Revolution Read Online Free Page B

will be some conjecture in this book; what I have done, though, with considerable assistance, is navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and taking drugs were my only solution to a state where, one day at a time, I never drink or take drugs. What happened?
    As a lost little boy in Essex, awaiting Lakeside, adoring the ambivalent beaming patriarch Ronald McDonald, I felt a discontentment. I loved my mother, was uncomfortable around my stepfather, and adored my absent dad. I felt disconnected, though, and frustrated. My mum was ill a lot, I was uneasy at home, unsettled and insecure. This feeling of irritability and alienation meant I was malleable. Have you ever tried to argue with someone who doesn’t want anything from you? It’s hard. Have you ever noticed in a rowwith someone that no longer loves you that you have no recourse? No tools with which to bargain. If you stroll up to a stranger and tell them that unless they comply with your demands they’ll never see you again, it’s unlikely that they’ll fling themselves at your feet and beg you not to go. They’ll just wander off.
    When people are content, they are difficult to maneuver. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. My intention in writing this book is to make you feel better, to offer you a solution to the way you feel.
    I am confident that this is necessary. When do you ever meet people that are happy? Genuinely happy? Only children, the mentally ill, and daytime television presenters.
    My belief is that it is possible to feel happier, because I feel better than I used to. I am beginning to understand where the solution lies, primarily because of an exhausting process of trial and mostly error. My qualification to write a book on how to change yourself and change the world is not that I’m better than you, it’s that I’m worse. Not that I’m smarter, but that I’m dumber: I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker.
    My only quality has been an unwitting momentum, a willingness to wade through the static dissatisfaction that has been piped into my mind from the moment I learned language. What if that feeling of inadequacy, isolation, and anxiety isn’t just me? What if it isn’t internally engineered but the result of concerted effort, the product of a transmission? An ongoing broadcast from the powerful that has colonized my mind?
    Who is it in here, inside your mind, reading these words, feeling that fear? Is there an awareness, an exempt presence, gleaming behind the waterfall of words that commentate on every event, label every object, judge everyone you come into contact with? And is there another way to feel? Is it possible to be in this world and feel another way? Can you conceive, even for a moment, of a species similar to us but a little more evolved, that have transcended the idea that solutions to the way we feel can be externally acquired? What would that look like? How would that feel—to be liberatedfrom the bureaucracy of managing your recalcitrant mind. Is it possible that there is a conspiracy to make us feel this way?
    If we were cops right now, we’d look for a motive. If our peace of mind, our God-given right to live in harmony with our environment and one another, has been murdered, who are the prime suspects? Well, who has a motive?

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One Hand Clapping
    B Y THE TIME I WAS A JUNKIE , I NEEDED DRUGS .
    Lakeside had been a letdown. Once you’ve walked round its three floors, clocked a few birds, mostly uninterested, maybe nicked a pen or a CD, or got threatened by some hard lads from Tilbury, what’s left to do? There’s stuff to look at on the other side of the glass; mostly you can’t afford it. That opened up the possibility that the problem was an economic one. If I could buy that stuff, everything would be alright. A brighter bloke would’ve given more consideration to that equation, but not me. I devoted myself to acquiring the means to solving the problem as presented.
    Get