Dawn of the Dumb (25 page)

People who watch
Emmerdale
, for example.
Emmerdale
is Britain’s third most popular soap opera—second, actually, when
EastEnders
is having an off day. It attracts something in the region of 5 million viewers, which means approximately one in twelve Brits regularly tunes in. Yet I’ve never actually met anyone who watches it. If you add up the number of people I’ve met in my life, divide it by the percentage of people who should watch it, then multiply the result by the number of
Emmerdale
episodes broadcast during that period, you end up with a number that definitively proves two things: firstly, that I’m hopeless at maths, and secondly, that the
Emmerdale
audience consists of invisible dark matter whose presence can be detected only in viewing statistics, not the everyday physical world. What are they? Spirits? Ghosts? I haven’t the foggiest. It’s scary.

Then there’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They’re one of the most popular bands in existence. They play sell-out gigs all over the world and regularly top the album charts. They even get good press. But have you ever met a single, actual fan? I mean, everyone can name
one
Red Hot Chili Peppers song they kinda, sorta like—usually ‘Under the Bridge’, or diat other one (that no one ever knows the name of)—but where the hell are all these adoring fans? Clearly, they’re lurking out of sight, in an alternate dimension that exists somewhere between the atoms of our world, where the Chili Peppers are considered acceptable rather than simply annoying. This magical alt-Earth only intrudes on our reality when the Chili Peppers release an album or put tickets on sale. The rest of the time it’s invisible.

Fry’s Turkish Delight. That’s another one. I can’t remember if it was me or someone else who once described it as ‘a refrigerated human organ dipped in chocolate’, but whoever it was, they were on to something. It’s been on sale since 1914 and is still going strong—but do you know anyone in their right mind who’d voluntarily eat one? It’s a mystery on a par with the continued success of Fisherman’s Friend (a cross between menthol and earwax in tablet form) and Kendal Mint Cake (urinal bloody cake more like).

Perhaps people just consume all these things on the sly. Or perhaps I just move in limited circles. But no. I prefer to think there’s a phantom population: invisible people, invisible consumption. Dark matter with shoes.

Plan Z

[11 August 2006]

I
f you ask me, the most terrifying sound in the English language is the word ‘plan’. I don’t plan. I can’t plan. The merest whiff of a plan fills my head with fog and makes me jittery. When someone’s outlining a plan, especially one that involves me, my mind refuses to hold the details in focus; instead I nod and frown and pull my best ‘listening’ face, while inside, my brain’s shrieking ‘Concentrate on the plan! Concentrate on the plan!’ in such a high-pitched squeal it’s impossible for even the most basic instruction to register.

Way back in the mists of time, when I wrote about video games for a living, every so often I’d be handed a point-and-click war game to review. Generally, these involve lightning-speed military deployment, informed by an adaptable battlefield strategy you’ve formulated while studying a map at the start of the game. In theory, anyway. To me it was all blind panic. Every game consisted of several minutes of increasingly desperate mouse gymnastics followed by a crushing defeat. My brain isn’t wired to cope with this stuff. A dog could thrash me at chess.

The reason, apparently, is that I’m a ‘present-dweller’. I’m incapable of envisaging any kind of future whatsoever, even one that begins in five minutes’ time. My life consists of a single, gigantic ‘YOU ARE HERE’ arrow, pointing directly to now. Which makes things pretty simple. I don’t have to worry about fulfilling my long-term goals, for instance, because I don’t have any.

Furthermore, I can leave teetering piles of bills unopened, because I simply can’t imagine the consequences of not paying them. Instead I walk around in a woozy real-time bubble in which my sole concern is instant gratification. Can’t be arsed to fill out that pension form? Then don’t bother! Tomorrow never conies. Tomorrow was never there in the first place.

Trouble is, this is all very well when you’re fifteen years old, but when you’re in your thirties it starts to look pathetic. It’s hard to tidy up after yourself, for example, when you repeatedly fail to understand that an unwashed mug on the bedside table will stay there for ever unless you take it away and clean it. It’s especially hard when you find yourself glancing at said mug every so often, actively thinking, ‘I should take that to the kitchen, wash it, and put it away’—and then still not doing anything about it because that’s crazy future cultist talk.

The bigger picture ain’t so grand either. I don’t own my own property, simply because the thought of all those viewings and negotiations and twenty-five-year contracts makes my head throb like a hammered thumb. And when people tell me this is crazy, that ‘everyone feels like that but they just get on with it’, it makes no sense to me. I mean, what’s their motivation? I don’t get it.

What’s required, I think, is a time machine. If I could skip forward to my own future, preferably one in which I’ve put the mugs away and bought my own home, then maybe, just maybe, I’d finally feel like a fully qualified adult. But could someone else invent one, please? Because I can’t imagine where to begin.

Down with parties

[
iis
August 2006]

H
ere’s an amusing game for all you coal-hearted misanthropes out there. Next time you find yourself lurking in the corner at a party, watching the disgusting fun unfold around you, start saying the word ‘despair’ out loud. Begin the incantation at conversational level, then increase the volume incrementally until someone asks you to leave. I guarantee you’ll be bellowing at the top of your lungs before anyone even notices. If you’re lucky, someone else’ll join in, and then you’ve made a new friend. I know; I’ve tried it myself.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fun guy. There’s nothing I enjoy more than a bit of poindess dicking round. It’s the single most life-affirming activity in the world. But I have a problem with parties. Parties are supposed to be the last word in devil-may-care enjoyment, yet they fill me with an infinite sense of sadness, so vast and gaping mat shouting ‘despair’ seems like the only sane course of action. After years of pondering the subject, I’ve worked out why.

Parties somehow represent the rationing of fun, and that very concept depresses me. You’re allowed to act like a tit at parties; therefore, by implication, you’re not allowed to act like a tit the rest of the time. I consider that a serious infringement of my human rights. It’s like society is blowing a whistle and shrieking, ‘Attention drones—your allotted enjoyment period starts now.’ Talk about enforced bonhomie. It takes the joy out of joy itself.

Consequently I’m suspicious of parties, and all who sail in them. Experience confirms my aversion. For example, when people refer to someone as a ‘party animal’, you can guarantee what they really mean is ‘a loud, unimaginative, overbearing cretin who just about gets away with it when everyone around them is too drunk or stupid to complain’. If there are any self-proclaimed ‘party animals’ reading this, I hope the ink rubs off on your fingers and poisons you—and if you’re online, I hope your monitor shatters, firing white-hot LCD shards into your dimwit, party-loving eyes.

Come to think of it, just hearing the word ‘party’ makes me angry. In addition to wishing misfortune on ‘party animals’ everywhere, I firmly believe that anyone who uses the word ‘party’ as a verb—as in ‘Hey everybody—let’s part-ay!’—deserves to die shackled in rags while a masked torturer pours a saucepan of their own boiling blood down their throat. ‘Let’s party’ is a pathetic phrase. It really means, ‘Woo hoo everybody—we’re allowed to enjoy ourselves for a moment! Aren’t we ker-razy!?’ Ugh.

The only solution, as I see it, is to swap the fun/no fun balance in everyday life. I’d prefer it if the entire year consisted of one long party, punctuated by bursts of compulsory stony-faced toil, preferably doled out in the most fascistic manner possible: two hours of serious work a week, overseen by jack-booted stormtroopers who’ll thrash you into a coma if you so much as chuckle before the all-clear sounds. Global efficiency levels would sky-rocket. Better still, our quality of life would improve dramatically. And that’d give everyone real cause to celebrate. Not party. Celebrate.

It’s time to smother romance in its sleep

[25 August 2006]

H
ands up anyone who’s had a great experience with romance. Now put your hands back down and stop lying. Romance never works. Romance never does what it says on the tin. Romance, ultimately, is bullshit.

If I sound jaded, it’s because I am. I’m so sick and tired of love and its pitfalls I can scarcely lift my fingers to type. If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn’t work properly. The seams come apart and it’s full of powdered glass.

Each fresh romance has two potential outcomes: (1) one of you falls heavily, and quickly, until this helpless, unattractive neediness sends the other running for the hills; or (2) by some miracle your desperate neediness levels balance out, and you stay together for several years—until the love between you withers and dies, at which point one or both of you will stagger away, howling like a wolf with a hook in its gut, wounded beyond reason.

When you’re smitten, romance is a thrilling high-wire act over a looming lake of woe. Your head’s full of music; the first few steps are a joyful scamper. Then the skies darken, the breeze picks up, the tightrope shudders and you fight to retain your balance. In your heart of hearts, you know you’re heading for a tumble, but you’re out and exposed and there’s no turning back—and who knows, maybe you’ll make it?

Imbecile. Of course you won’t. Instead, the rope snaps and suddenly you’re plunged back into the monochrome workaday reality of flowers in the dustbin and dogs being sick on the pavement.

At this point, wandering in a post-romantic shock, things get even worse. Being numb and distant somehow renders you magically attractive to others. It’s sod’s law in action, and before you know it you’re abusing the privilege. Hungering for another go on the tightrope, you hurl yourself at the nearest admirer, but since the love canary’s recently flown your cage, you’re selfish, robotic, and doomed to wipe your arse all over their soul. Congratulations: you’ve become an emotional vandal. And you’ll do it again and again until you meet another special someone—only this time the tightrope’s higher up and more precarious, and you’re so scared of falling that your feet shake the moment you step aboard.

On and on and on it goes, and there’s no end to it. This madness must be stopped. We can medicate depression into oblivion; why not romance? A preventative tablet, perhaps, or an adhesive patch that suppresses the relevant endorphins, which you can slap on your skin at the first sign of attraction, killing romance dead, stopping you in your tracks before you make a fool of yourself or a hapless Aunt Sally of another.

And sizzled on the back of every packet, embossed on every patch, just to keep things melancholic and swoonsome, you’d find the last line from Graham Greene’s
The End of the Affair-the
battered protagonist’s final plea, which sums up the absolute aching awfulness of romance so eloquently it makes your heart nod along with tears in its eyes: ‘O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.’

Anyway. Next week: some jokes.

The war on boring terror

[1 September 2006]

G
uns and bombs, guns and bombs—boring, boring, boring. I’m sick of things going bang. Listen: if the world
must
slide into unbridled chaos and savagery, if we really
are
doomed to splutter our last lying face-down in individual pools of our own viscera, can’t we be dispatched more creatively?

Take massacres. It’s been ages since anyone went berserk with a firearm in this country, and obviously that’s a good thing, mainly because insane machine-gun rampages are just so Nineties. Even so, it won’t be long before we see crazed terrorists scampering through the streets toting AK-4ys, drilling pedestrians to sausage-meat with big beatific grins on their faces. Well, where’s the challenge in that, you pussies? It’s far too one-sided. Obviously, harbouring belief in any kind of religion whatsoever betrays a crushing lack of imagination, but really, that’s pathetic—like stamping on ants.

If you’re hell-bent on wiping us out, at least put some effort into it. Arm yourself with nothing but a frying pan and a saw, and if you manage to score a body count in double figures, then maybe I’ll respect you. Otherwise, up yours. You’re boring.

Bombs are equally lazy. There’s nothing you can do about a bomb going off, short of psychically foretelling the blast and running away. There’s no sport to it. I’m getting bored of being frightened of bombs. Give me something new to fret about. Here’s an idea: an ankle-height laser beam that sweeps across densely populated concourses in the blink of an eye: a sheet of light slicing everyone’s feet off simultaneously. Imagine the chaos! It’d be more humane too, since there’s a good chance you could surgically re-attach the feet later—although matching each foot to its rightful owner would be a logistical nightmare. Chances are you’d end up with a size ten and a size three. Still, it’d break the ice at parties.

Actually, even foot removal is too violent. The thing I don’t grasp about terrorism is why it has to involve violence at all. Detonating a gigantic bag of manure in a crowded space would make the same point far more eloquently—and the victims would still be around to put pressure on the government to do something to ease the crisis. Indiscriminate slaughter isn’t just barbaric and selfish—it’s immature and idiotic. Any budding terrorists reading this now: toss those detonators in the bin and try being man enough to change people’s minds via some other method for once. Girls will respect you. Only wankers kill people. Whether you’re a head of state or a disgruntled fanatic, the moment you get blood on your hands, you’ve become a massive wanker.