About Me (2008)

A couple of years ago I was studying Multimedia Design and Communication. A prerequisite was a personal web-site containing an e-portfolio. All that code is redundant now but for posterity’s sake here is the content from the old ‘About Me’ page. Please understand that at the time the side effects of my pills were quite, quite maddening.

Christopher John Parlett (born June 5th, 1979) is a British mongrel dog; a drunk, a hack and spiteful, anchorless trash. He is best known amongst those unfortunate enough to be acquainted with him for his pernicious satire, gluttonous hurtful appetites and poor life-choices.

Hark, such a vicious degenerate was not born – it was fostered by a cruel fate.

Born in Portsmouth, England to a humble working class background, he quickly impressed his mother – a hospital cleaner, and his father – a naval dockyard crane-operator, with his startling precocity and ripe dexterity.

Unfortunately Christopher’s keen aptitude would bring an untimely end to this idyllic council house utopia when his father became resentful of this newborn’s usurpation of his status as alpha-male of the house.

Christopher was six months old when he and his mother were thrown out on the streets like so much dirty needles.

He spent the next several years being raised by his Grandmother and young Aunt whilst his mother toiled day and night to support the family. Plagued by nightmares and the grim uncertainty of a future dominated by women, it is a pleasant fiction to imagine that Christopher’s then strong yet gentle heart willed to him a new father and a loving husband to his dear mother.

Our brave soldier’s stepfather was a heavily-medicated RAF veteran with a quick temper, a veritable apothecary of antidotes and a workhouse approach to marriage and discipline.

Eight bleak years passed before the Right Opportunity presented itself to Christopher; he slid away from home without a word to a soul and embarked on a mammoth expedition that would mark his soul forever. When the police brought him home four days later he was disturbed but understood that there was more to life than the reality he had been presented with.

His long-suffering mother divorced her husband two years later whilst Christopher buckled down at the Roman Catholic all boys’ school (to which he’d been awarded an assisted place). To the backdrop of the Machiavellian scandal of the Headmaster’s pederasty and the continuous jibes of “silver-spoon motherfuckers”, it is uplifting to discover that Christopher came away with an impressive four GCSEs at grade C or above.

Shaken over the suffering of his fellow students yet giddy with exam accomplishment, Christopher unfortunately fell in with some unsavoury characters and began his life-long yet inspiring battle with alcohol, narcotics and dark, jaded intimacies.

It wasn’t until a heady two years of Art-School had passed that wanderlust overcame our steadfast young buck and he embarked upon his love-affair with Denmark. At first a strong-backed farm-hand, he quickly impressed his employers with his natural skill and determination to be a hard and tireless worker. It was this attitude that took him away from thankless agriculture and into the factories, warehouses and kitchens that would ultimately consume his fragile mind.

Personality disorders and manic depression reduced our hero to a wreck rejected and betrayed by all he knew and loved. Able only to cope with the perils of existence by ingesting large amounts of psychotropic mood-stabilizers, he was incapable of finding solace in the plastic-hippy machinations of laughably moronic old friends nor comfort from the dwindling members of his nuclear family.

Yet even after vast oceans; desert and forest; mountain and city; the many jobs, friends and lovers he took and cast aside – somehow he would always find himself returning to that land of filtered Vikings.

At the time of writing, Christopher is residing in Aarhus, Denmark; an adroit speaker of the local dialect he has immersed himself in the grand and complex culture of the town – the oldest large city in Scandinavia.

Just a short while ago he was a chef rising to the upper echelons of standing in the local food-service industry but alas an old war-wound became too much to bear and after two invasive knee operations, Christopher is all but lame. Fortunately for our modern day renaissance man he was able to secure a place at a local technical college with a bitter mind to perfecting his art and “selling (his) blackened soul like the prime corporate fucktard (he) was always destined to become.”

Wounded and alienated; an anti-hero for a lost world – none could have imagined anyone would fall for such a wretched creature; least of all the creature itself (Indefatigably sexual and compelling though it was, it was always advisable not to approach the fellow as sudden shocks could startle and alarm it, leading to unpredictable and often violent outbursts.)

Yet the pills and the drinks guided him through the darkness and into the arms of fresh, young love from the old East; and whether this beauty be Dulcinée or Melpomene, the mere sight of the two together might catch a tear in the heart of all but the weariest of lovelorn philistines.

But this short biography is no fairy-tale and this humble scribe no bard – a happy ending is not to be found at this juncture. Even though those days of being found speaking in tongues in the wine aisle of his local budget supermarket (his inner mouth chewed away in amphetamine panic) are but a thing of the past, empathic ennui and a crushing sense of painful absurdity often crash over this hopeless, ruined martyr like a massive wave of cold misery from where the only true escape may be little more than swift, messy oblivion.