They say I’m a miserable fuckwit.

They say I’m a bastard.

Thus far, they’re probably right.

They say I’m a misanthropic clown who enjoys waving my ungroomed arse-hair in people’s faces.

In this, they’re wrong.
(Well, maybe not the clown bit.)

A misanthrope is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (and they should well, fucking know) ”[a] hater of mankind; a man-hater; one who distrusts men and avoids their society” — which is, by extension (if we ignore the implied misogyny) someone who hates human life.

I fucking adore life — real life. The gorgeous, bulging, unglorified surge of it — sensory defiant: the honest roughness where the blank, plastic wall-coating has cracked; the venal stink of an overused dressing gown; the erratic grace of an ecstatic pogodancer.

I love the whimsy of laughing through a broken lip; the glorious, unsanitised madness that bubbles up inside when the absurdity of life overwhelms you; the relentless curiosity that licked a street-light in January and went on to split the atom…

…the exquisite taste of sweat on a lover’s body; those burning moments of unbridled emotion when the world disappears and there is only here… now.

I love it so fucking much that I rage against anything that tries to sterilise it, stunt it, stifle it.

I love it so much that I can even embrace death — not as the evil void we must make war against at all costs, but as a natural end of life; a welcoming release and the enfolding counterpart of that dark, yearning memory — the womb.

I know, I’m a demented romantic. Yee-haw.

It’s said that James Joyce got off on having women sit on his face and fart. I don’t really feel like trying it, but I can see the attraction.

Life is brutal, visceral, rough and dirty, and life is beautiful.

If you don’t see life as beautiful — if you prefer clean, sanitised and unthreatening, then it’s your aesthetics that are warped, not mine.

Anger — anger is beautiful. Anger drives the struggle for equality — the people’s revolutions, the unions and the social guerilla warfare against discrimination. It is the inexhaustible energy source of the wretched and the oppressed; the driver of change; the great equaliser.

I love anger. I love grime and sweat and ragged breath.

Yeah.

I love life.