“I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday” proclaimed the gloomy facebook status this morning.
A curious combination of words penned from a friend.
“Only Tuesday.”
Obviously not referring to the comparative mightiness of Monday. Or the relative weight of Wednesday. “Only Tuesday” must have been a temporal slur.
“It’s still Tuesday, goddamn it!”
But if it was a temporal reference, to what end was the author aspiring? What resolution?
The weekend, I would assume.
But why not roll out this line of thinking? I can’t believe it’s only this weekend.
Keep going and it starts to get absurd.
“I can’t believe it’s only September.”
“I can’t believe it’s only 2009.”
“I can’t believe I’m still in my thirties.”
In the end, all the status said to me was
“I can’t believe I’m not dead yet”
And with the thought that this should be a sentient human being’s existential state wafting around my head, I went about my day.
Hello.
Just about everyone I know is on facebook.
My whole generation has been conscripted into it.
Which got me thinking about how sinister this site is going to be 80 years from now.
Assuming that the annals of the internet remain preserved for all to see in years to come, facebook has the potential to one day be a Gothic masterpiece.
As generation facebook starts to die, our profiles will remain. We won’t be able to delete them – not from the grave. Facebook will be a veritable internet ghost-town. And as we die, our internet persona will just freeze. Captured there like Han Solo in carbonite.
Friends, unwilling to delete you, will read into your last few messages with profundity that was never intended. Every nonsense comment. Every sly dig. Every status update has the potential to be your de facto last words.
Friends who outlive you will go back and read those status updates, and look at those photos (I’ve got one where a friend has tagged me on a montage of paedophiles) and maybe this content will define us. Maybe facebook is going to be our legacy? A legacy of utter, fucking, nonsense.
Our grandchildren can find the pages and get to know us in ways we never knew our own grandparents. One post about Cheryl Tweedy’s bum and suddenly your grandkids think less of their dead relative.
Of course, in reality, facebook will no doubt be quickly surpassed by some currently inconceivable semantic web alternative. But it’s worth giving some thought to.
One day facebook could be an online graveyard for the entire 2.0 generation.
There’s a girl I’m kind of seeing at the moment.
I think she is astoundingly beautiful.
The simplicity of beholding her got me thinking. About meaning, and why everything has to mean something.
If someone asked me the ‘meaning’ of her beauty I would find the question confusing.
The meaning of beauty.
For me, those words have a peculiar relationship to one another. A scientist could no doubt give a perfectly rational and intelligent (sane?) Darwinian meaning. But I’d find it unsatisfying. The meaning of beauty seems to me as futile an investigation as the colour of hate, or the distance to music.
The closest I can get is to seek not ‘meaning’ but justification.
But what justification can there be for beauty? I refuse to accept people are beautiful only to encourage reproduction. It makes sense, and I can see why most people hold reproduction to be the be-all and end-all – sustaing life, etc. But beauty is infinitely more impressive than function. Function (in this case, chemical reactions and evolution) can surely only be justified as means to an end? But what end? Function for function’s sake leads us to a very uncreative and futile existence. It may be so, but how very dreary.
If beauty was just a means to reproduction, why would the sky be beautiful?
I mean, you can’t shag it, can you? (You’re more than welcome to try, of course)
It is my point of view that the power of beauty trumps more or less anything you can think of. Which (unscientifically) draws me to the conclusion beauty is its own justification. You can deify beauty. It moves from the justifiable to the justification.
“why are you doing that?”
“because it’s beautiful”
And all this got me thinking about that other more cliched question:
What is the meaning of life?
I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that, like beauty, life has no ‘meaning’ as such. It is justification that we should seek.
And if you take as read (as you almost certainly will not) my previous conclusion, then you see that life can only be justified in one way: as the form necessary for beauty to be observed.
In other words, life has a purely aesthetic reason for being.
It’s a nice thought. Every biological, chemical, physical and quantum physical process being nothing but an ingenious and intricate system put in place so that beauty, in its many forms, can be enjoyed by the living aesthete.
Something isn’t beautiful because of a, b and c
A, b an d c happen because they facilitate beauty.
“Why does the sun rise in the morning?”
“Because it’s beautiful.”
Would a world without beauty be a world worth living in?
And if not … if, without beauty, life is meaningless … what then is the meaning of life?
Okay so this is a weird one.
I was having a think and drawing parallels between life and sex. And how our relationship with the world around us can be compared to the act of intercourse.
There are two approaches you can take: you can be the man, or you can be the woman.
What I mean by this is that when presented with the world around you, you can seek to impose yourself upon it. You can take control of it. You can organise, boss, fight, shout. You can get in amongst life, get in its face, and work so that, as much as possible, life conforms to your will. You can tell people off, you can save your money, and live free from hardship. You can make life the mistress to your master. You can be Arthur Schopenhauer, Cecil Rhodes.
This is a very active, male, relationship with life. And I’m sure it brings a certain amount of satisfaction.
But then there is the other approach. The passive approach. You can let life get inside you: inside your head, inside your soul. You can let yourself be overcome with the strength of everything around you. The sounds, the smells, the sights, the raw physics. You can submit yourself to it and be its mistress. If you find yourself in a tricky sitation, you can teach yourself to live with it, rather than take the easy way out (dead men, after all, do not find themselves in tricky situations). You can let life have its way with you, let it wash over you. You can be Walt Whitman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
This is a very passive, female relationship with life. And the satisfaction is limitless.
The older I get, the more I find myself assuming the latter position. When it comes to life, in Richard Pryor’s words, “I’m the bitch.” Which is strange for a man. But life seems so much stronger – so much more than we are – that it just seems unbecoming for us to try order it to our will.
How more infinitely satisfying to submit to the force and law of nature and be ravished by it?
Whitman, as ever, says it best:
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, :
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
“If there’s a God why didn’t he answer my prayers?”
“What did you pray for?”
“I prayed that he would raise me out of despair”
“You prayed for yourself?”
“Yes. I have a terrible life and don’t know who else to turn to”
“I see”
If you were the Almighty, and you could look down and see everything that’s going on in the world, how would the above prayer sound?
There you are, up on a cloud with a big old beard and a lute. You’re looking down at a world, your world – six days of labour – where you’ve decided in your infinite wisdom to have children dying from AIDS and water-borne diseases. Sometimes, for a bit of a laugh, you’ve caused an earthquake that crippled some people. Then there’s the starvation thing you like so much. Not to mention the miscarriages and cancer and all that other stuff you like to mete out to your flock.
But it’s not all bad. As well as this pestilence, disease and war, you’ve also created moaning middle-class pricks who like coldplay who have every material necessity they could ever reasonably want. And now you notice one of these pricks has picked up the old celestial phone and decided to ask you for a favour.
What could it be?
Could it be that one of your priveleged children has finally noticed the injustice in your taste for misfortune? Could it be a humbling moment whereby one of the ‘haves’ finally sees that it is their repentance that will save the world? Is this a prayer for the children of sub-saharan Africa? Is this a cry on behalf of the mentally unbalanced? The terminally ill?
No.
It’s a prayer for themselves.
One of the 1% of people you chose in your almighty power to live a nice life has decided that it is *they* who needs your help. Not the starving, not the dying, not the lonely.
Do you answer the prayer? Or do you feel the temptation to go all Old Testament on his ass?
And this is the thing. It seems to me that you don’t have to have religion to see that a prayer – if one is to be made – should be for someone else. An act of advocacy, if you will. I don’t mind throwing a prayer up there to the skies on the off-chance it is picked up. If someone I know is dying, or is having a hard time, I’m more than happy to spend a couple of minutes asking what very well might be nothing to lend them a hand. Why not? In the words of Muhammad Ali ” if that prayer reaches the right person mountains will fall, mister”
But it’s not right to pray for yourself, you have to pray for someone else. If you want something to change in your life, then you best hope someone is praying for you.
Which is why, if you are pitching for a piece of business, consider how happy it would make your colleague if you were to win that piece of business. So you should pray for your colleague.
Yes, you get the business too, but that’s not the point. You may very well become rich and get promoted. But think of your colleague – it means so much to him.
If your football team is in a cup final, consider the dying child who also supports your football team and then pray that the child might be so lucky to see your football team lift the trophy before they die.
Again, you might share a little in the glory as well. But that is simply not the point.
And, if you are on a plane, terrified that you might crash into the sea after take off, do the honorable thing. Pray for the safety of all those around you; all those innocent lives that you love so much and would like to see safetly delivered to their destination.
Simple really.
Politics is praying for everyone else on the plane.
Socrates liked asking questions.
He’d stop Athenians on their walks and ask them questions. Clever questions.
Much to the glee of Socrates, the cocksure Athenians couldn’t answer his clever questions. As a result he would draw out from them conclusions about the nature of existence. It was his way of educating people as to how little they knew. Through Socrates’s ex duco questioning method, Athenians began to understand that they should not cling so confidently to received knowledge. They should know that they know nothing.
So, as you’d expect, the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death.
But not as you might expect, on charges of ‘being a smart alec’ or ‘acting like a nosey parker.’
Socrates was instead sentenced to drink hemlock on charges of corrupting the youth.
Which leads me to the conclusion that among the snubbed-nose father of philosophy’s favoured questions one may have found:
Would you like a sweetie?
Would you like to see my lovely rabbits?
and
Have you ever seen one as big as this before?
Corrupting the youth, indeed.
Dirty old Greek.
So this expenses row is dragging on a bit.
Still. I suppose it is news of sort, for which we should be grateful. And it’s given rise to some interesting questions about MPs’ salaries and the nature of the job. It’s made some people turn nasty and it’s made others recognise that being an MP is an important job. It’s got people engaged, and that cannot be a bad thing
But what’s baffled me is that the media corollary of all this is that people will punish the MPs by voting for the BNP.
Reeeeeeeewwwwwwwiiiiiinnnnnnnnd.
What was that?
People will punish the MPs by voting for the BNP.
Does that baffle anyone else?
How exactly does this expense row result in people voting for racists? It makes a nonsense of causality. One thing does not follow on from the other. Racism and expenses – the are completely different categories.
Voting for the BNP in reaction to MPs expenses would only really make sense if the public had grown weary of MPs caning their expense accounts in the cause of racial tolerance. A receipt handed in for a 300 mile drive to Middlesbrough to say a gratuitous “welcome” to an asylum seeker, for example. Or a second-home allowance being used to put a roof over the heads of some homeless Somalians in winter.
That would not only make a better story but would justify the public voting BNP in reaction to the expense scandal. The BNP are unlikely to do that, after all.
Some white toff cleans a moat on the sly, and the logical thing to do is punish anyone whose got a different colour skin?
This is clearly illogical. The only thing I could think more illogical would be punishing rabbits. Or, pushing the envelope, punishing rocks.
Another situation that would make more sense would be if the current MPs were a collection of pure-hearted angels. Then voting BNP would make sense – even though the situation would be inherently paradoxical. “Fuck you honest, decent people, you’ve gone one step too far. We’re giving evil a go now.” But it’s quite obvious that few of our politicians fit the description of angels. So that’s not what’s going on here either.
So what is it?
It seems to me that the only logical reason people would vote for the BNP in reaction to a cross-party expense scandal is that the BNP, while not everyone’s cup of tea, are actually terribly efficient and honest when it comes to personal finance.
“Say what you want about the BNP. Yes, yes, they think white people are superior. Yes, yes, they would rather people die than compromise their way of life. Say what you want about all that, but they do keep a meticulous filing system.”
The assumption that the BNP members, if elected to MP status, would not cane their expense accounts is an hilarious one.
But maybe it all comes back to their progenitor, Adolf Hitler.
“Okay, he was responsible for killing millions of Jews, Gypsies and Homos. But he resurrected the German economy.”
Evil and financial responsibility seemingly go hand in hand.
Which, now I’ve just typed that, doesn’t seem as ludicrous as I first thought.
I’m not a very nice person.
Sometimes when I hear Ricky Gervais laughing at disabled people, I kind of hope in later years he gets a bit of the Dudley Moores and ends up in a wheelchair himself. I know it’s not really a very nice thing to want. I know that.
But, when you think about it, it’s not really that bad, if anything it would actually be funny. Ricky himself taught me that.
People in wheelchairs are supposed to find themselves funny. That’s why Ricky does his little sketches about them. It’s actually non-discriminatory, isn’t it? People in wheelchairs are just like the rest of us, so it’s actually pretty right-on to laugh at them in the same way we laugh at non-disabled people.
That’s kind of why I want Ricky to get some debilitating disease and end up in a wheelchair. It will be so funny for him. There won’t be a day goes by when Ricky Gervais won’t piss himself at his flaccid worthless limbs and his state of semi-dependance on others.
“Look at this little fella!” he’ll say. As he looks in the mirror. With tears in his eyes.
But, I digress. Of course I don’t really want that to happen. It would be evil.
No, what I really want to happen is for Ray Parker Jr to be sold a new nice retirement home by a wily estate agent.
I want the estate agent to persuade Ray Parker Jr to invest all his life savings and future royalties into buying this nice new home.
And I want the estate agent to neglect to mention the fact that the house hasn’t been snapped up by another eager buyer because of the minor technicality that it is haunted.
And every night I want the ghouls and the ghosts, the spirits and the spooks to scare the living FUCK out of Ray Parker Jr. All their ghastly trickery being deployed to its maximum shudderiness.
I want the rest of Ray Parker Jr’s waking hours to be ruined by the terror of living in a haunted house. I want him to be on the phone to his family late at night crying like a baby. I want him phoning 911 screaming “Help! Help me! It’s the ghosts. They are smashing things up again. And I’m terrified! Please, do something!”
He’d soon regret his macho boasting in the mid 1980s.
Make it happen, Karma.
Make it fucking happen.
Lads at work did this video over the weekend for a competition.
I did the music for them on Saturday night. Bit beta-band ish. But does the job.
If everyone who reads this blog visits it, then that will be ten more hits for the boys. So go ‘ed and do it.
“If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake, baked a cake, baked a cake”
What a fab song!
I love the fact someone actually wrote this song.
In a sensible world it wouldn’t exist.
The thought is fine. I can imagine someone entertaining the thought behind the song. It could easily cross someone’s mind should the appropriate circumstances arise. There’s a housewife in her apron in the nineteen fifites and there’s a knock on the door. It’s the housewife’s sister. The housewife is, naturally, delighted at this arrival, seeing as it’s been a while. But it is so unexpected. “Dash it!” she thinks. “If I’d known she was coming, I’d have baked a cake.”
She might even go so far as to articulate the thought.
“Susan! What are you doing here? If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake!”
“Don’t worry about it”
“Come in, come in, it’s been ages.”
But I find it hard to countenance that the moment the thought forms in her head, she says to her sister, “Can you just wait there a second. You’ve just given me an idea for a song.”
Then she kind of absent-mindedly ambles over towards the piano in the living room and starts experimenting with melody and time signatures. “If I knew you were coming..” no that doesn’t work. Let’s try it in C. “If .. I …knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake. Oh that’s nice I like that!” And she goes on to represent in song the concept of someone not knowing they have guests and being therefore unprepared with regard to cake provision.
Had the songstress been instead, a painter say, maybe in the Louvre there would today hang a painting entitled “woman showing embarrassment at not having had cakes at the ready for unforseen visitors”.
Had she been a dancer, maybe a more physical representation of the thought would exist.
But we should be grateful for what we’ve got. A song. And a jolly nice one too.
The only other thing that confuses me about this random song is it’s popularity. Not only does the song exist, it became so popular that people all over the world heard it, liked it, and hummed it.
I can only attribute this to the composer of “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake” being to fifties housewives what Morrissey was to eighties teenagers.
The feeling of helplessness at being caught cakeless by a spontaneous friend may have been an emotion that had been hitherto felt by many housewives but one they’d never heard out loud. Imagine the relief they must have felt at hearing a song that let them know that they weren’t alone in feeling this unspeakable humiliation.
Sing it, sister.
Can anyone else think of 1950s songs that are about subjects that you don’t really have to write a song about?
“Hot Cross Buns” maybe?
