CJ
Stone was born in Birmingham on the 16th of June 1953.
That makes him a Gemini, for all of you who believe in the
tyranny of destiny (CJ merely believes in the tyranny of
the absurd), a Snake in Chinese Astrology - a Water Snake,
for students of the obscure and arcane - a perennial pot-boiling
philosopher and a resident of a psychological space he likes
to call "Limbo-Land". Caught in between, in other
words, a screen-junkie without any qualifications. Neither
here nor there: neither fish nor foul, caught between a
rock and a hard place, leaping from the frying pan into
the fire, while making his own bed and not wanting to lie
in it. It's a common problem.
Many
people born in the fifties are like this. Too young to feel
comfortable with the Victorian values of the Old World of
the British Empire, of Lyons Corner Teashops and stiff-upper
lip morality, but too old to join in enthusiastically with
the newer, freer world that succeeded it (even though we
were party in the making of that world), Limbo-Landers are
condemned only to observe and to contemplate, to encourage
and to regret.
CJ has
borne all this with a startling lack of fortitude, preferring
despondency to any constructive evaluation of his condition
and sinking ever deeper into the kind of absurdity and despair
that writers of a certain kind of post war European literature
would recognise as their own. CJ was never an original enough
thinker, even, to have invented his own psychological misfortunes.
Somebody else did it all for him.
Actually,
his full name is Christopher James Stone - Chris to his
friends, Christopher to his mum - a name that would have
appeared at the head of this page but for the lack of space
on the masthead in the Guardian Weekend, where he started
his career, belatedly, in September 1993, already too far
over the hill to get the job done properly.
That's
been the story of his life so far: too young to have been
a hippie, too old to have been a punk, too obnoxious to
believe in the New Age, too airy-fairy to join the SWP,
too sensitively literate to bear factory work, and too incoherent
to make anything useful of his life, he has wandered this
world in a daze of breathless insecurity for as long as
he can remember, compensating himself with beer and cigarettes
and bad TV. All of which might account for the peculiarities
of his writing style: a cross between Charles Bukowski on
Librium and a letter home to his mum from a Bed and Breakfast
holiday in Guildford on a particularly damp weekend..
So let
this be a warning to you: STAY AWAY FROM THIS SITE. If psychological
ineptitude is catching, you may already be infected.
