Edited 14/05/05, 24/06/05

I felt like smashing a spade into her face just to watch her cry, though this would go no way to convince her I was mentally stable. From that mouth of hers - uninjured by garden tools - she had uttered words that damaged me inside like cheap Latvian vodka. Multiple mental parts had become biological sludge through an application of her caustic sentences.

I was stiff with the rigour of suppressed violence and revenge; a statue seated with a mess of thick desperation inside. I scratched the head and the internal sludge for a 'get-out clause' or verbal gymnastic workout that could change her mind. The 'head custard' stirred and produced nothing of use for any speaking orifices. I said nothing. She had a motionless verdict and a self-assured voice; and I cared very little for either.

Her desk was a carefully organised clutter of clinical bureaucracy. Papers and forms lay in loose piles or caged in hi-rise plastic trays stacked on stilts. Her sponsored desk calendar showed the 28th of July and the name and logo of some surgical supply or drug company. In fact most items on the desk looked like they had arrived as offerings from sales representatives: a free stapler if you use our surgical gloves, a complimentary pencil caddy for buying our blood pressure gauge, pens, pencils, paperweights all with screaming logos and company names proudly announcing themselves just in case you are stuck for a place to buy, buy, buy. On this day I had walked into this doctors room with just myself to sell.. only she wasn't buying any of it.

The desk calendar was a reminder to me that it was the most of a year since I had submitted an application to the police. I was sick of working for money, sick of my purpose for someone else's profit, someone else's new sports car, so sick that I had a minor mental breakdown at the waste of all my time. Prescription drugs cleaned the sick out of my mind, and time supplied the glue to stick back the pieces. Into a shiny cleaned out head I resurrected an old and battered dream. I needed to open spaces between the blindness and pull the burnt shadows away from the breaks. I could no longer be the victim of a global situation and moved with the intention of playing a part in the state of the world. 'The world is what you make it', echoed as a cliche spoken in conversational drunk. Few people genuinely get to make a world but we all have to live in the consequences. I needed to make this a place in which to live not hide and to return respect to the ones that didn't walk on the backs of others. This day was the day of my police medical examination and the words of a product-whore doctor had murdered my dream in its newborn cot.

"I am afraid that with the information that you have given me on this form and in our subsequent conversation that I cannot recommend your application to proceed any further"

She spoke the words as if they meant nothing, or more accurately, like she had made herself believe she was doing me some kind of favour. I guess that's the way you sleep at night when you take other peoples dreams away for a wage.

"You have suffered a period of depression, and the work involved in the police force could set that off again. I couldn't put you into a position that could make your health suffer"

Well, I'm sorry spade-face but that is exactly what you have done and I can hate you so much in this moment. I was depressed, yes, but in a call-centre booth it's an occupational disease. A university provided me with nothing but expanded knowledge of what I was missing outside and the only work I could find was manipulating people to consume lists of things they never wanted. I was depressed because people that steal, intimidate, persecute and kill always get away with it. They thrive and spread like ants on a coke can and I can't do anything about it. I was depressed through a lack of a career, a lack of direction and a lack of control over the decay of western civilisation. Somehow after everything else, the sight of a face smashed on a dashboard seems like nothing more than an entertaining website.

"When you submitted your application surely you must have known?"

When you read my application surely you knew that you would fail me? Instead we had to go through this whole pointless charade. Why did I have to lie naked on that cold sterile couch with your hand on my scrotum? I didn't think to question it at the time. Sure, the moment was sweet as I imagined having sex with you over the instrument trolley - that flouncy flowered summer skirt just demanding to be lifted as you try to avoid being impaled by a 'free sample' scalpel. I admit in truth I was split by the fear of an involuntary erection faux pas and the possibility of a small penis preventing enrolment due to a lack of 'perceived power' in a naked gangster sauna situation. Surely I must have known what? That your point of view would be informed by hysterical tabloid doctrine instead of science? How I wish I'd asked that one. Depression is now so regular that if you look out of your window and don't want to jump out of it then you are probably sitting in a bungalow. Who is to say it is a disease anyway, and not a naturally occurring behavioural reaction to the conditions we find ourselves in? If I become cold I shiver, if I become pointless should I not look for a knife drawer? Prozac use is widespread like the birth control pill and recycled traces of both are now found in the water supply. Drug-laced piss swills around in the sewers beneath us, beneath you, swimming with infertile humping rats plagued by unreasonable happiness.

Desperation can do strange things to a man, like leading him into nightclubs or masturbating in the supermarket. Desperate ideas are generally defective. I considered breaking into the doctor's quarters and scribbling altered results on the papers. I thought of threatening her with violence, it all seemed logical at the time. Nothing I said seemed to make any difference so surely a sharp pencil in the throat could only open the dialogue. This whole depression thing was so much in the past it was starting to smell but written on paper it still looked bad. The doctor's untouched face continued to talk and bury me with dogma.

"For this condition we really need evidence of one or two years without relapse"

The decision had already begun to set in like the crust on a weeping sore. Nothing from my mouth would ever help a situation that's already tagged, bagged and driven to the morgue. I somehow had to accept it and move on. Dead ambitions are always difficult to mourn; with the death of a future only views of the past remain. I look at my past and see everything I want to escape from: things I shouldn't have said, people I shouldn't have done. If I had only lied on that form then none of this soul-searching land-fill would be necessary. I was so naive to presume honesty was a valued trait of modern law enforcement. One or two years without relapse? That was going to be tough after today.

Outside the sounds of a distant lawnmower drift aimlessly on a lazy wind. Somewhere back inside another application form is stamped, forgotten and filed in the loser drawer. Another naked nut-sack sits pensively on sterility. A door closes loudly as if for effect.

The path away from the Police Headquarters felt much longer and harder underfoot than I had previously remembered it; arcing into the horizon like a concrete claw. The HQ was an incoherent spatter of disparate buildings and departments forming a small purpose built town outside the major city. The burn of summer punched life through the scene; fuelling trees to beautify themselves with buds and flowers. All around was the cut and paste of edited nature landscaped for the senses and practical maintenance. Birds flew straight lines and sang for attention. Precision trimmed lawns carpeted the expanses between accommodation, gymnasiums, offices and conference rooms. Any benefit to the law was hidden or lost in a wisp of cumulus cloud. I breathed in the idyll and savoured the share my taxes had paid for; booze for the water feature, cigarettes for the flowers. In reality none of this was mine and so physically, atmospherically distant from the crime and grime of the city.

Those fights and tears, that sweat and smegma; the sounds and smells of life can be an annoying distraction from the filing and paperwork. This 'satellite' administrative centre is a spider unwilling to sit in its own web, yet still expecting to catch flies.

My shoes scraped along thick gravel driveways and I hung along for the ride. The security gates passed effortlessly by, no sign-outs or security checks; it was a slow train in, but a fast track out for the average Joe Schmoe. The grey haired old cunt in the guard room attempted a look away from the latest celebrity sleaze rag he was reading, though thought better of the effort and continued to suck in the junk with his eyes.

The sun pushed out the kind of rays that could give a coal miner a cancer. The faint smell of tarmac melting in the haze threatened to smother what nature does naturally. I rode my shoes in a daze, passing 'nice' little country houses for those with enough liquid capital to drown in. Oversized cars and supersized gardens were being washed and pruned respectively by scuttling little women in gloves and pastel tennis shorts. These were not natives or local people, they had been priced out long ago. These were the second houses of those with second cars on driveways, used only for the second 'wife' on scuzzy weekends. Tradesmen, farmers and craftsmen now work as packers and shifters and live like ants in the city because of someone's 'desperate' need for a country retreat. If you have the cash you can always escape the filth, but the rest just have to learn to love it.

The road was hot, the walk was long and the suffering was better than a bad tempered taxi ride. Nature was withdrawing from civilisation like the gums of a corpse. The gardens, the 'fish tank' cages of botanical elitism, the imprisoned and disciplined plant life; reduced on a scale in parallel to my journey. 'Nice' little houses turned into nice little clusters; clinging together in groups for security or support. The tarmac streak burned onward as groups turned into petulant gangs, into villages and villages into suburbs. Post offices and rustic pubs turned into off-licences and convenience stores. Lush gardens turned microcosm in a window box, window boxes to decorative plastic pot plants. The fragrant pleasure of tarmac and grass cuttings was now replaced by the sour tang of burnt fuel and sun-bleached dog shit.

I had stepped between two worlds; from a fantasy to reality, from ambition to rejection. My head offers a dart of pain, a reminder for the times I banged it into the wall for every relived second of the day. The sounds from outside buzz with people going places and vendor places doing people. I read the toilet wall graffiti until it stops moving like a broken kaleidoscope. 'Be here 7pm Tuesday for a blow' fades and dissolves into the wall like piss in the snow. An old man once told me that a train station was an almost eternal symbol for the convergence of souls, for lives at a crossroads, for options and choices. The shifting boards of electronic letters spelling out the corners of the world, multiple destinies, links and changes. The old tramps words spin like graffiti on a toilet wall and vibrate through a crunching tannoy. I feel the crumpled return ticket in my otherwise empty pocket; a token of pure rigid guided fate. I smell the sick on the train and somehow feel closer to home.