You Cannot Be Serious!

What you see is what you get.

I have tried, from time to time, to put something ‘out there’ that was altogether more mature than my normal farrago, actually ready to stand on its own two feet, that was not quite so needy, but inevitably what leaves my head as ‘worthy’ hits the page as ‘trite’ and, by and large, any point that I think I might want to make is probably best served by being made by somebody else.  Nobody ever had their viewpoint changed by a sockful of wet fish in the face.  Whoever said that laughter is the best medicine has never had a UTI.  It might be possible to successfully make a point with a joke, but only if you use a feather duster and not a bludgeon and, let’s be honest here, I’m not certain that I am aware of anyone who has actually laughed so much that it has fundamentally changed their point of view.  I don’t think that anybody necessarily likes somebody more because they can make them laugh, although it definitely has the edge over making them feel as though they would like to swallow stones.

Whilst being the butt of a joke is never going to improve anybody’s demeanour, seeing somebody else getting their pants filled with custard may well work a treat.  Nothing is quite as cheering as the misfortune of others.

Extreme emotion is incredibly difficult to channel properly.  Everyone has experienced that moment at the lowest point of a funeral when grief overwhelms the senses and they find themselves giggling.  No?  Only me?  Oh dear…  It is in no way a mark of disrespect, merely a brain that is unable to process what it is feeling and so seeks relief in the first emotion that comes to hand: inevitably the wrong one.  This is no sign of flippancy, but the mark of someone with an emotional compass that has been left too near the microwave.

There are times when I feel that the reality I occupy lies just one millimetre to the side of everybody else’s.  I am the man who set off to explore the Cosmos and wound up in a bar in Kos.  (Or, if my first draft is to be believed, ‘in a bra in Kos’.)  On the whole, my world is split into three sections: 1. the huge things that I have no control over whatsoever – these are usually of incomprehensible magnitude and almost always distressing; 2. the usual day to day annoyances which occupy my brain in fevered worry for 99% of the time; 3. everything else – usually composed of sheer absurdity, frustration and chocolate.  There is seldom anything amusing to be found in category 1, but if I couldn’t find it in 2 and 3 I would almost certainly be found wandering the Brecon Beacons in a woolly hat and loin cloth shouting ‘wibble’ at unicorns.  My default position is always ‘Really?  Are you sure?’ 

Truly you do not have to search to find absurdity, we are surrounded by it, so little of life makes any sense at all, and if you report on it, no matter how microcosmically, you simply cannot be serious…