Ollie, Mt Eden

“I’m 45 and I have no drivers licence” … it feels like something a dominatrix would make her slave say to degrade himself in front of her.

I’m Oliver Green. I’m a cruel 46. I live in Mt Eden and I’m commercially creative.

Right now, I’m working remotely. Going for neighbourhood bike rides with my little ones. Training in the back garden. Cooking. Trying to keep two tiny minds busy without resorting to the TV … and failing. My kids have watched so much Peppa Pig they have English accents.

Before this, I loved driving. I got my license late so it’s still novel for me. I started learning in my 40’s – 45 to be exact. Being 45 with no driver’s license is demeaning. “I’m 45 and I have no drivers licence” … it feels like something a dominatrix would make her slave say to degrade himself in front of her.

How am I keeping my spirits up? Burpees. It’s true. I’m tricking my body into giving me drugs by making it think it’s dying. I go, “Hey body, you’re being chased by something terrible and snarling. Something with an erection and a knife. That must be the case, because why else would you be feeling like this? You’d better give me some drugs so that we can fight this hairy, horny, knife-carrying ghoul!” and then my body gives me drugs and I lie in a puddle of my own melted will-power and sob tears of joy while dolphins swim through my veins and the two women from ABBA fart pure oxygen into my mouth … or something like that. I’m also going to the supermarket like it’s a holiday, and I’ve started eating carrots like they’re the last thing on the planet. For me, carrots are the official flavour of Covid. I hate carrots now. Fuck carrots. So inconsistent taste wise, how can you have a peppery one and then a sweet one? There’s no way to tell! You can tell a flowery Braeburn apple just by flicking it, but there’s no way with carrots. Loveless vegetables from the devil’s own arsehole. Which reminds me. I’ve run out.

Oh, and I’m loving VEEP. Holy shit. It’s so good. The writing is so brilliant. I’ll watch four VEEPS back to back and then go onto YouTube and watch the insult reels. And then eat a carrot.

I lost my Mother to a stroke. A terrible thing. It’s made me embrace the hippy in me. I’ve realised I’m a believer in the concept of ‘everythingness', that we’re in this form of a human for a while and then we die and melt back into the universe and exist everywhere all at once. Seeing death and seeing birth. The two times you’re faced with the concept of the soul and what that means. You greet a child and it’s mind blowing, because there’s a fully formed being inside that tiny little body. You go, “Okay. Fuck. You’re already you. I promise to get you on your feet and into the world but all I am is someone who is on the journey with you. You’re not mine. No one is anyone’s. I’m just here to share this ride.” And then you see death and your mother’s body and it’s just a body. There’s nothing in it. There’s no comfort to be had from touching it. Or talking to it. It’s packaging. The ‘thingness’ has gone. The soul. Back into the foreverness of the flat circle of time and space. Back into the mystery and wonder of love and life and loss and magic. I dunno. What the fuck do I know?

Once, back in my drug days in London, I went to Peckham to buy cocaine from a crack house and ended up staying there for two days playing chess with a toothless Rastafarian named ‘Benny Big Cock’. So in a sense, yes, I have experienced something like this before.

What am I finding hard right now? How fast the days are going. My life is falling through my hands. What even is this? The speed of life makes me fall into the trap of nihilism. It’s the only defence against the realisation that I’m a man in a box inside a box inside a box. Wake up. Drink coffee. Work. Feed kids. Repeat. Die. This doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. You don’t matter. I don’t matter. Nothing matters. We are specks on specks. The camera pulling out and out and out. Revealing our world as a snow globe on the shelf of an alien species’ hearth. Then that snow-globe-hearth scene in another alien species’ terrarium. Then that whole snow-globe-hearth-terrarium scene in a window in the background of a photo of an alien family posing beside a new car. Going. Going. Gone. Nihilism is an honest response to the life that we find ourselves living. It’s almost rational. If the outcome for a life time of toil, doubt, worry and fair play is nothing … then why not just fast forward to nothing now? My wife and I discuss the concept of nihilism and she finds the pointlessness of us as all a relief. But it makes me panic.

Also, carrots.

Looking ahead, I’m most worried about the collapse of society. People like zombie movies because, after the killing and looting, it’s a reset of society. It’s a chance to start over. A real shot at equality. As if the myth meritocracy has finally come true. And revenge. Lots of revenge. Zombie films are poor people’s porn. For the rich it’s probably a little too close to the bone. The rich don’t see us as very different from zombies now anyway. Drifting around pointlessly, wearing tattered clothes, moaning and smelling like ‘LYNX Rat Orgy.’ They’re already locked into their compounds at night and say things like, “Don’t go into the city - they’re everywhere.”

I’m feeling positive about getting paid full salary again, so I don’t have to hand my house to the bank, who will sell it to an overseas consortium of Saudi Business men, who will bulldoze it and make it into luxury apartment block where they store their motorbikes. I sometimes smile as I imagine a world where we are living on our wits, collecting rainwater in buckets and snaring seagulls on the beaches. It’s comfortable there in the end times. Where nothing matters anymore and everything is real. Where no one is keeping score because the score machines are repurposed as ‘dropping machines’ and we all know what a dropping machine is, right? A dropping machine is a machine that is designed to be dropped from the roof of your house onto the skulls of looting hordes, as they approach at night to steal your carrots.

The worst thing to run out of? WIFI. Let’s all welcome WIFI to the needs list. Nestled in there with FOOD WATER & SHELTER. If aliens came to earth they’d think, “Hi, what’s your WIFI code?” is the way we greet each other on this planet.

Before lockdown, I bought a crossbow. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go but I didn’t want to be left holding an incense stick if the riots started. I’m a glass half full kind of guy, except the glass is half full with the blood of my enemies.

I miss normal life. It was like being stuck in a lift with 8 billion people. When we get out of lockdown, the first thing I’m going to do is launch Issue 8 of my zine, NEVERLAND.

That’s my lockdown. Follow @neverlandzine and win a free carrot.

Spritzing.

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