The ELT Interview: with Crazy Bob
The ELT Interview: with Crazy Bob
ELT: Well, it's a great pleasure for us to get to finally talk to you Dr Robin. Our pants are wet as we speak. Could you just recap as to why you teach English language?
Dr Robin: They have my family. If I don't do what they say, they'll hurt them. They tell my family the same thing; if they don't do what they want, I'll be hurt. I get a lot of complaints from stud`nts. I understand my wife's keeping her legs together. They have my car as well. They'll smash it up if I don't accept wage slavery - or even if I do. It's a game they're playing with us as hostages. There's really no quid pro quo. They rape my wife and cut my fingers off. They call it 'torturing a couple to death'. Then they explain it to themselves by saying I didn't teach the past participle properly.
ELT: Do you?
Dr Robin: I'm sorry. I won't do it again. My needs are basic. I won't leave the wardrobe I've been given to sleep in except to teach. Please don't hurt me again. I'll be good. Is there a bathroom here? Does it have a window?
ELT: Why are they doing this to you?
Dr Robin: I'm the victim of an evil gang of smug homosexuals who don't want me to be with a woman. The women are too frightened to even be seen with me so now I have to do it with goats. They film us together and show it to my captured wife. It's tough on us both. She does it with coats. They send pictures. I masturbate. It’s horrendous.
ELT: You're joking with us Dr Robin! This is one of your spoofs! Come now. You get paid well for what you do, don't you?
Dr Robin: They have a time machine. In the future I was a rich and successful actress (in inverted commas); but they travelled to the year 2091 (that me was born in 2070) and murdered me for my billions and had unconsensual sex with my children. Afterwards they went back to 2070 and took my mother back in time to 1961 where they altered my chromosomes and I was born as a language teacher under the sign of Arachnea. It isn't the first time either.
ELT: You wouldn't recommend ELT as a career then?
Dr Robin: It's just a gang bang. Teachers think they've got it tough here in the UK with screening for child molesters. Imagine being the lowest common denominator in a child sex ring being passed from one filthy gang of paedophiles to another. That's what it's like being a language teacher overseas. There's no protection. They don't wear a condom. The UK Parliament doesn't care. Being trained in TEFL on a government training scheme and sent abroad to work is just a euphemism. I was transported for stealing a bar of chocolate; much like those nineteenth century criminals who stole air from aristocrats by breathing and escaped prison by agreeing to colonize Australia.
ELT: A bar of chocolate?
Dr Robin: When I was once fifteen I put a Cadbury's flake in my pocket without paying in a sweet shop and was apprehended by the proprietor who, spotting a passing policeman, called him in: and so it was that I found myself being arrested and cautioned by my own dischuffed father. The transporters are patient though. My first cell was Hungry. I was 34 and a virgin. But I've been 'Pretty Boy Robin' on the Wing now for the best part of two decades. 'Gerund! Gerund' big Karoly would mumble as he thrust his way into my soon apathetic rectum while holding a copy of Time for English open on my back.
ELT: You taught English in prison?
Dr Robin: Well, to be accurate, I'm a prison slave. Obviously there's the law; even in civilized countries. So the stud`nts who're raping my children and smashing up my car are in prison. Because it's my children that are being torture-raped and my car they're smashing up, I understand that I'm a prison slave. It's a simple matter of deduction really. I'm not Dr Phil. I'm balder and fatter for one thing. Of course he can get an erection. He's allowed to. But I know he'd complain if I had one. Men are like that. For them it's all about deflating others. Like Karoly in Hungry. He got it up while I couldn't. Prototypical male behavior.
ELT: Would you like your own talk show?
Dr Robin: No, I'd just like to sit in a chair with a camera on and tell the truth about it all.
ELT: The truth?
Dr Robin: Yes, I've been around for a long time. The Yarubs want me to learn Yarupric and the Hungriuns want me to learn Hungriun. I suspect it has something to do with the ancient Egyptian goddess of the sun, Isis, and puttin’ out in the Rushon Federation after the war over the golf, but so far I’ve refused to talk. Knowing something about structuralism helps one to understand. Structuralists look at reality as a room in which there's furniture; some of it will always be there; some of it has always been there, and some of it has disappeared. Another analogy is film. Imagine reality as a film and this is the version you're in now; but there have been other versions. In Riyald, Pseudi Yarubeer, there's a women's Universe City, the Binned Nora, and there was a time when they used to breed blonde Apples there: Crushdina Apples from the US sitcom Married With Cauldron (1987-97) - in which she played teenage Calipornian airhead Jelly Buns - is the best known example today. I asked them one time if I could have an Apples or two? 'What for?' they wanted to know. Well, if you've ever seen Crushdina Apples as Jelly, you'd know. But it was explained to me that they were bred for being edible. They were eating Apples. Cooking Apples too. They used to release them into the streets for the people to knock 'em over the head and drag 'em off to barbecue. Or make Mom's Apples’ pie.
ELT: We don't believe you.
Dr Robin: Okay, I'm ambivalent about credulity. I have a stud`nt who patiently explains to me that jeans are singular. It doesn't matter what the English language says; for him it's 'a jeans'. He's decided, and it wasn't a tough decision. A lot of them decide never to use the 's' on the end of the verb for the third person singular. They believe otherwise you see. Some people believe in the automobile, others in flying carpets. I know which camp I'm in.
ELT: You believe in flying carpets?
Dr Robin: They're eco-friendly.
ELT: What advice would you give to budding ELT professionals.
Dr Robin: Don't bud. It's more fun being a prisoner than a prison slave. Screw the teachers. I'm screwed. I know my place.
ELT. Isn't that just a tad overly pessimistic?
Dr Robin: They have a time machine. I marry, I father children. They murder me and leave my widow and burgeoning adolescents grieving. Then I find myself growing up in an earlier period of my life with a passport that says I'm single and never have been married. So, officially, my children don't exist and they're sold into paedophile rings or eaten. My wife hasn't a leg to stand on. According to the records she's never been married either you see. Wave goodbye to the kids honey, they don't really exist.
ELT: But that's horrible. If true.
Dr Robin: Imagine meeting a woman you know you were married to before you were murdered. What do you say? Hi Hon, I saw the kids the other day in Jello Tots. Perhaps she's been murdered too, but they're allowing her 1983 version to develop, having 'pruned' her in 2015. Consequently, she doesn't know you from Adam - or the kids. When I was a boy I lived in two houses in the same street in Birdlingtown, #12 (firstly) and #3 (secondly) Barbecue Street. It was convenient for the child-abusing time-travelers. They'd abuse me at #3 and smile at me at #12; or they'd abuse me at #12 and smile me on at #3. Paedophiles like that. I was like a shuttlecock. Would I ever escape? If I lost my life at #12 I'd be back at Primary skull in Piglington, North Yorkshire. If I lost my life at #3 I'd be back at #12 and might never escape into a future beyond #3. Sometimes I'd see myself playing up the street while I awaited the latest paedophile prank. One Xmas they cut mine and my sister's hands off so we couldn't open our presents. They'd seen us in the future perfect you see; and we had hands. It was a game for them. They'd see me in a physically perfect future riding my bike, and I'd take my hands off the handlebars: 'Look! No hands!' I'd say. The laughter was screeching. Paedophiles are like that.
ELT: How did you get your hands back?
Dr Robin: I woke up with them again one morning - and an erection. Happy New Year.
ELT: A nightmare?
Dr Robin: We believe what we must.
ELT: But because of all this you've learned to express yourself using the past tense?
Dr Robin: TEFL training is very thorough. I didn't think it was important until I saw one of our Philupyournose (with coke) teachers write 'It is yesterday.' on the board. Using grammar like that you'd have to be writing a science fiction story; probably about Phil Being.
ELT: So we should take what you say with a pinch of salt; is that what you're saying?
Dr Robin: If it helps you swallow. I write scifi and I've written time travel stories.
ELT: It must be difficult going from place to place, teaching English language with all this going on in your noggin.
Dr Robin: Why do you think you're an English language teacher? Because you have something they want so you have to get in circulation. My genes are good. Crushdina Apples is famous for her appearances in Playboy. We might say her genes are blue. I have blue genes too. The children I produce from my loins are blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful. Who wants to eat ugly people? That's why they like me to get around. Get married, have children, be murdered - and start again. It's the Presson method. I learnt it at skull. The teachers used to tear up our work - even if it was good - and make us do it again. Learning by repetition.
I had a girlfriend who knew the system; Crushedin used to keep her exercise books with her parents and when she left skull she'd make porno movies. When she was too old for it they'd kill her and she'd find herself growing up again; but she understood the 'Pression method' and went over to where she kept her exercise books so she wouldn't have to do all her skullwork over again. She'd just hand in her old stuff and wait for the porn barons to contact her so she could go back to working. Learning by repetition has been widely criticized over the years, and I always associate it with degradation. It's not about educating someone to better themselves; it's more to do with the idea of putting square pegs into holes already prepared for them to fit into. Don't try to be a round peg. They'll just kill you - metaphorically and literally tear up your work - and force you to make porno again anyway.
ELT: So ELT was an escape for you?
Dr Robin: There is no escape. I sometimes work at a place called the Higher Institute for Spastic Fabrications in Riyald. The stud`nts are able to concentrate for about 15 minutes out of the 90 we give them per session, and the only word they're fluent in is 'bathroom'. So, if all they want is to watch their own urine and faeces floating around in the bowl (in English), why are you there? Because it's a circus. In that country over there they want to torture-rape your children and they want to smash up your car with your wife in it in that other country over here. Go ahead. Apply for a job. Get out more. Choose your exotic gang masquerading as a skull language. How many children or wives can you spare them? How often? Come on. Squeeze a time frame. They pay your salary. You don't seriously imagine they're paying you good money to teach them the word 'bathroom' for twelve months, do you? 'Teacher! Give me more mark!' Or I'll get into our time machine, travel to where you were living before you moved hotels, pull out all your teeth and cut off your arms and legs with a chainsaw. I refuse to give them more marks, so they do that to me. There I am again next day. But I also bled to death in a corner of my previous hotel. I'm not supposed to remember; but I do. Now I'm laughed at when I tell them I eat tinned chicken and don't go out. But I haven't been anally raped for a good while. The joke is that I think it's chicken.
ELT: You sound bitter.
Dr Robin: You'd have had to have been there. What's that? Pluperfect past pissiple?
ELT: But these things are just a part of your usual idiosyncratic imagination, aren't they? You're just trying to amuse us with strange invented stories.
Dr Robin: Here's a truth fragment and I dare you to publish. I was at Junior skull in the 60s at Muckfield Skull in the North East Yorkshire coastal resort of Birdlingtown. One day the kids looked out of the window and saw Wombles. Now I don't know when Elisabeth Beresford (1928-) invented her characters, but this was around 1968 when I was seven years old. The Wombles came into our classroom singing, ‘Remember You're A Womble!' (1974) and began drilling holes in the kids with Black & Deckers. It was just a haze of pain and groanings for hours. We'd been visited by the Masons.
ELT: We don't believe you. It's the kind of thing that would make the newspapers. Did it?
Dr Robin: Yes, but newspapers are not memories. They're other peoples. I do recollect how the Wombles took their heads off and underneath were a bunch of men who looked like builders' laborers. I don't know how we survived. But, chronologically, I left that skull aged ten when my father's police duties were transferred to the North East coastal resort of Wyvernsee. Perhaps it was a part of my TEFL training?
ELT: What do your colleagues make of all of this?
Dr Robin: They're worse. Remember the different film versions analogy? Another is that of the palimpsest where what's written is erased, then it's written upon again before being erased, before being written upon ... There were two 'teachers' called Rebort and Stott with me in Riyald and, when I was a smallish boy, I remember them tying me to a chair while I watched them torture my mum. I had to keep quiet or they'd kill me. They should be in hell but here they are again. Isn't TEFL training thorough? Past tense but still tense (with fear) in the present. Present perfect? We have tortured your mother. Present perfect continuous? We have been torturing your mother. Future tense? She's dead now. She died from bowel cancer in 1997 and I saw her directing a big welcoming smile at me from a bus stop in Ochyagibberin, Rusher, in 2003. I walked on. I'd seen her being tortured enough. She used to say that I had to 'learn sense'. I've learnt tense: past - future. The arrow of time's directional indicator; move along now, nothing to see: or else!
Time's speeding arrow is one of the things we programme ourselves and others with as language 'experts'. I know the drill; firstly, secondly, then, next, finally ... We're taught that life is chronological; but experience tells me that's a linguistic construct. There are stories the Australian Aborigines tell of the 'Dream Time' before the Europeans arrived with their clocks and how, when hungry, their hunters would remember where they'd killed an animal for food; go back there and kill it again. We seek to control time with our tenses and our timepieces, but it still escapes our yoke. I remember a 'friend' of mine appearing in someone's room once at Universe City with another person I didn't recognize. They chilled out with us for a while and when they went the stranger shook hands with me. In Yorkshire they have a category for it: 'shaking hands with the devil'. The unknown visitant was me: probably on his way to a premature blood-soaked ending. Every time I see one or other of many figures from an unhappy past (remembering that the future can also be the past for someone who can remember living in it) I tense up with a range of emotions from horror to hate.
ELT: I was a stud’nt at Head Chuck Higher Occasional College in ‘Ull before I went to the Universe City there, although the dorms were close by, so I’d go over there to chat and chill. This Hungriun took me to watch a girl being fucked by an Alsation, ‘You’re her,’ he told me, ‘and we’re not sure the dog isn’tyou.’ Later I was inveigled into taking an ELT course and transported to Hungry where the dog-fucking experts live.
ELT: But you do have friends?
Dr Robin: My friends are my memories. You know what people are like to begin with. They want you to get a good impression. When you're young and impressionable you think 'friendship', which is natural and evil people rely on it. Only really rich people can afford friends because - by and large - they have what they want and can protect themselves from others; the rest are looking to claw away from you what you have because they want it; or, simpler, they don't want you to have it. Of course they'd rather do it under the veneer of pleasantness. I meet people - teachers and stud`nts - by whom I've been tortured and murdered (not to mention the tortures and murders of those I've known and loved). The suspension of disbelief is a very large part of wisdom. But the Truth doesn't set you free; as She`sis Crushed would have had us believe. It's more like being a Chew in the Holocause. The realization that God is not going to stop them; therefore He does not exist.
ELT: If you don't believe in God, what do you believe in?
Dr Robin: The Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) spent most of his life in a hermeneutic pursuit of representations of what he called the 'supraordinate Self', which in its diverse cultural manifestations appeared to be indistinguishable from that which we term 'God'. That's what I believe in.
ELT: Yourself?
Dr Robin: Jung showed us that the self is largely unconscious; like that 5% of the iceberg visible above the waterline. We strive to become conscious in the course of our lives but self-actualization is a never attainable goal because our ego limits us. The stories of She`sis suggest that he was on the way there; but there are older tales of gods and goddesses that indicate the path has already been trodden upon. If we want God to help us we have to wake Him up first, and He's within: as the religionists tell us.
ELT: Did you ever think of being anything else apart from an English language teacher?
Dr Robin: I've done lots of things. This is just my present incarnation, as it were. But I can remember many of the others. In 1994 I was working at the Spare Institute for English Teacher Training (SITT) in Deepratson, Hungry, where I met Martin Weedle who was working on Countess Cilla’s Briti Studies programme. Shortly thereafter I became 'born in the spirit' after full immersion baptism at the Hít Gyülekezete or Faith Church in Buttapes, ‘WHERE THE BUTTS HAVE APES’. But I remembered Martin. I'd been a neurosurgeon at ‘Ull Royal Infirmary, and he'd bludgeoned me to death one evening with the explanation that he was a member of the Hít Gyülekezete and was teaching me 'faith'. I guess the idea was that doctors were full of hubris and I needed to be humbled. My brain functions. I can remember Martin. Perhaps faith is a part of TEFL training too? ‘What did the pastor say?’ I’m often asked. ‘I don’t know’, I reply, ‘it’s some pastor’s language.’ I was once struck dumb by Weedle`s pal, Chuff, and sent back in time to Piglington to relearn English. Chuff was still there when I returned. It reminded me of the story of the deaf and dumb me, who was killed in a Piglington police cell for refusing to answer questions.
ELT: Faith can move mountains?
Dr Robin: Faith Brown's (1944-) wobble as far as I can recall. Britney Spears (1982-) endorses a perfume called Faith. My mountain's more of a Vesuvius; but she certainly causes me a few eruptions.
ELT: So you don't really have any faith; in what you do as a teacher either?
Dr Robin: People are evil. I always use the analogy of someone who spends three years building a replica of the Taj Mahal using matchsticks. Everyone admires it, but it only takes one skinhead to stomp on it. And he's representative of all the others' true feelings. Ever seen the comedy action scifi movie Mars Attacks! (1996)? There's a scene in it where the Martians with their bugging-out eyes and huge green brains are standing in front of the Taj Mahal posing for a photograph. One of their flying saucers is hanging there in the sky and it blasts the Taj Mahal with a disintegrator ray. Then the Martians have their picture taken wreathed in smiles. But we're the Martians. That's really how we are. I always think of the library at Alexandria, the repository of much of the wisdom of the ancient world raised to the ground by Caesar the Great in 48 BC. Great, huh?
The majority of people would rather destroy a nice thing than see it in the hands of another. The bigger the thing, the angrier they are; witness the Vandals in Rome, the French and Rushian Revolutions. That's why we have the marriage contract. To protect our love in law. But look at the beautiful people in Hollywood. Hounded by the press for any sniff of scandal that will lead to break up; break off, or break down. We lap it up avidly, and roundly condemn the lives of the stars with gusto. But it's us in microcosm. No one really likes to see a happy couple; it's an affront to the misery we all make each other live in. Teachers are like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. I teach them to speak English and every time I see them I know that all they want to really say to me is 'Fuck off' so that they can rape my darling wife and munch burgers made from my children.
ELT: But what about the stud`nt who really wants to progress?
Dr Robin: Well, he's either earmarked to spend his life producing a Taj Mahal built of matchsticks for a skinhead to stomp on, or he has a weirder perverted vision that requires him to learn English to a higher level. A bit like a native Yarupric speaker learning to use the Boble in English so that he can call upon the angels of the Lord in order to be able to cut out their hearts and devour them for his breakfast. Not that native English speakers wouldn't do the same thing; they would. But I'm a Crushteen paedophile English language teacher. This is my dike.
ELT: What's your approach as an ELT Crushteen paedophile?
Dr Robin: Understand that they're evil and teach them English. Don't fraternize because TEFL`s is the devil's path. Be professional with your colleagues and joke with them when you can. Be a good Joe. Take the money and stay well. But don't be fooled. If you're lucky you'll live. I'm fifty and I won't live much longer. I don't want to. Not here. I want to put as much distance between myself and evil as possible so I have a chance in the next world.
ELT: Is Heaven real?
Dr Robin: I've been offered it a few times, but mostly I didn't like the company I'd be keeping. Women have cocks and they fuck women who don’t have cocks. If you look for that on the internet, you see Eric. He’s men’s porn star there to show the women with cocks that he’s ‘The Man’ with the holey spurt. You can’t find porno of women with cocks fucking women without cocks, because it’d be obvious that their Heaven isn’t with men’s. For me it's a personal thing. I believe that each Heaven is individual. It's for those who love you well and those you love well. When I was at Muckfield Junior skull they used to make a big thing of sharing. I used to have things that I was told not to show to anyone. Sometimes I'd take them to skull and the teachers would run into the classroom and snatch what I had and run off with it. I had a red sports car in Wyvernsee once. It was a 'Robin car' from Batman and Robin. The police just took it. I never saw it again. I was once a busynessman in Khartoum, Sudan, and I deposited a billion dollars with the Zidni International Investment Company. I went back to complete negotiations and they told me they'd never seen me before. I remembered when I went there to teach them English language. What do you say? 'Oh, about the billion dollars? Do you remember me now?' The big cheese at the Hít Gyülekezete is Shandy German, the preacher, and he once took the ticket from an orange I bought in a supermarket near Blower Loser Square in Buttapes, ‘WHERE THE GOATS ALL BUTT’. 'When you buy the orange again,' he said, 'bring the ticket to me and I'll give you Heaven.' In 2007 I bought it again; but I don't like the system: I ate the orange and threw the ticket in a rubbish bin. Get real. Put up or shut up. What's your problem? Aren't the planets aligned correctly?
ELT: You believe in Life After Death?
Dr Robin: Of course. I was a man of the `Slammer myself once. I remember being in Omoan and they told me I'd offended a local Princess; so they were going to cut my head off. So they did. I remember standing up a little surprised, but it turned out the Princess had taken rather a shine to me and awaited my arrival in Paradise. Death is just a transition. I've been a transit many times. But the Afterworld isn't what it used to be. All it takes is one skinhead; you know? The kind who'll tell God He's sitting in his chair. I have a friend who expects Heaven to be where she praises God all day. If it isn't like that she'll take it higher. Expectations change. Once upon a time the houris would take you to the djinn and grant you wishes. Nowadays people would be disappointed if it wasn't all a shoot 'em up. Who cares if those figures off in the distance are real? They're small and far away. What did you say it was called? Heaven? I wonder what was in it? Too late now.
A lot of them were brought up on the ‘Vlad’ Putin-inspired Golf Wars, watching guided blockbuster bombs glide into huge Iraqi bunkers in the sand. Kap-oom! Like it was a video game. See them now in the arcades? Training for Heaven. At least in Valhalla they'd fight and die each day. But that's not the idea with these guys. 'Heaven, huh? Shoot it up! Easy meat. Wow! An angel! Watch it burn!' We're training cowards. No risk, no gain. No desire for genuine interaction. No pain, no gain. Just trigger fingers: ugh-gain, ugh-gain, ugh-gain ... What's the score? Bore, bore, bore ... Distance learning. Killing from afar. Kap-oom! That'll learn them! Well, it'll learn 'em to avoid you. That's what religion is, basically; avoidance therapy.
ELT: So avoiding life is what you preach?
Dr Robin: Hey, I'm a realist not an idealist. If I don't drive a car, I don't mow anybody down. I teach; I earn my daily bread; I write articles and stories; I watch TV and movies; I read good books; I listen to heavy rock - as a basic preference - but my musical tastes are pretty catholic; I'm discerning when it comes to art, and I shun evil. So I guess I don't get out much.
ELT: What's evil to you?
Dr Robin: It's hard to avoid. As an English language teacher I help build the walls to the prison. We teach cause and effect, and chronological event sequences, that is, we reinforce the mental framework that precludes us walking into an aboriginal Dream Time of our own in order to; for example, eat the same contents of the fridge each day. If we all did that, no one would bottle the milk anymore. Economics you see. I once had an argument with the boss of Toscos on the Charred Pork housing estate near Moanthorpe flats in ‘Ull. He explained how he'd arranged for a very successful tv personality to lose his job so that he'd return to the area and buy his food there at Toscos. That's what he should be doing you see. He didn't care about the tv star's career. It was the purchasing of bottled milk from Toscos that was important. The scary thing was that he was able to do it. Busyness and Crushteenity, ‘All in all we're just - bricks in the wall!’1
ELT: Okay, but you still didn't answer the question. What's evil to you?
Dr Robin: Guns, murder and torture. I've heard of sex parties on a large scale with maybe a thousand or more people involved, and when some of the men had had enough they began to shoot the naked women. That's what guns are for. People who can't be bothered to get it up. It's easier to waste something beautiful rather than give it its due. Some of the men would shoot the women until they got an erection again. Everyone understood. The whole of our culture is going that way. There's a very real connection between the gun and the penis, which is often described as a 'love gun'. But I've never seen a penis in its love-making context on Briti television. I'm treated to paroxysms of penetrating projectiles in the form of flesh-ripping bulletry though. Taking a girl's virginity is a task. If I can't be bothered to get penetration, do I sublimate and shoot her? This is what our worship of guns is teaching us. Love-making is out, the gun is in - and has been for a long time now. This is evil.
ELT: Thank you.
1 Waters, Roger 'Another Brick in the Wall Part II', Pink Floyd The Wall, 1979.