Skag Overdose

Thair he wis, standing wi his dick in his hand, waiting fir us, waiting fir us tae cook one up fir him.

            - What’s taking so long ye cunt? Cannae fuckin garner the energy tae do it?   Tommy’s got it bad. He cannae even cook up his oon hits, lazy cunt. Evir since Rents gave him that hit, his gone doon hill. It’s a fucking shame.

Nivir take a hit or you’ll be chasing for the same orgasmic sensation fir the rest ay ur perr junky life. It’s mindless, takes ower ur body, ur will, ur motivation. Gone ar the days ay endless shagging wi the lassie, gone ar the days ay playing fitba. Thair’s nae turning back, nae redemption. Eviri day is consumed by the want fir mair skag and thit’s it.

            Ah pass the cunt a fresh syringe. In mere seconds, it is in his bloodstream, circulating tae eviri extremity ay his body. Now it’s ma turn, time tae answer tae the demands ay ma addiction. Mibbe ah could make this ma end, purposefully owerdose, n leave the scum ay the earth tae fend fir thirselves. Top missel aff. In reality, ah’ve got nuthin to lose apart fir the wonderful world ay skag.

            Ah nivir imagined a world wi oot it. It wuld be a world wi oot the Velvet Underground, Iggy, or Bowie. Fucked up world that wuld be. Not worth living in really. If thair ar aw these posh junkies, why ar we shunned, put intae the corner ay society tae rot away? It’s fucking unfair. Sometimes, ah git a little tae philosophical, contemplating ma life. Fuck it. Ah’m jist another junky cunt who needs his fix, thit’s it. Ah’m not special and nivir will be. Ah’ll see missel oan the other side.

            Ah’ve woken up, vomit scattered all about us. What the fuck have ah done, ah puked befair the poison killed me. It must be a sign. A sign telling us tae keep living ma life the way ah have. It cannae kill us. Ah’ve learned that now.

Heroine Brings Out Individuality vs. Monotonous 'Normal' Life

Mark finds himself in between two worlds in “Blowing It”, that of the ‘normal’ Scottish world where his brother Billy is ‘an archetypal model of manhood Ecosse’ as he drinks to sickness and beats his wife Sharron and Mark’s little world of addiction. Forced to go cold turkey, Mark begins to reflect on the reason why he turned to heroine. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t give a clear-cut answer, but rather questions social norm; ‘Why is it that because ye use hard drugs every cunt feels that they have a right tae dissect and analyse ye?’ Renton doesn’t accuse society for being against drugs but rather its inability to mind its own business. He does not comprehend why his heroine addiction becomes the focus of social workers and psychologists who in truth shouldn’t give a shit about him. In his essay New Scottish Writing and the “Queen’s Fucking English”, Jeffrey Karnicky points out Trainspotting’s criticism of normative culture’s tendency to repress marginalized cultures. According to this thought process, Mark feels that his life is threatened by his inability to conform to society’s norms. He attempted to live the ‘normal’ life by attending university but failed to integrate himself into the academic environment and decided to avoid normality and follow his instinct.

Normal Life according to Rents;

“Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.” Pg. 187

In this context, ‘life’ refers to a normal living. Mark rejects this, he prefers to die with his heroine addiction. If he were to kick heroine, than his ‘dependency [would] shift from the drug to them [society]’. Mark makes a conscious decision, to choose heroine addiction over the need for consumption of material objects and commodities. He prefers being part of a marginalized culture, that of heroine addicts, than be part of ‘them’, the mainstream culture. In a sense, his addiction represents the only quality of individuality that Mark possesses. Therefore, from Mark’s point of view, ‘rehabilitation means the surrender ay the self’.  

Pop Culture & Drug Addictions

            Trainspotting is filled with vibrant characters who are distinct from each other in every single aspect of their personality; Rents is, at heart, a caring person, especially towards his best friend Tommy; Sick Boy is, as his nickname points out, a twisted man who places himself on pedestal above others, claiming numerous times that he was going to kick dope; Spud is the fool of the crew of friends, shyly injecting his remarks into the conversation without expecting direct responses; Tommy is the ‘responsible’ figure in the group, limiting himself to speed until breaking up with Lizzy at which point he becomes a junky; and Begbie is a belligerent, spiteful man with a knack of causing turmoil and chaos. The characteristic that is common within all of these vibrant and colorful characters is that of an addiction. Though they all have a physical addiction, Rents/Sick Boy/Spud/Tommy all do heroine whilst Begbie is a drunk, they are also addicted to popular culture.

            Tommy’s obsession with Iggy Pop pushes him to purchase concert tickets instead of buying birthday present for his girlfriend, Lizzy. His negligence of his lover’s desires inevitably leads Lizzy to dump him, knowing that she could do better. Sick Boy is interested in one thing, getting the ladies. Therefore, it is only natural that his idol would be no other but Sean Connery, the slyest of the womanizing Bonds. Spud is the whipping boy of the group, and for whom everyone feels a necessity to protect. Evidently not a bright person, Spud is grasped by the materialist world pushing himself to do petty crimes of shoplifting.  Begbie is most definitely a masochist, looking for a fight every time he enters a pub. He adheres to social norms of the heavy drinking Scot who doesn’t take shit from anyone, though he gives others a lot of shit for not apparent reason. He believes to be better than his friends who do heroine, claiming that alcohol only does well to him.

            Trainspotting emphasizes every individual’s addiction to popular culture, our dependency on it for daily living. Welsh demonstrates how dependence on pop culture can be as harmful, if not more, to the a person’s soul.

Jargon and Phonetics

            Reading Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh is difficult, no doubt about. After struggling through the Scottish dialect’s bizarre spelling, you are then tasked with understanding a jargon that is unique to Edinburgh. Phrases such as ‘she nivir sais nowt tae me, ah whinge, biscuit-ersed’ are bewildering. Over-time, I’ve gotten used to the Scottish vernacular, it is easy to understand the narrator saying ‘she never says nothing to me, I whinged’. However, to understand the term ‘biscuit-ersed’ I had to resort to looking at an urban dictionary (turns out to mean ‘feeble’ or ‘weak’). This relatively confusing phonetic voice is supported by the constant shifts in the narrator’s perception of self.

            Mark, the narrator aka Rent Boy, is a heroine addict and his vice seems to be catching up to already. At various points in the text, Mark refers to himself as ‘us’, suggesting that he has multiple personalities. The ambiguity of his mental condition is evident in the randomness of changes in personal reference. Though the shifts can not occur for pages at a time, it is also possible for it to change within a sentence such as the following; ‘Ay took ma last shot in order tae git us through the horrors ay the shopping trip’. I believe that ‘us’ is primarily used to point out Mark’s inner demons, those who fuel themselves off the smack he injects into his arm. By adding plurality, he assumes his role in his addiction, albeit a less significant one, in company of his inner demons. The ‘us’ is satisfied once its desire for the dream world of heroine is achieved.

            I look forward to reading the remainder of this baffling text.

Conforming Bull

            Bull is a conformist. He has an innate fear of feeling abnormal, of not being accepted into his society and being stigmatized. His initial anxiety stems from his lack of knowledge regarding the aperture behind his left knee, a vagina, and the abnormality that comes with a mysterious injury. However, once has undergone the ‘appropriate treatment’ following his appointment with Dr. Margoulies, he feels ‘almost normal again’. To emphasize his tendency to be more at ease in socially common situations, Bull is comforted when Margoulies sets himself behind his desk, writes medical gibberish on a piece of paper whilst ignoring him, Bull. This is how Bull perceives doctors should act around their patients, supposedly having watched medical soap operas, as opposed to Margoulies intricate examination of his ‘wound’. It isn’t surprising that Bull is a journalist for Get Off!, a pop culture magazine that is at the pinnacle of culture trend coverage.

Bull in a 'cock&bull' World

            From Carol’s unexplained penis growth, on we go to the sudden apparition of a vagina behind Bull’s left knee – what an awkward place to have one… - Will Self knows how to intrigue this reader. The obvious difference between Bull’s and Carol’s moments of metamorphosis is a temporal one, Carol’s frond morphed into a penis over the course of a few weeks whilst Bull wakes up one morning with a newly acquired sexual organ. Bull’s vagina appears to instantly have a mind of its own, a distinction from Carol’s penis, which took time to eventually dominate her behavior.

            As Bull tends to his habit of ‘[exploring] all the nooks and crevices of his body’, he comes across the vagina. However, the narrator does not credit this discovery to Bull’s borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder-like practice but rather to the ‘malevolent reality-gashing interloper, [who] chose that moment to prink and snag’. The attribution of it mind gives the vagina another dimension apart from being a character’s body part, but a character in its own right. If the vagina itself is not a character, it could be the result of foreign intruder in Bull’s body. Who knows, it might be the symptom of a new pathogen yet to be discovered by modern science? Bull is thrown into a ‘stereoscopic zone’ where factuality no longer coheres with rationality and the predisposed conceptions of human anatomy are thrown up in the air. The same could be said about Carol’s story as she made her progression from being a feminist, albeit one with little knowledge or true conviction, to the don, a sex-driven egomaniac with a penchant for storytelling. It seems as if Bull shall be going through a similar alteration of identity though in the opposite direction, male to female.

           

Humdrum Lady

            Christine was an ordinary housewife; up at seven in the morning to cook a scrumptious breakfast for her brute of a husband, a work out session wearing her favorite tangerine neoprene leotard in front of her beloved Richard Simmons at eight, cleaning up the muck, caused by her husband’s belligerent tendency of spilling his food at dinner and then playing soccer with it when the food was not up to his standard of deep-fried crispiness, around the house between nine and two in the afternoon, and spending the remainder of the afternoon gossiping with the local housewives till her husband returned home for another spell of tender beatings. She had attended a Cosmetology School as a young woman, with the aspiration of becoming a world-renowned make-up artist for celebrities. In the end, her knowledge was only used on herself, in an attempt to withhold the truth of her blissful marriage from her suburban acquaintances. Though deep inside, she knew the regular poundings were potentially hazardous to her health, she disregarded them as a quotidian occurrence that was ordinary and natural; the man is supposed to govern the woman whatever the means. No, this was far from her primary concern. In fact, having become a predictable part of her existence, it was the last of her anxieties.

            Six months before, the pool cleaning company sent a new set of hands, a handsome Guatemalan with bronze skin adorning his bulging muscles. On a weekly basis, he arrived at the house while Christine was just about finishing her household chores, around one thirty, to sweep his titanic net across the pool’s surface, gathering fallen leaves and pinecones, ants that had lost their way back to the colony and the occasional rat. Though limited at first – the polite ‘How do you do’ and glass of water – Christine and the Guatemalan began having conversations about the mundane like the weather and the local murder that happened a few weeks prior. As small-talk topics began to dry up, Christine began learning about his past; where he was from, how he arrived in Southern California, what he has done to survive… She never talked about herself, in fear of repulsing him with her humdrum past. He represented an aperture from her monotonous life, an opening to the audacious world outside her gated community. It was a gateway that she refused to close.