Adrian Gray

“I wanted to say to them: I don't even know what we're doing. There is no scheme. There's nothing we want or hope for. I felt as if everything was pressing in, as if my mind was a sludgy and toxic as the slurry that covered the floor, the walls, our skin. There is no difference anymore, I realised, between what we were taking in and what we were expelling, between what we were and what we might aspire to be, between what we consumed and expelled, and what we'd become. It was all shit. We were shit. Our world was shit. Everything was a single, flowing, un-dammed, undifferentiated river of filth, and within that river we were formless and liquid and horribly free, and all anyone wanted to do was to fashion new moulds into which we should pull the cooling and hardening putrescence of who we were, so they could force what was formless into a form that they could comfortably condemn.’ (p.290)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“Sometimes, looking back, I try to isolate a moment to change, a day or a night on either side of which things were demonstrably different. I never succeed. Partly, I think, is because it's simply not possible. Outside of sudden, violent events, changes is ongoing; we measure it only by holding what we've become against the memory of what we once were. But it's also because, in that space, at that particular time, We were so enmeshed in change, so completely caught up in it that singular, momentary factors became lost and blurred. Day and night slipped their boundaries. Our bodies ached, contorted, then were numbed with narcotics and went slack. My fingernails became sharp, then broken. In regular life, the life we'd left, we would have managed these processes, checked them, turned things back to how they were and how we liked them. There, in that concrete room, we surrendered ourselves to time and all its effects. The heat was unrelenting, pooling us in sweat and thickening the stink in which we lived. (p.271)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“We were inundated with food. Delivery, vans from local supermarkets arrived, laden with crates of booze, fine chocolates, cooked meats, exotic fruits....
What once had felt necessary, then abundant, now began to feel obscene. In part, we revelled in that obscenity. We took pictures of ourselves awash with food, not, just eating it, but rolling in it, lying on it, burying ourselves in it. When people found this offensive, we simply absorbed and digested their disgust in much the same way as we re-absorbed the shit we produced from our bodies. Zelma, in particular, enjoyed this aspect of what we did. It harked back to her adjustment of adverts. Her violent hatred of consumerism. This isn't our life, she wrote in the caption of a particularly excessive and indulgent image - Kim lying on her back while from above eight bottles of champagne were emptied over her face - it's yours. The post attracted a particularly high level of outrage. What was this? People wanted to know. Was this a protest? Or just debauchery? Were we anti-consumerist, as many seemed to feel we should be, or in fact, hyper-consumerist, an idea which some people found it offensive as the idea that we were some sort of plague cult. (p.266)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“You know what I think?’ said Zelma. ‘You got to start small, start symbolic, then grow it until it's huge.’
‘Meaning what’, I said
‘Meaning take back certain moments, enjoy certain moments starting with your body. Starting with how the only shit you can actually save her is at the weekend. I mean, Why? Why is that?’
‘In the morning I'm rushed. And when I get and then I get to work and I'm busy. And I feel like people notice when I'm away from my desk. I feel like either they think to themselves that I'm skiving, or that they just immediately know that I'm shitting.
‘Why shouldn't they know that you're shitting?’
‘I don't know.’
‘From now on, she said, I want you to prioritise your shitting. In your day now starting tomorrow nothing matters except shitting. Your sole purpose is to shit. I want you to get professional at shitting. And when you get good at it, celebrate it.’ (p.141)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease