Little by little, I stopped buying soccer cards. I didn’t like soccer. I started buying punk pictures instead. I didn’t know half the people in the pictures compared to the soccer cards. But it was still a step up. I was determined to find out everything you could find out about punk. Some of the characters in the pictures didn’t seem like they were particularly punk. For example, I got lots of copies of the card with Dr. Feelgood on it. “Feel good” means being content. That’s not punk. Punk means feeling bad and angry, not putting up with any assholes. Punks don’t believe in the future. For them, there’s no future, only an endless decline. There’s no point trying because everything’s all going to hell. Nuclear war could break out at any moment. Anyone not wearing torn clothes isn’t really punk, was my opinion. It wasn’t enough to simply play at a loud volume to be punk. What’s more, punks typically didn’t wear ties. The Brits didn’t even have collars on their shirts — they tore them off. David Bowie wasn’t punk, nor Madness, nor Ian Dury. Yet there were pictures of them on the punk cards. It was like the makers of punk cards weren’t quite clear about what punk was. I threw those pictures away immediately. Tenpole Tudor and Adam Ant went the same way. They weren’t punk, though many people seemed to believe they were. I couldn’t believe Johnny Rotten would be friends with Adam Ant. Adam Ant dressed in some stupid costumes. Some bands were still a gray area. I didn’t know if they were punk. There were bands like The Jam, The Police, and Blondie. I kept their pictures until I knew for sure.
The first few days of summer vacation were spent mostly hanging about. I stayed inside my room, reading and listening to records. I read the lyrics of the songs with an English-Icelandic dictionary at hand, looking up and underlining words I didn’t know. I got a picture of Johnny Rotten from my punk cards and put it on the wall. I turned around the award I got for Best Performance in Sports at a competition at the National Scout Convention and scrawled on the back of it with a big, black marker. The award was made of leather. I wrote JOHNNY POTTEN in large letters then put a big A inside a circle. I was done with Scouts. I’d been in the Venture Scouts. I was only there a year. The group dissolved. We’d started by learning knots and reading Baden Powell and memorizing various rules. I never completely got knots. I didn’t know how to tie a single one. I cheated on the knot test by having a pre-made Bottle Sling in my pocket. The only knot I knew how to do properly was the hanging knot. Then our troop leader took up smoking and we started messing about with that, too. Scout meetings began to change, little by little. Our interest in Baden Powell declined steadily until it fell off completely, and instead of reading The Boy Scout’s Handbook, we started looking at porno mags the older boys were resourceful enough to bring along. The area leader became some sort of big-shot winemaker and bootlegger. Finally, the bottom fell out of the Scouts. Meetings were mostly hanging out, smoking, looking at dirty magazines, and talking about sex. I felt okay talking and smoking, especially when I could grub a cigarette and a swig from the older boys. Of course, I was also interested in the pages of the dirty magazines. But masturbation didn’t sit well with me, and when people started to get out their dicks, then I made myself scarce. There’s something especially embarrassing about talking to people who are masturbating at the time, especially when they’re wearing scout uniforms.
I left the Scouts. Baden Powell was standing with crossed arms in the hallway and looking at me, a strict expression on his face.
“What’s wrong with you, boy? Aren’t you a man?!”
Some days, I went over to Fat Dóri’s and hung out at his house or went over to Óli the Stud’s to listen to records. Sometimes Kristján Þór came over and we played Risk. Kristján Þór was part of a past I was trying to get rid of. He had no idea about or interest in punk but was trying to be like me. He tried to keep our friendship going while I neglected it. I felt lame around him. He was a dork, and I was trying to be tough. I avoided him and made endless excuses for not being able to play, or pretended to be tired or on the way to something he couldn’t go to. I also enjoyed being on my own; when no one was around to see, I fetched my Action Man, which was hidden under a pile of clothes in my closet, and played with him. I often went to the library and hung out there. I’d already read all the books in the children’s and teenage section — including the girls’ books, Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, Sven Hassel, and all the adult books I thought were interesting. I greedily paged through Melody Maker and drank in everything I could about punk. I researched the bands I’d gotten on the punk cards and was persuaded were actual punks. The staff, most of whom knew me well after years of frequent visits, even let me cut out articles and pictures from old magazines. But I needed more information about anarchism. I read a biography of Peter Kropotkin. I found it abstruse and frustrating. The book described various parts of Kropotkin’s life but shed little light on anarchism itself. The only other books on the subject were weighty scholarly tomes in English whose titles I could not even pronounce. I borrowed Anarchism: From Theory to Practice and pored over it at home. My study of English until now had not offered me more than tiny insights into song lyrics, newspaper articles, and interviews. Faced with a textbook, I was baffled. I’d never read a book in English, let alone such a complex one. And although I understood some of the phrases, I couldn’t get the gist. I paged through it, looking for familiar slogans like “Fuck the system,” but didn’t find anything. For chapter after chapter, it was all about some workers in Spain hundreds of years ago and some wars. I threw the book across the room, disappointed. What a buzzkill. This couldn’t be what Johnny Rotten was interested in.
I always slept badly — I’d lie awake late into the night. I read or played Risk on my own until morning. Only then could I sleep. But I didn’t sleep long. There was so much I had to do, to try and find out about. During the day, I was tired. As soon as I lay in bed at night, I started to think. It was like my brain couldn’t see any purpose in sleep. Thoughts came in waves, and I couldn’t deal with them. My brain was continually producing new thoughts, ideas, and questions; I had no control over them. I felt like an observer standing at a busy intersection watching cars he couldn’t affect. It didn’t matter how I tossed and turned and tried to get rid of the thoughts and empty my mind. None of it worked. My brain totally overwhelmed me; I was merely its feeble accessory. I tried to think of one particular thing, like when I was little. I’d built an imaginary city in my mind, planned out the network of streets, furnished an entire house. That was how I fooled my brain so that it wasn’t out of control in every direction. When I had trouble falling asleep, I imagined I was in this city. It hid all kinds of dangers: wild animals, robots, automatic guns with motion sensors that fired when approached. If I was able to lose myself here, my brain’s other thoughts weren’t able to reach me any longer, and I’d manage to fall asleep. But it had stopped working. The brain had contrived to take total control; it had overcome me. By evening, just as things were quieting down, my imagination burst into a fireworks display and a circus where everything got mixed together. Endless questions and no answers. What is anarchism? What will happen in the future? Is there life on other planets? Is there a God? Some thoughts went in unceasing circles, turning around one another and giving rise to new thoughts and questions. Some exploded with loud bangs the way rockets do, then disappeared. Others came like cars or planes, loud and quick to disappear but returning just as swiftly. It was like an entire carnival was being held in my head every single night. Dadadararadadara. Sometimes, I had a realization; the answer to a question I had been wondering about a long time ago would suddenly appear. I scrabbled to write it down so I wouldn’t forget. But when I woke up, I couldn’t work out what I’d written; I’d never know why or in connection with what I’d been writing. This caused me anxiety and despair. What can you do in such a situation? My mind was like a busy airport where aircraft took off and landed, vanishing over the horizon as new planes came in to land, employees dashing about on this or that task, and everything flowing continuously on and on. Never at rest. Everyone always had to be somewhere. No quiet moments when everything would fall silent. The airport in my head was never shut. Are people good or bad? How do you say hallærislegt in English? Will I ever get a girlfriend? Am I crazy? Will I get put in a loony bin like Cousin Kiddi? He was awake day after day, got up to all kinds of nonsense, and was subsequently sent to the loony bin when he could no longer help himself. One day he’d had enough; he snuck out in the middle of the night, went swimming in the sea, drowned, and was dead.