You’re Not a Hero, You’re an Idiot

I’m tired of living in someone else’s juvenile fantasy

Not long after university, I moved to London and worked in a bookstore near Covent Garden. Most of the time, I was in the shipping and receiving room. That part of the job was pretty mundane — checking in new books and packing overstock and prepping it to ship back to the publishers — except that at least in the back room, we could listen to music and chat. ‘We’ being me and my colleague, Sam. Sam was a short-ish, shaved-headed late-20s Londoner. Sam liked to think of himself as a budding rapper. More than once I saw him eat most of an entire package of chocolate digestives for lunch — with tea. Despite his love of rap, he listened to the same Keane CD on repeat, as two (or maybe three, I don’t recall) plays roughly equalled the time between breaks. He occasionally stole books. And he was a very profound conspiracy theorist.

Sam spent countless hours telling me about how things really worked. I was already familiar with what I thought was a fair number of conspiracy theories — things like the JFK assassination, the moon landing, and the 9/11 truthers — but this was just the tip of the iceberg for Sam, a devout reader of David Icke. Sam told me about lizard aliens, planet Nibiru, and the supposed meaning of all the dragon statues around the City (Illuminati something…