The Problem with Community

I must be getting old. Well, I know I am, but this is one of those moments when the realisation creeps up and bits you on the arse like one of those foul spiders that hide under toilets seats in Australia*. Well that happened last night. Not the spider thing, the biting arse thing.

It bit me in when I was sat in the empty bar of the local church club after going over to join so I could hire the hall for a party. I had to join, you understand. That is important. I’m not one of life’s natural joiners. I’m also not religious, so to be joining a church club group was a strange experience I can only liken to finding myself pregnant with puppies. Sort of.

But then a strange thing occurred in my thinking place. I began to think I felt a combination of nostalgia and loneliness. There were pictures of the people who cut the first sod of earth back in 1912 when the church was built and I could see fields where my house now stands; there were pictures of the men who built the grotto to some saint or other I used to play around as a kid; there were pictures of the village I grew up in back when it was a village and not just the suburban discharge of the nearest town I’ve only ever known it as. Suddenly I felt the emptiness that squats inside me, just behind my ribs and down into my gut, grow a little bit, like a giant squirming, vibrating bacteria splitting into two after having a fruitful hand-shandy with itself. The dirty bugger.

I want to be part of my community, I thought. I want to go to church fetes and drink at the church club and nod and smile to people in the street with an innate sense of shared history. I want to belong! my weary soul screamed at the godless skies, see-through soul fists shaking with the injustice of it all. I want to be a part of this, of my, community dammit!

Then some thick, booze-hound local rolled into the bar, cracked some dreary joke to the haggard barmaid who laughed like a drain sluicing pig guts and I thought do I fuckers like! I have nothing in common with these people other than my location in the world. Sure, we made have gone to the same school and church, but I hated school (a daily ritual in soul stripping that I still think I should get a refund for) and realised church for the filthy lie it is many, many years ago. All the social club is to these people is a place to gather, shovel beer down their gullets until they can no longer hear the voice inside pleading for some kind of release before they waddle home farting like a reputed gas terminal so they can narrowly avoid burning the street down by cooking chips in the deep fat fryer and collapse into bed to bravely struggle against fat-induced sleep apnea like the fucking pointless warthogs they are.

And it’s not just these cunts either. All of them. All of you. Cunts. I’ve been places, met locals. Drunk in their watering holes. Almost without exception social clubs (especially those that are just pubs with a room full of folding trestle tables) are full of the drunk, swirly eyed, surly twats I fully expect to follow me outside and beat the shit out of me after I spurn their clumsy repressed homosexual advances or jealous ramblings about me thinking I’m better than them**. Life’s flotsam gather in these places like the shit and foam that bob about in the stinking harbours of dying fishing towns.

And the ones that aren’t piss-ridden alccies are always happy, nice people thereby further showing me up for the hate-filled anti-social cockend I know all too well I am. Bastards. Why can’t they shun these leper-filled holes like I do, then at least I would feel justified in my hatred of community and not like I’m missing out on something, like a thick school-leaver destined to never get a simple joke’s punchline.

What I need is my own community. One by me and for me and the scum can fuck off. I might let the happy people in, but in all honesty I doubt they’d join. To be honest, knowing what a smart-arsed misery guts I am, I don’t think I will. What a twat.

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* When I was a kid and found out about them I spent two years squatting on the toilet seats to take a crap in the belief that if one popped out (a spider, not a pellet of used food) I could leap free and avoid a fanging in the ballbag.

** I am. Or am I? Yes. Yes I am.