CHOKING ON POWDERY SHITE

He loved to look at the lovely moon in the sky above him and dream that he would one day go to the moon and then one day he got in a rocket and went to the moon and he landed on the moon and lived on the moon and he became unhappy on the moon because he could no longer see the lovely moon in the sky above him and dream of one day going to the moon because he was on the moon and all it was was rocks in the dark and powdery shite.

Now, that's a little story for you. What does it mean? Well, I suppose it's just a long way of saying 'be careful what you wish for and be content with what you have.' Trite but perhaps true enough and maybe you should apply it to your life. Unless of course you are a two year old Sub-Saharan sucking on an energy biscuit and dying of Malaria. I doubt the moon story would bring much comfort to such a person. It's hard to imagine what kind of story would. I suppose stories are just comforting little indulgences for those who are not in such dire circumstances. I suppose, the less you suffer the more time you have to contemplate suffering. It might even be a case of the less you suffer the more you seek out suffering and then have to reckon with it, the very nature of it, so you need stories to explain it. Converse kind of stuff that, perverse even. There might even be a story in it. A story about an adored king who lives in luxury but all he can do is dwell on the slightly frayed trimmings on one of his robes and compose stories about them.

I'm not saying we're all crybabies. I'm just saying, well, imagine your heart is broken. That stings doesn't it? It does. Well, bad and all as that is, you probably wouldn't be worrying about it all that much if you were being chased by a lion would you? You wouldn't be going 'I wonder what she/he is doing right now,' with some roaring clawed fucker of a giant cat charging after you. I doubt you'd be remotely interested in hearing a parable involving someone overcoming their lovelorn predicament if you were involved in a predicament involving a lion.

What I'm saying here is that we have stories to comfort the comfortable and the truly uncomfortable don't get any stories, which is fine because they're too distracted to heed them anyway. If you're listening to a story, well, then things mustn't be going so bad for you and maybe you shouldn't take the story too seriously because, when things get serious, stories aren't much use at all. For example, I've never seen anyone put out a blazing building with a story about a brave firefighter. And I've never seen a man successfully wrestle a lion into submission by recounting The Epic of Gilgamesh. Stories are just made up things. They are only stories. Even the ones on the news. Even the ones God told. Even the ones you tell yourself about yourself. Instead of listening to stories, you'd be better off going outdoors and looking up and contemplating the moon and being happy to be under it and not on it, gasping for breath and crawling over rocks in the dark, being in no mood for stories and choking on powdery shite.

Saturday Night at the Movies...

I'm going to become a film director. I'm going to change my name to Gustav Klankenheimer and make a seven hour meditation on suffering. Either the film will be in black and white or only feature washed out varieties of beige mixed with jaundiced yellows. It will be bleak.

The film will begin with a shot of ominous rolling clouds. We hear a clap of thunder. Cut to drizzle against a window pane. Beyond the glass we see a sparsely decorated room with peeling wallpaper and a garish sacred heart picture upon the wall. A fluorescent light bulb crackles and flickers, as they do. A narrow bed with coarse horsehair blankets contains an emaciated old man. He is wheezing heavily and staring at water dripping through the ceiling and landing on the stiff body of a dead cat. The old man is dying of cancer and he frequently moans in pain because he has no medication. Occasionally he calls out in a Scandinavian accent. He calls out the name 'Elizabet'. We see a woman in late middle age sitting at a kitchen table. She hears the old man's calls but ignores them. She chain smokes and stares into the middle-distance. Her face is a road map to regret. She listens to the sound of weeping children being broadcast over a battered wireless.

A clock hangs above the old man's head. Its face is cracked. It ticks portentously. It tocks with even greater menace. A large bluebottle fly buzzes around the room. It lands on the old man's nose. He attempts to lift his hand and swat it away but he hasn't the strength. He is helpless to do anything about it. 'Elizaaaaaaaaabet', he croaks, 'Elizaaaaaaaabet'. Elizabet ignores him.

In the final moments of this film, the old man's eyes will roll back in his head. He will convulse and choke. As he breathes his last, he will gasp these words: ...'I see a great ugly mouth with jagged teeth, gaping open, miles wide. I smell its stinking carcass breath. This is the mouth of God and he is laughing, ...laughing at us all.'... The old man will then die. We hear his death rattle. Elizabet will then enter the room. She will regard the old man's corpse. She will smirk and then jump out of the window. The end credits will roll to the sound of the clock ticking, the children weeping and the water dripping on the dead cat. I'm going to call the film Transformers 3.