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.

ORDER!

Did you see the moon up there last night? It was like a discarded dirty plate and the stars were scattered about it like shiny white crumbs. I was looking up and I found it very messy. I found the sight slightly obscene. We'll put order on it one day. We'll line up the stars in neat rows, like the ones on the flag of the United States of America. We will look up and see a regimented, disciplined, and comprehensible night sky. We have brought order to our world and we will bring order to what lies beyond it. We cut the grass and trim the hedges. It's what we're all about. It's how we roll.

We even put time in order. We made it a series of numbers on a dial. When the pointer on the dial is at a certain number you know that it's time to get out of bed. When it points to the next number you know that it's time to leave for work. When it points to the number after that you know that you are late for work. A few numbers later and you know that it's OK to go home and watch the telly. Before us time was a sprawling mess, an intangible nuisance, but we captured time on a dial and when we put time in order we put ourselves in order.

Before time, humans were a messy. They just did things, all willy nilly and whenever. They would eat when their belly grumbled, sleep when they were tired, plant stuff when it was getting sunny and reap it when it was getting cold. Nothing really got done when it should be done and when it should be done is when we say it should be done. Proper order!

When we put time in order we put work in order and when we put work in order we put money in order. Yes, money. We gave designated times to the earning of money and with money we designated objective value to things. Before money value was messy and subjective and sentimental. Now it is certain.

We have order and we, ourselves, are defined by order. We ordered reality so it would order us. Without order there is only disorder. Have you ever felt disordered? Not nice is it? Scary isn't it? Did you know that there are those amongst us that hanker for the disorder that lies beneath order? Yes, it's true. Some actually feel an aversion to the numbers on the dial and to designated toil and objective values. These people are feeling the atavistic longing for a world before order. These people are subversives and seek to reinstate mess. These people are inhuman because to be human is to be ordered. These people must be put back in order so that they once again appreciate and obey order. You see, to stay ordered we must obey our orders otherwise we'd be a mess like the dirty plate and crumbs scattered throughout last night's sky. Without order we'd be an obscenity. An insult to human cognition. An anachronism. We'd be mad people or even criminals. Without order, well, we might not even exist!

There is no alternative. There is only order. We decide order and we impose order. We are order and we must have order and to have order we must obey order. So quit messing. That's an order!

This message was brought to you by the Society for the Maintenance of Chronological and Spatial Ontology, Kinnegad Main Street, County Westmeath.