BAC

And it's a new record, with a calculated BAC of .31

let the hangover commence.

Room 38

There is a room beyond the eyesight of all the people I could never have known. I go away, out from the party, to find a hiding place where I can be alone. But you'll miss me when I'm gone, and tonight, all you'll get is pain. I'll never leave room thirty eight. Inside my room I am an island, a happy castaway in my own little world, and I don't care if you might miss me, you never cared that much when I was still around. And you'll miss me when I'm gone, and tonight, it's YOU who'll be alone. I'll never leave room thirty eight. And I've known it all along, even if you could change it, you'd do the same again. So I'll never leave room thirty eight.

Bob Dylan's right on the money

This is a gun built by a company called Gonher. It's made of metal, and it doesn't have an orange cap on the end of the muzzle. It's a cap gun. Police are all crazy about shit like this now, and you read stories in the news about toddlers being arrested and stuff
for playing with obvious plastic toy guns.

But this Gonher pistol was very realistic, and I bought one in France in about 1996. Luckily, we were never searched at customs off the Stena Liner, and my Gonher pistol came to the UK. In 1997, in the months following Princess Di's assassination, I took my Gonher pistol into school, hidden in the bottom of my gym bag. My parents didn't know it was there, and I was all adrenaline praying that they wouldn't look in my bag and find it. They didn't. In the playground before school started, I ordered some of the other kids to stand facing up against the back wall of the hall/gym/lunchroom. (Incidentally, anyone else remember being made to run around the periphery of their school hall in their pants and vest (I forgot my PE kit a lot) with terrible music blaring out of a casette deck that looked like the picture below, stepping in all manner of crusts and yoghurt smears as you went?)



Anyway. So I've got all these kids lined up against the wall, and they're playing along but don't really understand why I'm shouting orders at them, until I pull out my Gohner gun, holding the pistol and letting the bag drop around it, and start waving at these kids. I'm pretty sure they knew it was a cap gun. They stayed against the wall, either way. But the bell went, and so I had to hide my pistol again and give up on the massive rush and powertrip I was enjoying.

But that was the closest I ever got to a school shooting. And if I'd done that now, me, my parents, and my whole extended family would be in prison, there'd be an internal security investigation, media criticism of our police and customs and border control, Stena Line would be fined an amount of money roughly equal in size to the annual national revenue of Canada, and we'd be at war with France. Luckily, they were all distracted buying Candle in the Wind singles at the time.

But god, it was a hell of a powertrip, and I felt cool as FUCK.