Prologue

Being one for writing his thoughts down rather than speaking them, he once wrote in his journal; “The inadequate support of cheap imitation shoes is slowly crippling a whole generation of young wannabe fashionistas. Trying desperately to follow the trends of today and unable to afford the real thing, they have opted for a cheaper and, dare I say it, even uglier version of something which already draws un-nerving connotations to John Motson hunkered in a freezing commentary box, wrapped in sheep skin and surrounded by a sea of 50,000 mullets…” Jake Jarvis is a man caught up in a world obsessed with the new, overpriced objects and goods produced for those around him to consume. His frustration at the mindset of an entire generation produced by a global consumer culture threatens to bubble over in a possible break-down of his own mind. His questioning of other human’s choices and decisions will perhaps produce a slip in his own ideas and beliefs, thus surrendering him to the habits and wants of those groups and organizations which he loathes.

Let it be known…

Hello. You are reading this because you have to. Not because you particularly want to, or will find it incredibly interesting, but because it has been forced upon you; in actual fact what is written amongst these sheets is, most probably, not very good for you at all. This is not a disclaimer. Should you meet any harm as a result of what you are about to read, I will gladly pay for any expenses incurred and also try to amount for any mental or psychological pain caused by the following text. Let it be known that this is not a critique of a particular person, nor is it a comment on any social group; it is not meant to hurt anyone’s feelings. Ok…? Then let’s begin.

Jake Jarvis and his Ingenious Juice Experiment

Jake had conducted an experiment one morning which would enable him to take in a lot of fluid. He wanted to take in fluid because his body had become unable to deal with simple bacteria humans used to have no problem dealing with; the ones he had become infected with were commonly known as The Cold. Jake didn’t mind being infected because it meant he didn’t have to go to work. Work is a pointless thing which humans do, on the whole, to earn money, rather than for pure enjoyment or the pleasure of completing a worthwhile task. Mundy Jarvis, Jake’s mother, had always told Jake that whenever he was infected with The Cold that he must take in lots of fluids, presumably because Mundy thought that the bacteria would drown. So Jake sat down and on the advice of his mother, who had been defunct for 28 years, he filled a glass with diluting juice and topped it up with a little bit of water, until the glass was totally full. He planned to take a sip and top the glass up with water after each sip until he couldn’t taste the orangey flavour of the juice any more. It took Jake 437 sips until he was convinced that he couldn’t taste any flavouring in his glass. Happy with his intake of fluid, and convinced that his experiment had taught him something extremely valuable, he went to bed, fell asleep and woke up 7 hours later in a puddle of 389 sips worth of former orange flavoured water which his body had turned into urine.

Born To Fit

After waking in the warm puddle Jake had removed the sheets from his bed and put them in the washing machine with some of his other clothes which were suitably dirty and required washing. These included a Berghaus fleece, two pairs of Karrimor socks, two pairs of CAT socks, five pairs of Calvin Klein boxer-shorts, two pairs of Dickies jeans and an assortment of t-shirts. All of his clothes, except most of his underwear, had been bought from a variety of charity shops and second hand clothing emporiums from around Edinburgh. Jake did not buy his clothing from charity shops because he enjoyed giving to charity, he didn’t suppose anyone shopped in charity shops for the good of charity. Once he’d turned the washing machine dial to the 30 degree wash option he went into the bathroom and took a shower because he was suitably dirty and required washing too. Jake was environmentally conscious and had been told that ‘washing your laundry at 30 degrees Celsius can save you £10 a year’. He enjoyed putting his rubbish in the correct coloured receptacles and taking the short walk to the recycling bins down the road on a Sunday. Jake had become restless over the past year or so and had begun questioning the choices of others. He questioned things like why people didn’t bother to do their recycling properly, or why people felt the need to wear suits when it wasn’t a special occasion. However his main question had become: Why do people spend such a lot of money on such a load of shit? Jake enjoyed the finer things in life; he spent his money wisely, on things that were made with care and with the best materials available. Of course there was the odd exception but Jake tried hard to stick to these principles, he saw no point in paying over the odds for something that was designed to break. Instead he would spend his afternoons productively sifting through the racks and shelves of Edinburgh’s many second hand shops, never looking for anything in particular but always with an eye for something special, something of quality. Jake had become very skilled at being able to tell at a glance if an item were of suitable quality or not for the price on the tag. In fact Jake often thought he should work in a shop like this because of his ability to price the items, excluding the antiques and rarities, with a price which was perfect for both the consumer and the shopkeeper. It thrilled him that he was not buying direct from the manufacturer; some other poor soul had done that for him, instead he was getting the things he liked, things of a high quality and at a ‘low wear’ stage of their lives, for exactly the amount he felt he should be asked to pay, if not less. All in all, Jake was thrifty, even if he didn’t like to be known as such. When around friends and family, Jake would spend his money normally, albeit a bit too excessively at times, like anyone else, without thinking what he was spending it on, with a total disregard for the quality of what he was buying and the costs involved in making it. Take, for example, the horrendous shoes Jake had been semi-obsessing over during the last 6 months, he had many names for them but their official title was: UGG boots. These had become a prime example of people paying over-the-odds for genuine UGG boots and even further over the odds (even thought they were a cheaper option) for imitation branded versions of the UGG boot. Jake’s brain was incredibly quick and receptive, even though he had trouble putting his thoughts into words and often pained for days just to come up with a worthwhile sentence. Jake’s ideas, on the other hand, came thick and fast, although not always coherently or in any particular order, his eyes were like gateways for everything he saw to be brought in and processed quick as lightning, and his nimble hands were very reliable tools for transmitting his ideas, however mundane or whimsical, onto paper.

Chameleon Sanctuary

Jake had recently secured a new job, he had taken it on as the hours suited him and it provided him with exactly £100 every month without having to do a whole lot of hard work. Also, he had come to the conclusion that cleaning ‘an elegant beauty sanctuary in the heart of Edinburgh’s West End’ may prove to be an interesting job. His recent obsessing over the boots had, unbeknown to him, been directly triggered by his time working at the Chameleon Sanctuary Beauty Retreat. There were a lot of things about the Sanctuary that Jake found quite unnerving and found difficult to understand, what astounded him though was the amount of money people apparently paid for the things that went on between these walls… The ceilings were low and the corridors narrow. The door frames seemed to be narrower than any he had ever walked through and the deep brown colour of the floors combined with the dim lighting made it feel like a dungeon, albeit a very finely furnished one. The bins were regularly filled with all sorts of strange, one-time-use implements. Strange overgrown wooden splinters, like lolly sticks on steroids, sat stuck to an indeterminate amount of cotton wool pads. Use-once sandals, plastic hair covers, disposable pants and an unstoppable amount of tissue make up the rest of the bin’s innards. Jake was fully clothed and only cleaning the place and he couldn’t wait to get out; imagine the fear in the eyes of someone in here being poked and prodded by a therapist, wearing the most basic of disposable pants and being repeatedly finger-painted by a stranger with peculiar smelling creams. It defied belief. Jake had spent the last 6 months cleaning Chameleon Sanctuary twice a week. The tiled floor of the room which sat second from the back door on the right was always unnervingly slippery. It had recently been coated with a fine spattering of orangey-brown solution. The ghost of something rectangular sat in the centre of the room. This was the spray-tan room. As absurd as it sounds, women paid to come in here wearing the aforementioned paper pants and be sprayed, head to toe, with a solution containing dihydroxyacetone. Jake had read online that this chemical reacts with the dead skin cells on the top layer of your skin and turns them ‘brown’. Hence, your dead skin cells fall off and your tan fades. “What’s the point?” I hear you ask, well, I don’t know, and neither does Jake.

Class

From what he could make out most of the women he saw wearing the forbidden boots had several traits in common and could be divided into two main categories. The first included those women who wore their boots in a slovenly and idle manner, those who would not look out of place standing at the bus stop in their pyjama bottoms and a hooded top at 11:30 on a Tuesday morning. These women often looked like they had spinal problems or had experienced several broken ankles in the past due to the terrible support offered by the cheap foam soles on their imitation UGGs. The unsuitable support offered by these disgusting fakes coupled with the general ‘weightiness’ that the female wearer was commonly associated with, spelled disaster for the well-being of their feet and their future chances of healthy joints. The other category, although conventionally better to gander upon, remained to Jake as bad as their bed-bug ridden counterparts. Although ‘prettier’ in appearance and with slightly better proportioned bodies, the second category of UGG wearers was in many ways very similar to the pyjama-clad troupe. Both wore excessive amounts of make-up and perfume, dyed their hair and their skin and wore unflattering clothes. From what Jake could make out, the main difference between these two main groups was that the prettier women chose to buy genuine UGG boots and the slovenly party opted for an imitation boot that had somehow managed to top the original UGG in the ugliness, impracticality and physically damaging categories associated with footwear. There is also a third; quite rare faction of the UGG movement which is made up of seemingly pretty, intelligent, free-thinking women who for some reason or another have chose to adorn their feet with these shapeless symbols, surrendering themselves to a present state of sociological distortion. But alas, Jake had decided to grant these women the benefit of the doubt and hoped that one day they may see the light and look back at photos of themselves saying, “What the fuck was I wearing?”

Got Issues

A few days after completing his first juice experiment Jake had been sat on a bench waiting for the Lothian Buses office to open, seeing how many pairs of UGG boots he could spot, when he saw a bus stop at the traffic lights in front of him. The advert on the side of the bus said ‘HURRY!’ in big white letters over a blue and red background. It struck Jake that he had never once seen any type of advertising relating to the sale of UGG boots. How had these things taken over so quickly without advertising? It is a question Jake is still finding himself pondering today. Jake pulled the Metro from his pocket and opened it to a page which had a picture of a very thin woman holding a very large dress, she was wearing UGGs. The story was about a woman who had lost a large amount of the body fat she had spent years building up. The article mentioned that before her ‘life-saving operation’ Kate had tried ‘every diet under the sun’ to no avail. All the diets sounded terrible; from the Atkins to the Subway to the Weight Watchers, however one of them sounded mildly appealing to Jake. He looked down at his stomach and patted it, caressed it with his long fingers; he had been building up a bit of spare body fat himself recently and the Metro had provided just the solution, the Juice Diet.

Phase 2

Maybe he had spoken too soon, been too quick to judge. Maybe he was a bit pasty. He had known a man once, a very quiet, peculiar man whom everyone in the pub referred to as ‘Pasty Pete’ on account of his pale complexion and gaunt appearance. Jake’s Juice Diet had taken him down to below eleven stone now and his usually full face had become more angular than before, at 6’3” he should have weighed somewhere around the 13 stone mark. Add to that the lack of nutrients he was consuming on account of his diet and he began to wonder if it might help him avoid the ‘pasty’ tag if he were a little rosier in the cheeks. Slapping himself only worked in providing him with a more colourful complexion for a short period of time so Jake decided to get a spray tan. More to the point, he decided to give himself a spray-tan. His reasoning was based upon his unwillingness to pay someone £65 (this was the figure he had seen quoted in Chameleon’s price list) for the pleasure. No, he’d do it himself. He knew it was pointless, he knew that his dyed dead skin cells would fall off and it would fade but he only needed a little bit of colour, only for a short time, just to see what it was like and, of course, to improve his face-colour.
         At 6:27 the next morning Jake stepped off the bus and made the two minute walk round the corner to Chameleon, smoking a cigarette he had rolled on the bus. He didn’t normally smoke so early in the morning but he was nervous today. He arrived at the front door of Chameleon short of breath. Jake wondered if his breathlessness was the result of nervousness or excitement? A familiar feeling in his stomach suggested excitement but the sweat coating his palms screamed nerves. He got in quickly, switching the lights on as normal and making his way downstairs to the spray room. He undressed at the cupboard and hung his clothes over the door before reaching into the laundry basket opposite and pulling out as many towels as he could carry. With these he lined the floor (after all he still had to clean it up afterwards) and began the task of loading up the gun. He had taken the model number from the gun and its various attachments the week before and spent four nights researching the proper operating procedures. He learned he was more likely to achieve a successful colour and finish if he had someone else spray him but he could not compromise the integrity of his operation; he enjoyed that if something went wrong, he would have no one to blame but himself. He unwrapped a pair of disposable pants and a shower cap and quickly got to work transforming his pasty body.

Last Straw

Jake had dropped to a mere 9.5 stone by the time he’d spotted the boots at work. In fact they had been there all along, 3 pairs to be exact, but it was only now that Jake began to notice them, to covet them and all their fleecy glory. He no longer scoffed at those he saw wearing them nor was he repulsed by the thought of putting them on; now he yearned to feel them hug the bare flesh of his feet and calves. Jake pulled on the UGG boots until his bare feet had slipped fully into their soft woollen innards. He tugged them up so that each of his heels pressed into the soft foamy sole of the boots one at a time. He had come to work today wearing black leggings and a long baggy t-shirt that barely covered his buttocks. He had disguised his outfit by wearing baggy blue overalls so that, upon inspection, he looked like a maintenance man or contractor of some type. Once fitted with the boots, Jake stood up; a warm euphoria surrounded his head and numbed and blurred his brain until he fell sideways into the wall. As he opened his eyes, laid on his back on the highly polished wood veneered floors, his mouth opened, “the warmth…” he whispered. He pulled himself to his feet and padded his feet up and down slowly, getting a feel for the support and integrity of the boots. How peculiar, there didn’t seem to be any at all, it was like walking on soles made of Halloumi cheese. Even more peculiar was that he didn’t seem to mind, Jake slowly began to walk around the rooms of Chameleon, and then he began to hop and skip and jump until pretty soon he was prancing around those rooms. He stopped dead in the middle of the waiting area and looked out onto the main street. Outside, hand in hand, he saw an elderly couple admiring with sheer astonishment the fluid motions his body was able to take while wearing his UGG boots. He scampered to the front door and flung it open, they weren’t much older than Jake, maybe 70 or so, and suddenly the looks Jake had mistaken for admiration turned to disgust and pity and the old man asked, “What the fuck are you doing?” Jake looked at his reflection in a van window that sat on the street outside the door to the Sanctuary. Upon seeing himself for the first time in months, he stripped naked, walked home, fell asleep and woke up in 284 sips worth of former orange flavoured water that his body had turned into urine.