeted about was a permanent one.

This was the first time my sister had met Dusk, thought she has heard a lot about him over the years.  I have yet to find out what she thought of him.  Presently, she and Heather left and Dusk and Frost and I went for noodles around the corner from the hospital.

I take a drug called Warfarin which thins my blood so it doesn’t clot on my artificial heart valve.  However, in periods just before operations, I get put on Heparin.  This does the same thing, but is delivered intravenously.  So, Dusk, Frost and I set off from the main hospital entrance.  However, we weren’t alone.  I was dragging along Johnny Drip, an electronic pump mounted on a wheeled drip stand.  The pump very slowly pushes in the plunger of a large syringe which delivers Heparin into my arm via a plastic tube and canulla.

Drippy doesn’t really have off-road wheels, poor chap, so I had to carry him over the cobblestones.  Our party got a few odd looks as we crossed Westminster Bridge, but the noodle bar staff didn’t seem to notice anything odd.

We sat and ate, JD occasionally interjecting with a beep to remind us that he was unplugged from the mains.  Dusk went into full raconteur mode.  He told the story of how he nearly died of food poisoning in the middle of the African rainforest.  He told the story of how he was interrogated at gunpoint by the security detail for a Landless Peasant Movement camp when they mistook him for an intruder.

I fell in love with him, yet again.  He is just gorgeous: his smile looks like the low, sharp sun on a winter’s day; his mouth tastes like malt and his face is handsome and brown and he gives me the same feeling as hugging my teddy.  I could listen to him talk forever.  I make him laugh.  He says interesting things, unlike most people.  He knows way more than I do.

I met Dusk maybe six months after I moved to Leeds. We were hauling furniture from the house of someone who was leaving on a trip around the world and taking it to a social centre we were both involved with.  I didn’t fancy him, but I went on a date with him, anyway.

We became close, he became the first boy I slept with, and I fell into love that lasted two or three years.  He is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met.  Now, we are close friends.  I know he never loved me.  I think he might still fancy me a little bit, but mainly just really likes me.

Tonight, when Dusk came to visit me in hospital, I was allowed to leave for a short while to go and eat noodles at a bar around the corner.  We talked about Fooled By Randomness, his Glastonbury experience last year and about how the scientific method needs to be used by laymen in like art and literature (this flower is beautiful, but why?)

I told him about the operations I’m lined up for and he asked me how I’m feeling and I said, Terrified, and he sighed and covered my hands with his and I said more about how scared I am and he covered my hands with his again and I saw a second of love in his smile.