A Fucked Up Life in Books by Anonymous

by chance and that you are starving and you haven’t changed your knickers yet today. But I didn’t know what to say. So I went in to the kitchen and rolled the dice.
    ‘Someone was sick on me last night,’ I told them. ‘I don’t have any clean clothes.’
    ‘Riiiight,’ they replied. ‘Bye then.’ And off they went.
    I was pretty pissed off by this point. And my friend (who did my fucking head in at the best of times) came in from their day in the library.
    ‘We’re all going out later, so-and-so’s parents have put money behind the bar for his birthday. Are you coming?’
    I very calmly went upstairs and rolled the dice.
    I came back downstairs.
    ‘I can’t,’ I said through gritted teeth, ‘I am going to write my essay on Freud and Feminism.’
    FUCKING DICE.
    The dice didn’t let me eat again when I asked. And all of my friends went out and got very drunk and had probably one of the best nights ever. I sat in writing a fucking essay, like the dice had told me to.
    Back in my student days I was a moderate smoker. Halfway through my essay I ran out of cigarettes.
I will buy the most expensive cigarettes I can see.
I will buy the cheapest cigarettes I can see.
I will buy no cigarettes and not smoke for the next two
days.
I will buy rolling tobacco and rizla.
I will buy cigar skins and tobacco.
I will buy pipe tobacco and smoke that.
    I rolled a three.
    ‘MOTHERFUCKER!’ I screamed at the dice, throwing it out of the window. But, I had to do what the dice said. And lived out my last couple of days of The Dice more hungry and pissed off than I’ve ever been in my life.
    I gave the dice life up after that, and was only reminded of it a few months later when my friends all wanted to play
Monopoly
one evening, and one friend looking through the box said: ‘Shit, where have the fucking dice gone?’

The Lord of the Rings
    I didn’t read
The Lord of the Rings
until I was well into university. It was when the films started coming out that I thought maybe I should give them a whirl. You know that bit in friends where Joey doesn’t know who Gandalf is and Chandler and Ross are flabbergasted and ask him, ‘Didn’t you read
Lord of the Rings
in High School?’ to which Joey replies, ‘I had sex in High School.’ I think that’s probably also the reason why it took me so long to get round to
The Lord of The Rings
.
    My brother bought me
The Hobbit
for my birthday, and then the boxed set of
The Lord of the Rings
for Christmas. I took my box set back to my student house with me after Christmas and started to read.
    My housemate, who has cropped up a lot throughout these stories, partly because he’s a fucking idiot and partly because I fucking adore him came and sat downstairs one day while I was reading. He used to like being in the room while I read because I would talk to myself while I did. Key phrases included: ‘No FUCKING way!’; ‘God, [insert character’s name here] is such a cunt’; ‘I would ride that wanker into next week’; ‘I HATE PEOPLE THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE, THIS LITERALLY IS ALL ABOUT EVERYONE WHO I HATE’, etc etc.
    So there I was, sat on the sofa reading while he sat in an armchair on my right. If I remember correctly at the time he was reading a book called
Orcs
. (
‘It’s about orcs,’
he’d said when I asked.)
    I got to the bit where Frodo finds the ring. He puts it on and turns invisible.
    ‘No FUCKING way!’ I shouted. ‘I want one of these fucking rings! It’s fucking brilliant! Matey’s fucking invisible!’
    ‘Yeah but you don’t want one really do you?’ My friend replied.
    ‘Of course I fucking want one, did you not hear me? Invisibility ring. Best thing ever.’
    ‘Yeah, but it turns you bad in the end, doesn’t it.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Yeah, look at Gollum. He’s fucked.’
    ‘WHAT?’
    ‘The ring turns you bad. You know this. You’ve seen the films.’
    ‘I HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILMS YOU FUCKING BELLEND.’
    ‘… Oh …’
    ‘How much