Anywhere But Here Is Better

There's braincells in them there heads (somewhere)

Apologies in advance for making light of the pure insanity of Life in 2012. After all, most of us are well behaved these days when we encounter an obviously nutty person in the street. We don't snigger, point at or ridicule such folk, as was common not so very long ago. We do, of course, look the other way as fast as possible, and cross the street fairly swiftly, hurtling motor vehicles and thronging pedestrians permitting.

The theory is, we shouldn't laugh at our own collective craziness, but do something about it. Well, it's a good theory. Such as the long-lasting one that placed the earth at the dead centre of the universe. Unfortunately, thanks to successive governments successively limiting the personal freedom to think things through and respond intelligently to circumstances, 'doing something' about anything is redundant. We citizens are individually more powerless than a prawn on a barbecue skewer. And should we make even the slightest attempt to band together via spied-upon social networking sites and march for change, the misnamed 'authorities' send out the misinformed bully boys with truncheons to quell such detestable dangers to democracy and 'our' way of life.

Ha.

 

Who's the brainbox behind this one?

 

Even more clever in the dark

What could we do about evidently mad people anyway? With our governments' ever so crafty side-stepping of their responsibilities, there are no mental health institutions left, and if there were, there would never be enough beds available for the enormous number of Homo sapiens who appear to have little sanity between their ears. Who are these people? Before we descend into the abyss of subjective and judgemental casting of stones, I will attempt to set out simple criteria by which we can assess who is sane or otherwise.

In no particular order:

 

1: No interest in helping strangers in need.

2: Greed to the point of having more money and resources than are necessary to eat well, shelter from the elements, have sex and/or procreate.

3: Blood lust when encountering someone with a different opinion.

4: Jingoism, xenophobia, racial prejudice, homophobia and sundry other base leanings.

5: Intolerance of genuine democracy a.k.a. people power.

6: Lust for control and domination over others.

7: Physical, sexual, emotional or psychological abuse of family members.

8: The desire and preparedness to use lethal weapons to settle disputes.

9: Hypocritical behaviour, principally when publicly claiming to be religious/moral but privately acting contrary to religious/moral principles.

10: Smoking cigarettes and/or ingesting street drugs and expecting to live long.

11: Intentionally taking other people's lives or otherwise maiming them.

12: Unjustly relieving others of their own possessions.

13: Subtracting resources from the earth and adding life-endangering pollutants, poisons and radioactive waste.

 

That's a lucky thirteen. Enough I would have thought for the purpose of this exercise.

By this criteria, it's plain (after a few moments' consideration) that virtually the whole of the business, investment, political, military and super-rich layabout community ought to be treated for their lunacy. Along with a fair few practitioners of religion and the law, and career criminals with no chance of ever living above the baseline of humane conduct. I wouldn't care to administer large doses of anti-psychosis drugs, so perhaps large golden spaceships should be built to accommodate this vast swathe of deluded humanity and the keys handed over by robots once the astral voyagers are safely out of the solar system. I wonder what kind of party they'll have on board when they comprehend that this journey can only be one way.

Buy-buy

Is there hope for humanity? It's possible there are sufficient numbers of our species who can pass unscathed through these Thirteen Acid Tests. Many more could theoretically mend their ways and rejoin the ranks of the sane. I'm thinking for example of the otherwise sensible multitude across the world who fall prey to the tobacco companies' pernicious promotional wheezes that convey the idea that puffing on carcinogens is 'cool', including inducing Hollywood producers to cajole the latest crop of movie stars to light up in scene after scene.

Yes, should there be enough people who have left behind the crude animalistic behaviour that has been so much the norm for us late primates, it is feasible that we could have a fresh start before time runs out. However - there's always a however - it's doubtful that we have the nous not to recreate exactly the same kind of hierarchical system where a very few exploit the very many. In other words, corruption will very probably rear its head and drive out sanity all over again. Refer to Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm for elucidation.

All of which means we've just gotta laugh. Or should I say grin and bear it? No. Just laugh. Like I did when I spotted this delightful street sign in London's Chelsea inviting me to partake in recreational nutrition.

 

You are what you eat

 

Here's what's really funny. Those of us laughing uproariously at the dumbness of our fellow man - whether it's the sheer lack of foresight or heartless disinterest in the common good - are the ones who are labelled crazy. Meanwhile, those creatures at the top of the pyramid seriously intent on robbing and cheating the poor and erstwhile middle class while making the planet increasingly uninhabitable are lauded as gods and masters of the universe.

Somehow they think that the amassing and hoarding of purloined objects of wealth - gold, currencies, artworks, bags of cocaine - will have some value after the global catastrophe they are generating finally comes to pass.  Now that's bordering on criminal insanity, so far beyond stupid that nothing else need be said.

 
Brain too

 

The imbecilic controlled by the idiotic. Welcome to Planet Earth.

The irony, the irony. The thieves and pillagers who ‘run’ our world are running out of ideas of where to store their loot, so they bid up artworks at auctions. Right up to the vertiginous heights of $119.9 million for Edvard Munch's The Scream (kid’s crayon version). Just think for a moment about the small change you get from $120m. One hundred thousand dollars buys a lot of Big Fat Macs for the drones. Even art is now bought like fast food by ignoramuses awash with plunder. Can’t they even see that the man on the bridge isn't the one screaming? He is dumb-struck by other people’s screams and is trying to block out the cacophony. The shrieks and moans are coming from the hearts of countless poorly treated impoverished humans scrabbling across the surface of this woebegone planet like beheaded chickens.

Who cares?

Giving at the office

 

There used to be a handy little expression to sum up life on this piece of coagulated spare dust. Going to hell in a handcart. The sentiment is still accurate but the vehicle has changed. It’s now a Lamborghini or an executive jet, sales of which are booming regardless of the growing poverty of most of the populace. You can see these limp dick toys in the City of London, on the streets or in the air. Sometimes both, when Johnny Wideboy has had one coke snort too many in the john at the office. Pity the cleaners on minimum wage (if they’re lucky) who have to clean up after these addled numpties with insatiable appetites for brainless excess.

Who cares?

The human species crawled out of the swamp, stood up, learned how to use tools, harnessed fire, the spear and the wheel to outsmart biological rivals, started to farm the land, built a trading economy with the surplus production and then organised into groups engaging in permanent war over resources. Give or take a few short bursts of ingenuity and creativity, everything changes but everything stays the same. Rule by brute force continues by proxy, the majority are subdued by the minority’s paid-up bully boys in uniforms. Scientific mumbo-jumbo and religious hogwash are both deployed to mask the greedy intent of vested interests.

Who cares?

 

Weren't they clever

 

People are programmed to chat about the catatonically boring problems of fictitious stupidos on TV ‘reality’ shows, rather than question the equally lame-brained elitist politicians who are eagerly conspiring with ‘free market’ asset strippers to slash the already meagre quality of life of the general public. The same kind of docile robots pay to see musicians demonstrate their artistry and then jabber to each other all the way through the performance about multimillionaire zombies kicking an inflated blob around a sports field. Talking of music, the talentless feted by the cultureless grab all the receipts, while those of the genius of the incomparable Ozric Tentacles and Limited Edition play for crumbs. And we wonder why there’s been no contact from extraterrestrials seeking out intelligent life.

Who cares?

Violence and abuse are fine and dandy but caring is the dirty word. Health service staff care and are treated with blunt disdain by their paymasters when it comes to valuing their work. Firemen care and continue to care even when they are periodically treated as superfluous by successive governments. A handful of teachers care, and are drummed into obscurity unless they sell out and apply empty-headed (non) educational policy that maintains illiteracy and docility. The police used to care before they were instructed from on high to falsify crime numbers and put their own ‘health and safety’ before public safety. The other side of the coin: those who care not a jot about anyone else are the self-appointed kings of the castle. The spoils go to the care-less and couldn’t-care-less.

No point in going on. With brainpower spread so thinly, there’s only one direction the world will go. Down the smelly pan with the rest of the unwanted by-products of Nature’s consumption.

Calling all cosmic explorers: Planet Earth. You’re welcome to it.

 

Bring plenty, Zog

 

Looking ahead, mankind DOES have a choice

I have been reading the prolific output of many of my fellow bloggers, from the guru of sapience George Mobus to the epic logger of decline Dave Cohen. Everyone has their own style, and everyone in their own special way is attempting to catalogue and explain the catastrophic moment we have reached in human civilisation, or should I say "civilisation".

The general consensus is that we are on an inexorable path to (choose your preferred term:) adjustment/realignment/decimation/destruction/doom/extinction. When I say 'we', I mean us bipeds in our current guise of Homo sapiens.

How we got to this tipping point is fairly clear. It is because our species has long been dominated by a relatively tiny minority of arrogant self-centred close-minded psychopaths of greed, whom I have railed against in previous postings. They look like us to some degree, but they are different. While most of us know at least a handful of good people, and would like to believe in the idea that 'most people are as good as gold', we are just about unanimous in complaining about the self-aggrandising phenotype that has populated the ruling class in every country since time immemorial. Their behaviour is governed by a holier-than-thou ego that pushes them to abuse, denounce, tyrannise and ultimately murder their perceived and usually trumped-up enemies, who as a matter of record are normally just normal people trying to live quietly, feed their families and survive.

The equally pernicious string-pullers behind the scenes play the tune that the publicly known leaders dance to. So I lump them all together in the same foul pig trough - investment banksters, market speculators a.k.a. manipulators, oligarchs, arms dealers, drug barons, oil sheikhs, media magnates, boardroom pillagers, sundry dictators and 99.9% of politicians.

In their technically insane urge to dominate and control others and perpetuate their own existence, with zero interest in the future of other people's grandchildren, they can only operate with short-term goals, i.e. to seize and expand their own power and wealth way beyond what is needed to live like latter-day Sun Kings. Apparently without irony or any understanding of Orwellian language, they love to call it the 'free market'. A more honest term would be feeding frenzy. And it is gobbling up the earth's resources at a rate that has already passed the sustainable level, as time will show.

It must be the case that only the bad eggs play and win in the power game, for whenever someone ostensibly 'good' finds themselves in the political cauldron, they are either extinguished (Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Salvador Allende) or have their freedom to function severely circumscribed (Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi).

There is another category who merit a mention: seemingly decent runners for office who are forced to 'play the game' once elected. To those of us outside the stinkpot, the term we prefer to use is sell out. Witness candidate Obama's 'Yes We Can' rhetoric compared to his dismal achievements since 2008. Sadly, Obama is now beyond redemption, up to his nostrils in the swill.

So where am I heading with all this? Where we're all heading, in fact. My point is that we DO have a choice. There's always a choice in this life. There are several options available, and it is up to each of us to select the most appropriate to our own needs.

I will now set out the options as per my exhausting research.

 

#1 A fine choice

 

#2 Lovely and white

 

#3 Birds for company

 

#4 Charming view

 

#5 Clean and pristine

 

#6 Pure majesty

 

#7 Dizzying beauty

 

 

 #8 Multiplicitous

 

#9 Wow

 

Now, in case you are thinking what I'm thinking, and that I've missed out one glaringly obvious option, I will include it here for the sake of good order.

 

#10 Bunker down

 

Apologists for current trends in human behaviour adore talking about 'us' as the culmination of generations of survival-of-the-fittest evolution. Again without irony, they say we have the edge over all other species. A quick scan of the options above confirms the actual edge we've now got.

Another form of precipitation has now taken my attention. It's pelting down again in the ancient drought-stricken land of the Angles. May Day. Mayday!

When you add it all up

Being inquisitive by nature, I have spent (wasted?) a lot of time trying to figure out why things are the way they are. I'm not sure I have got very far after all these years. The craziness of life in general - and the way people tick in particular - has only increased in scale the more I have tried to make sense of 'it'.

Obviously, it would be much easier not to think about such things. I sometimes long for an off button that would shut down the part of my brain that devotes itself to puzzling and wondering. This function is very similar to a Jack Russell terrier, famed for never letting go once it has sunk its teeth into some unfortunate's fleshy parts.

 

Sniffing out an answer

 

Love is supposed to be the answer to everything, or at least the antidote. It is all we need, chanted John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Buddhists say that loving one's self is the route to loving all things, at which point one reaches blissful Enlightenment. If only it was that simple.

Lust is commonly mistaken for love. While it is a useful precursor for reproduction, which is all that is required by evolution, lust doesn't automatically translate into love. Love means putting another person's survival ahead of one's own. I'm not sure how many 'lovers' subscribe to self-extinction when Hobson's Choice rears its head.

 

It takes two

 

Of course, we must do everything to remain positive minded, despite all that life throws at us. In the dark before the dawn, what sustains me is the gritty resolve not to be broken by the hurricane force winds of injustice that blow incessantly through the human forest.

Could the world be any different to what it is now? In theory, yes. In practice, I suggest the opposite. The same laws of 'survival of the fittest' that have led to more than seven billion of us human viruses living and breathing on this rock have governed that we must have power structures that deny the good life to all but a handful at the 'top'.

Knowledge should be the measure of fitness, or rather wisdom or to use the most correct term: sapience. I would be delighted to remain a lowly serf if people like Einstein and Gandhi were in charge of our destiny. Instead, we consistently have a breed of intellectual lightweights grabbing and holding onto the reigns of power every generation, their one quality being the ability to hoodwink the vast majority while feathering the nests of the tiny minority.

Summing all this up, I have to find a new approach to discovering the true meaning of life. Rather than look at the whole picture, which is overwhelmingly depressing and almost impossible to carry inside one single brain, perhaps I should look at specimen information and assess the totality based on a broad sampling. For example, instead of reading whole paragraphs of data, perhaps I could just collect the first letters of the first word and see what this all adds up to. Maybe the result will make better sense of everything. Yes, I think I'll try this, starting with this very blog article as an experiment.

Isaac's balls at work

Living in Disappointment, population 7,000,000,001

What is this place coming to? All the creativity and inventiveness and energy and enthusiasm and aspiring and dreaming and extreme patience under duress has this outcome? Really? This is evolution? This is intelligent life?

 

Interesting town meetings

 

I've been taking stock.

The super-rich are permitted and even incited to pay little tax, even though it would hardly dent their wealth one iota. The greed-motivated banksters steal from the general public and won't lend money that's not theirs in the first place to good businesses that could hire people from the dole queues. Entire industries despoil and pollute their own backyards to make a fast buck for their criminally myopic senior managers and equally complicit shareholders. Expanding numbers of no-haves worldwide are incarcerated in drug-infested jails as a reward for poor education and minimal life prospects. Health and welfare outside of the affluent are increasingly deemed unimportant, left to chance or heroic charitable efforts. ‘Democratic’ governments persistently ignore the will of the people, most notably in the US and UK, using whipped-into-a-frenzy police rather than good argument to exercise their governing. Autocratic regimes everywhere torment their own citizens, bestially preferring to torture rather than cull. Country after country beat the drums of war, in an Orwellian dance designed to keep their own populace living in fear and subdued into grateful inertia.

Am I nuts to question why the West is jumping up and down about Iranian nuclear intentions while enjoying bully-boy status because of their own jealously guarded nuclear arsenals? Anyone with half a human brain would surely suggest that all countries self-preserve by signing up to a binding ‘no use’ pact, rendering redundant the rush to obtain such idiotic weapons.

Why are the same politicians who spout forth about respect for human rights travelling the world like cheap whores touting lethal weapons to questionable regimes? Surely the idea is finally to move from loaded guns to round-table dialogue as a method of settling disputes in this so-called new century.

 

Yep

 

Why are religious institutions brainlessly choosing to fragment and weaken rather than unite and strengthen under common cause? Why the heck does it matter what faith people call themselves, or what gender do the ministering to their congregation, when at root all who term themselves believers believe in identical principles of godly behaviour on this miniscule blue pebble orbiting an insignificant star in a Milky Way back passage.

Come to that, why does anyone anywhere try to convince anyone else that they're wrong about anything? Who has access to the Whole Truth? No one does, not even those smug anti-God scientists who claim only to believe what is provable, and then go quiet when you probe them about how much of what they “know” today is merely accepted theory until “proven” otherwise by fellow members of the scientific fraternity with bigger research budgets and smarter grey matter.

If we were intelligent in the first place, natural selection by all accounts would have increased the level of intelligence - because intelligence is a survival aid. So I can only conclude that we are not an intelligent species, because the level of stupidity is growing, especially among our puffed-up masters. Look at the field of 2012 US presidential candidates, and look at the current crop of genii (sic) in the UK parliament. I rest my case, m'lud.

Observe any humble squirrel unkilled by road traffic and smog and deforestation. What does it do when winter is ahead? We are pathetic in comparison. The whole of capitalism - the epitome of freedom according to many lame brain economists - is utterly short termist. To the point where the amassing of shed-loads of personal wealth by the very few string-pullers has become the only raison d’être of economic activity. Whatever happened to building a better world for all our children?

Me, I have no fear about the future. I'm a tad jaded about the wisdom-free genetic line to which I apparently belong, but I'm not frightened of what's coming. And it's coming as sure as a runaway train down a mountain pass, accelerating as it nears the buffers. No, what I find scary to behold is the blindness of the ruling class, who if they think at all think that fitting castors to the deckchairs on the Titanic is a prudent way to behave.

Over and out.

15-04-12 R.I.P.

Whatever will be

The little boy was very pleased with his bicycling prowess. He begged and begged his mom to come outside so he could show her his skills on his brand new purple two-wheeled rocketship that Bill had sent money for a couple of weeks ago. Mom sighed as she put down the dish cloth but patiently followed Jonny out the front door. "Watch me Mom! Watch me!" He jumped back on his bike that he had propped up by the fence and pedalled furiously out of sight around the corner of the quiet residential street. 

    Mom waited placidly, noting that Mary's bedroom curtains opposite were still closed, and it was past 10am. She also noticed an unusual car parked in front of Mary's, not the husband’s who usually drove off to work at 8 o’clock on the button.

Further thoughts of Mary and her regular morning visitors were driven away as Jonny reappeared around the other corner. As he sped past the front of the house, he gleefully shouted, "Look Mom! Look how fast I’m going!" And he was moving fast, faster maybe than was safe. But he seemed quite adept as he angled left and rounded the corner and cycled out of sight.

Mom glanced at the other houses to each side of Mary's. All looked normal and quiet, drapes neatly drawn back and cars gone from the short driveways. I'll need a better job soon, Mom thought. Two hours three times a week at the library was barely enough to buy peanut butter and jelly for Jonny's lunchbox. Couldn't assume Bill would keep sending money. Maybe they'd need to move to a cheaper area downtown.

Jonny's joyful exclamations brought her out of her reverie. "Look Mom, no feet!" And his feet were off the pedals as his momentum carried him swiftly around the corner again. Mom looked at her nails, which could do with a little attention. A couple were broken, and all badly needed a fresh coat of polish. Her eyes flicked back to Mary's bedroom and she wondered what might be happening behind the curtains. Her thoughts made her flush a tinge darker and she unconsciously bit down gently on her lower lip, glazed eyes fixed on the upstairs window opposite.

Suddenly, Jonny was back. He was even more elated. "Look Mom, no hands!" She was slightly more concerned as she followed Jonny's motion, his arms stretched out wide as he sped past the house, still pedalling without a care. She grimaced as he wobbled when he reached the corner, but her face relaxed a little as he grabbed at the handlebars just in time and turned left successfully.

Mary's curtains seemed to twitch, she was sure of it. But no amount of looking would open them. Mom's thoughts returned to Bill, who had left last year to find himself. And she hadn't had any physical contact since, not with anyone. Mom sighed, absently running her hands through her unbrushed dark hair. I must look a state she thought.

"Look Mom!" Jonny's shout brought her back to reality with a bang. "No hands and no feet!" Mom's liquid brown eyes followed his movement anxiously as Jonny made an X shape with his outstretched arms and legs. She gasped as the bicycle careered crazily towards the middle of the road and then lurched back again towards the sidewalk, but Jonny managed to regain control and she could hear his "wheeeee..!" as he disappeared around the corner in a blur.

Mom smiled for a moment, a shade nervously, then her musings turned to Jonny's future without a dad. I'll do my best, she thought. I don't know much about baseball and soccer, but I can learn and then I'll play with him. What else can I do? Her eyes alighted on the interesting old car parked opposite. Expensive, she thought. Wonder what he does.

 

   When Jonny didn't reappear as quickly as before, Mom got worried. She strode to the sidewalk and looked nervously up and down the roadway. Then she walked to the right, towards the corner where Jonny was expected to come around any minute. She hadn't gone ten feet when Jonny turned up, wheeling his bike on the sidewalk. Her relief turned quickly to alarm as she saw the red streaming down Jonny's chin, and she gave out an anguished cry when she also saw the rip on his trouser leg and a darkening gash over his knee.

"Oh Jonny what happened?" Mom knelt down in front of him, placing her hands on his shoulders as her eyes darted all over his face to see what was bleeding. He wasn't crying, please god he wasn't badly cut. And then Jonny grinned, almost in triumph it seemed. His gums were all red and for a moment it was hard to see any white. Her heart leapt like a tiger as her mind raced. Doctor, ambulance, hospital, dentist, Bill's anger...  catastrophe piled on catastrophe.

The boy was a picture of dignity and defiance, a little man determined not to admit defeat. "Look Mom," he blurted. "No teeth." For a moment, the world stopped as Mom stared into his face for an eternity of mere seconds. Then she saw the gaps where his two front teeth had been a month earlier. Then she pushed a finger into his mouth and exhaled with loud relief as she felt all the other teeth that should be there. And the sense of what Jonny had just said hit her like a brick, and she burst into a fit of laughter that had everything mixed in, jangling nerves, release, heartache, amusement and a mother's fierce pride.

Jonny grinned and grinned. He wasn’t in big trouble. Mom wasn’t yelling at him, she was laughing. He let her wipe his mouth and face with a tissue, he even let her wet the tissue with her tongue to clean off a dried bit of blood from the end of his nose. He calmly accepted Mom’s hand as she stood up and led him back to the house, her other hand hauling his bike for him before dropping it down on the small patch of rough grass near the front door.

“We better get Mister Bob to have a look at your mouth anyway, after I clean up your knee,” she said. “It sure is a good thing your grown-up teeth haven’t come down yet, or you’d look like this for life.” Mom peered down at her son, seeing that a bath was in order to get the dirt out of his ears and hair as well as his knee. As she closed the front door, her head was turned so she didn’t spot her neighbour Mary come down her driveway alongside a very well dressed woman, climb into the beautiful old car beside her and drive off together.

 

It's official - humanity goes full circle!

According to fossil records, the earliest living animal we can find is the sponge. I particularly like the idea that sponges are the most primitive living animals. Hold that thought just for now.

I've met Princeton University geologist Professor Adam Maloof and he is characteristically enthusiastic about the fossils his team found in Australia that date back 640-650 million years. This makes them about 90 million years older than the next oldest animal fossils discovered.

Alas, I am not a scientist - poor me had a torrid time not only with physics, chemistry and biology at school, but also with the esteemed teachers of these revered subjects. Another story for another time. However, who can fail to be mightily impressed with the enormous brainpower and stamina applied in the intensive search for knowledge about our origins. In my opinion, the best programmes on television are those on natural history, closely followed by astronomy. The abominations known as 'X-Factor' and 'The Apprentice' don't even make the Top 10,000.

I was thinking about all this as I scanned the news services these past days. Like all of us trying to clutch order from the straws of chaos, I was wondering whether there was any common denominator that might go some way towards explaining the terrible woes being reported - pointless slaying of innocent children (France and Afghanistan), militarised oppression of dissatisfied civilians (Syria and USA), bandit behaviour by thuggish numbskulls (Somalia and Zimbabwe), tax cuts for the super-rich (UK) and continued decimation of citizens' standard of living through legalised theft by bankers and their government stooges (worldwide). To name just a few woes.

And then it hit me like... a wet one.

Animalia, Parazoa, Phylum Porifera 

 

Sponge, yes! These perpetrators are all sponges on society! A little further research brings forth this consensus definition.

 

Sponge (noun) - a leech or parasite who hangs around a host, without benefit to the host, in hope of gain or advantage

 

Now, who dares disagree with the scientists? Sponges certainly are the most primitive living animals, and I've realised that in an extraordinary rendition of a fully circular argument, they still are in 2012. With the emphasis on "primitive" and "animal".

 

Astonishing similarities

 

If only all human brains, not just some, could be harnessed in the service of the common good, where it finally gets through the skulls of the primitive specimens who claim to lead us that what serves others serves ourselves. I will be as nauseated as a TV host if I hear another politician claim they are prepared to make an ever so big personal sacrifice for the sake of public service - and then continue to green light the evil primeval beanfest currently underway that robs from the poor and hands over everything to the grasping already rich.

 

 

Once upon a thyme, said the sage

Everyone's a writer, even if they are merely able to scratch an 'X' at the bottom of a pre-filled application form for a teaching job. Maybe I should rephrase this. Everyone thinks they're a writer. At least that's my observation, after working in marketing communications for several aeons.

No matter how carefully and sapiently I craft my words to produce the desired effect - normally to encourage the reader to take some kind of action - the "client" who ultimately foots the bill for my labour almost always starts messing around with that vicious red pen.

 

Take that, damn copywriter

 

I wouldn't mind if they improved on my words. I'm no prima donna, not when there are plenty of prima donnas around already. I will even go on record about this. There is no room on dry land for any more prima donnas!

If a paying client has a better idea how to motivate people to buy, to visit, to learn or to undertake any other licit action, I'm all ears. The problem is, ninety nine point nine nine recurring per cent of the time, the request for amendments comes with nonsensical changes. I wish I had kept a list of all the inanities I've experienced over the years. One I do remember was from a rotund Chief Executive of a large corporation, who flatly refused to have any italics used for emphasis in his corporate literature. Sit down and I'll reveal why. "We won the war!" he stressed. Then he gurgled, "I don't want to see anything Italian."

I'm not often stunned, but I think several gnats took the opportunity to investigate my gaping oral cavern.

Another time, after I had as usual exhaustively checked my entire draft for appropriate grammar and perfect punctuation, I received the document back with handwritten scrawls requiring me to insert erroneous apostrophes. Now, we all know about Apostrophe Catastrophe. There is an entire ward in state psychiatric units reserved for foaming-at-the-mouth Defenders of God's Language, who are finally pushed over the edge when they witness a single rogue punctuation mark in The Times newspaper - or the absence of one.

In this instance, I politely and gently responded to the client that my use of punctuation was correct, expecting peace to break out again in my heart. I was sadly mistaken. The client forcefully replied that she was right, it was what she was taught at school, and there was to be no further discussion. At this stage, having arrived at a barrier entitled 'Ignoramus In Charge', further adorned by a sign declaring 'I Am Right Because I Pay The Bill', I baled out of the project, sent across my invoice and washed my hands and my mind of this matter.

 

Steady

 

Visual artists and photographers have an easier time of it, surely. Can you imagine a painter who is told that his almost-dry canvas is lovely, but could he look again at the shade of blue he's used for the sky. Oh and please add a few more boats to the harbour, because it looks kind of lonely over there.

I thought that my escape route was to become my own client, gravitating away from business communication into "real writing" and with luck, getting published. Another silly misconception on my part. Apparently what I write isn't interesting because it isn't commercial, the definition of commercial being whatever is considered by the dull-witted to be the flavour of the day. Not being an addled celebrity with an unwarranted massive ego to flaunt, I have as much chance of seeing my works in print (or kindlised) as "Tony Blair's people" not telling us how wonderful his existence is for the world.

Not long ago, after experiencing another surge of enthusiasm for communicating ideas and enjoying life while doing so, I completed a film script with my co-writing partner. It took one whole year to finalise. We used the right formatting, we triple-checked the 180 pages of scene setting and dialogue. We did the research about how to get the script "out there", we learned how to sidle up to the right agents and production companies in the right way. We printed out and posted paper versions, we emailed digital files, as per the requirements of the recipients.

We are not naive. We know that a story that centres on the search for meaning, navigating mid-life issues, adventure, heartache, comic moments, friendship, sex and life affirmation, is not the standard (yawn) action movie glorifying violence and celebrating death and destruction. So it's already pushing water uphill for us to approach producers and agents who have as limited an attention span as the Playstation generation making up the audience for mind-numbing blood-and-guts fare.

If I see another piece of footage showing famous actors miraculously escaping death by jumping towards the camera in front of a huge explosion, I shall… I shall… I shall probably raise my voice.

Then again, The Artist and The Descendants have made it into films this past year. So maybe it wouldn't be an utter miracle to have our script accepted and eventually churned into a movie. All we're asking is for someone somewhere with some clout to read the script and tell us if it has legs. So far, silence. Not even the courtesy of a rejection. Ho hum, as Kurt Vonnegut would put it.

I guess I ought to keep my day job, or rather my freelance writing gig. As I gaze out the window on England's finest grey cloudscape, I am grateful for small mercies. I can write. I mean, I can really write. In complete sentences. With italics and all.

News media alert: Warning! Warning!

Listen up all of you responsible for news broadcasts. Some words of warning are required. I have it on good advice, following a recent brief encounter of universal proportions. Let me elaborate.

The alien was three-headed, although he* did explain that two of those heads were redundant. I made the mistake of quipping about this, referring to the current economic slump across the cosmos, but this went in one ear and out the five others. All three faces remained equally stony. Thereafter ensued a rather awkward five minute lecture on the Biophysical Mechanical requirement for redundancy systems in advanced species. I successfully concealed nearly all my puzzlement and my oxygen-seeking yawns.

 

Take me! Take me!

 

The reason I’m telling you this by way of preamble is because the umm... this odd being appeared to enunciate good English. Without his impressive linguistic talent, gained who knows how, you would be excused for thinking I’ve simply invented what follows. I wouldn’t like you to think I was making all this up, because he asked me a very important question. This is a question we all need to ask ourselves at this juncture in human history, and it’s no particular surprise that my encounter has coincided with an interesting date in humanity’s diary. 2012.

 

Question: “Are you able to categorise the key aspects of life on this planet in terms of both positive and negative?”

 

This was clearly not a question that could be properly addressed at the drop of a hat, or three. I mean, I could have answered Yes or No and left it at that, but I surmised that his enquiry required more than the cursory response I ordinarily reserve for strangers accosting me in the street.

By the steely look on his sole functioning visage, he obviously wanted me to start listing the Good and the Bad about our world. So I obliged, all the while wondering why he would select me for this exercise, when there were far cleverer people in the university city just a few miles down the road. I soon realised, however, that I was possibly the first human he had come upon so far, and he was assuming I was of sufficiently basic intelligence to commence an interspecial interaction.

My mental processing powers being what they are, I knew I’d need to find something to write on, where I could draw up two separate columns in which to record my opinions of what was Right and what was Wrong about life on earth. So I invited him through my garden gate and we seated ourselves on the two seaside-style deckchairs I keep stored in the shed for occasional use when the clouds part enough in Britain’s latitudes to permit the sun to emit a little warmth upon exposed skin. And from the hook on the back of the shed door I seized last year’s gardening calendar sporting a melee of nearly-nude lovelies from the South-East Wessex fire and rescue service, on the reverse of which I found a reasonably sized blank canvas for my scribblings.

 

Nice setting for an existential chat

   I was temporarily distracted by the way he furled and twirled his three lower limbs into a kind of cushion to support what I suspected was his posterior. But ever the considerate host, I averted my eyes as quickly as was polite and focused on the writing surface before me. I was just about to jot something down using the pencil stub attached by string to the ring-bound calendar when I realised that I hadn’t even offered my guest a drink. My hospitality was met with silence, however, his main face remaining as inscrutable as his other two. I mentally filed the proposition that recently brewed liquid refreshment may not be all it’s cracked up to be in the Anglofied regions of the multiverse.

So this is what I thought of first. Birds. It may have been because one particularly plump specimen was perched on a telephone wire almost above my visitor’s heads, and I silently prayed that now was not the time to be dropping off a small wet chalky-white present.

He asked me to verbalise what I was writing, and I almost said Avian Creatures in an attempt to sound scholarly, but I decided just to keep it simple. “Birds,” I said. “Everyone likes birds, so I’d say they were positive things.”

He intimated that he understood, and waited for me to continue my listing. In a jumbled outpouring of random items, I offered United Nations, classical music, medicine, love, chocolate fudge cake, rainforests, painting, scientific discovery, children laughing, ocean sunsets and Nelson Mandela. I was stupefied for a moment when he asked in which column I was putting them. “Positive!” I positively gushed. Whether he nodded or it was just my imagination, I’ll never know. I let my eyes rest on the words I had added to the right-hand column, as if to verify that they indeed all belonged among the positives.

“Pollution is bad, and so is war,” I then blurted. “Global warming, murders, racial hatred... (I looked up for an instant to consider the exact hue of his translucent metallic outer membrane) ...nuclear bombs, torture, government corruption, terrorism, street violence, stealing...” I paused for breath, and ruminated some more as I transferred these concepts from brain to cardboard surface. I could feel his gaze on me, unblinking. I can’t now recall if he actually had such things as eyelids. And what was his actual eye colour? I just don’t know. I’d make a useless witness at an identity parade.

“We have people who are considered especially beautiful, so I think I could add them to the positives.” Even as I said this, I realised the folly of my statement. One man’s lust is another man’s disinterest, so I stopped spelling out “B-E-Y-O-N...” and neatly crossed her out. It wasn’t so easy to stop thinking of this luscious peach. But then she did play a part by inspiring me to inscribe in her place tropical fruit.

Then I thought about religion, and I hesitated, hand poised in midair. I contemplated all the wars ostensibly fought because of people’s clashing faiths. I also considered that it wasn’t actually religion but power-obsessed religious institutions that usually caused the bloody conflicts, or 'God' was used as a convenient smokescreen by despots, psychopaths, control freaks and similar hoodwinkers. In the end, I wrote down religion in both columns.

 

By God I'm in the right

 

Some other ideas popped into consciousness, so I pencilled in diamonds, marriage, grilled prawns, money, investment bankers, born-again fundamentalists, free speech, wild horses, injustice, literature, tsunamis, farming, reality TV, millionaire footballers, education, sculpture, media owners and bedbugs in the appropriate columns. You can doubtless guess which went in each. I carefully double-circled investment bankers for emphasis.

When I looked up again, all three heads seemed asleep. I was therefore quite startled when triplicated pairs of orbs abruptly glowed in their sockets like fiery red suns, and my special out-of-this-world guest made to extricate himself from our own world’s silliest chair design. Especially for incumbents with three legs.

I didn’t dare assist him - physical touch seemed out of the question - although I felt a negligent host. But soon enough he was on his... feet, and towering over me again.

“Many gratitudes for your contributed data,” he single-mouthed, now sounding a little off-beam with his syntax. I tried to say you’re welcome, but my voice came out weedy and feeble. He said a few more things to me which I’ll come to in a moment. I didn’t immediately know how to respond, so as to conclude our dealings on a good note. Basically, I wasn’t the best advertisement for our species.

When he stopped all speech and his stubby upper limbs stilled completely, I wasn’t sure what to do next, usher him to the gate or run inside and tell my girlfriend I’d just been granted my life’s wish to meet Mork**. He took the decision out of my hands by bounding over the gate and away into the far distance at a rate of considerable kph.

I don’t know how long I stood there, watching where he had gone. My girlfriend tells me she found me in the kitchen, away with the fairies while I intently scrubbed and scrubbed a frying-pan that I had badly burnt cooking pancakes the previous day.

My alien tête-à-têtes now seems just a blur. An almost dreamlike quality. But what I remember clear as a gong is the final part of our conversation, before he tripodded off to parts unknown. “We come here with preparation for your biological cleansing (I gave a little shudder at this phrase) after monitoring of your planetary auditory and visual broadcast. Conversely it is presently evident that it is not comprehensively negative on your world. You are sapient six-hundred-fifty-two we survey and you are in conformance with common findings. We record there is probability of positive outcome in addition to negative. In accordance we will return in one (what sounded like) dy-ah-kwark for supplementary examination.”

I could have pressed him about what would happen to us humans if the positives were ultimately swamped by all the negatives, but I didn’t really want to know the answer. What I did want to do is start hollering at all the media broadcasters around the world who dish out that constant diet of overwhelmingly negative “news”, as if there’s no tomorrow. No tomorrow indeed. If they keep up the usual pattern of these doom-laden outward bound transmissions, they’ll do more than generate increasing levels of depression among us earthly inhabitants. We could be marked out for deletion by evolved species who wish to retain an orderly universe and have the means and the will to fix us for good.

* Gender issues seemed to be of lesser importance to my alien acquaintance. While I presumed he was male, as judged from the timbre of his voice and the manner in which he stood erect on his tripedal appendages, he did tell me something about the way his kind reproduced and this gave me much food for thought on whether he was in fact more accurately a she. With any luck, I will go on to publish a whole new galactic edition of the Kama Sutra.

** Or Robin Williams.

Down in the dumps? Here's a cheap cure!

It's a truism that life is full of ups and downs, and it's hard to imagine that anyone could possibly get through an entire lifetime without feeling the blues sometimes.

 

'Depression' is the catch-all term used when people describe the state of being that is characterised by low spirits - which may include loss of interest in living, low self-esteem, guilty feelings, disturbed sleep, loss of appetite, lethargy and dulled concentration.

According to the World Health Organisation, depression affects around 121 million people worldwide (presumably they mean 121 million at any one time). They also report that fewer than 25% of those affected have access to effective treatments. These two facts are surely astounding.

As a perennial student of all things philosophic, I have a fair interest in the nature of this elusive thing called 'happiness'. By gosh, we could have a year-long debate simply on the key differences between happiness and contentment. So permit me to proffer a new remedy for those of us (i.e. all of us) who drop into that bottomless abyss every so often and writhe all alone in the dark for a time.

This is a new remedy that I discovered quite by chance. In my experience, it actually works - and here's the wonderful part. It doesn't involve prescription tablets, illicit drugs, alcohol, cognitive behaviour therapy, psychiatric counselling, hypnosis, chanting, funny farm retreats, ashrams, electric shocks, brain surgery or even falling in love (the latter is reserved for the Very Lucky in this world). Not least, it's quite inexpensive as remedies go. Less than £10 ($15) for the whole treatment - or even 100% free depending on your access to a public service that is rapidly losing government support.

It's time to give the game away.

 

Masterwork

 

I recommend you get hold of a copy of this 650-page masterpiece, at a library if you want to try before you buy. I'm fairly confident that buy it you will, if this book has anything like the reaction inside your soul that it had in mine.

Don't be put off by the "650 pages" thing. All you need to do is read a few pages, once in a full blue moon or every night at bedtime or at any odd moment of the day or night. It really doesn't matter how much you read or how often, but starting from the beginning is best in my opinion. You'll know why after you open the cover.

Before you get wondering, I can tell you that I have no connection with the brilliant writer who is Bill Bryson, I have no commercial interest in his or anyone else's book sales, and I am receiving no financial benefit from recommending this remedy for when we're feeling out of sorts. I'm writing about it because I have not been the same person since I first started reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I feel like a never-say-die goldminer who has finally stumbled upon a vein of ore so pure and deep, there's enough for everyone on earth to get rich and have fun.

I don't want to give too much more away. I well remember rushing excitedly to my sister about Santana's new album called 'Caravanserai' that had blown my mind, and still does. She, a music aficianado, brushed it off with some disdain, describing it as "too spacey" for her liking. So I won't attempt to tell you how to react to Bill Bryson's words. I'll just say that I am in awe of the things he writes about, and every time I read some more, my awe grows.

The thing is, the awe is the cure. It's all around us and Bill's genius is to point it out to us, simply. This is the kind of Bill I like. Beats the one-per-month-forever one from the inscrutable shrink.