Days of Plenty are Numbered

I watch movie and BANG! It hits me – where have my ideals gone. Even the various ideas books I’ve carried around for years are more likely to be filled these days with telephone numbers or names of bars, restaurant and cd’s that I want to go to or buy.
Not one idea!
Not one manifesto for the revolution!

I strove for so much in my youth. I still cling to memories of my school years, fighting for every inch for the freedom of my adolescence. A year to go now – boxes of memories clogged above the wardrobe in my bedroom, waiting for a Friday night, to meet another new girl, an after party, go another summer holiday. So the following is part a reminder to myself, part a homage to the book I’m reading at the moment, Jonathon Swift's ‘A Tale of a Tub’ and the movie I saw last night, ‘The Edukators’:

As Mr Heron once said, ‘The revolution will not be Televised’ – the problem is that today it probably will be. So for a week, lets start – no TV.

In the desire to be someone, to do something different, it’s all I’ve ever dreamt all I’ve ever been. The sure confident guy who was; Potential! Just, waiting for the right time. The right moment.
I forgot something though. I forgot about the system. I forgot about all those just like me, they to have read and thought. Words like self and conscience slither their way through their lives too. Then of course they’re the realist who’ve tried to trap my imagination by telling me it’s the system that no matter who you are your beliefs, hopes and dreams. It will get you, just as it has got me. The literately termed big brother has watched all of me grow to my strongest when I truly believed I was destined for historical immortality. He stood in the background. My progression was slow but I had the benefit of self-belief. I could believe my own hype, term all my failings and inadequacies to some relish for longevity, not to burn out.

God, if only you could see the pile of shit rising in front of me, and as I continue, it grows. I on the other hand begin to diminish into absurdity at its hands. Diluted to mere tasteless cordial drink. Un-refreshing. Where are the giant ants in my pants that kept me itching? So long on my toes, always wanting. The new moment, a fresh experience, to jot down, a note for that biography of life that was to come. Come children I’d say grey haired with dentures and flagging fat, in my day I did this and that, as they’d look on with envy and pride at the old man. Trembling, they’d think he believed in himself and let the wind take him the rest of the way. Here is the man who ground the system and lived his life to the full.

I wake up some mornings, fresh and hard from a night of steamy dreams. In that instant the world I’ve just left occupies my thoughts for precisely 0.0004sec or less. I know, I’ve timed it just as I know it takes me 0.987sec to say supercalafragalistiepidalidotious, that’s a pretty long word Mary Poppins. I’m on that suckers fence now unable to distinguish between me and me. I’ve become paranoid, lost in a wilderness of contradictions between living and life. To eat, to dream, to believe and then to see. Some desire greatness, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrusted upon them. My greatest moment came and went and I didn't know it.

I need security lack certainty and am indeed very careless. It’s not that I’m a great literate either. I often find being articulate sort of loses my raw expression. I need to say fuck, fuck the system that confides me to conform, fuck those who have no belief in another way, fuck those who desire not to understand not to think. Just get on with it, you’ve got responsibilities, you’ve got a family. A wife you don’t love, a kid you didn’t want, a job that numbs your soul. You spend hours lost in a mind numbing black tube because you’ve lost access to those dreams you had when you were twelve, that changed when you were 16, again at 21, then 30...

You wanted to be an astronaut, to go live on the moon. To be a doctor, to save lives, a teacher (not because the salary was good or for the housing allocation), to write novels, be the next president…but as always somewhere along the line you lost sight of that goal. You always lose sight. You try to impress a girl, your parents, with worldy good – or you need to get married in a nice hotel, make sure the colours are co-ordinated, because that’s how a man is judged.

But don’t worry like the other billion people in the world you’re not alone. They say that, in life ‘shit happens’ you make your choices no one held a gun to your head. But the thing is that somebody did somebody did hold a gun to your head. Somebody has always got a gun to your head. When he disappears, goes for a piss or on vacation then it all comes flooding back the discontentment with your ineffectuality, your mediocrity.

Untill your life artieres You're having an affair with your wife's best friend; you're the butt of jokes at work. There are moments when you break free. In a fit of rage and anger. If you're a true bastard you beat your wife, your kids, or just are complete shit to everyone that you come in contact with.

Or worse still you try and escape in a moment of complete cowardice and kill yourself. What then? All that you will have left is a corpse for someone else to mourn over? So you destroy him or her again? Shit if you’re brave enough to tie a noose around your neck or butcher your wrist, you're fucking strong enough to beat it.

Today we’re all talking about self, me, me, oh, and the importance of the world, future, nature and the life of a man, a foetus and all the things that don’t make sense and can’t be understood. They've become general statements in these emphatic households that watch the yearly budget to see how it affects them.

Vote on May 5th. Vote for Me – Labour. Vote for Me – Conservative. Why not try something new – Me – Liberal Democrat, you’ve seen the movie, read the books, ‘I too was against the war’ and I quote, ‘If you’re not a liberal by 30 you’ve got no heart and soul…’ – Always take the part that suits your purpose.

Why? We've all got to do our bit for the progression of mankind. Yet where do we stand, where do I stand, with no answers, no solutions to help the guys sleeping by the cash machine? No real thought just complex layers of counter points pointing the finger at everyone else because I can’t point it at myself. I could but what would that achieve I’d be back where I started. I would be a part it. Shit, I am part of it, ‘it me and I’m you.

I should say, give credit to the imagination, but I’m weary of fiction. Human thought, the human mind is an entity on it’s own. It lives always in a different time. I have no scientific explanation or experiments to back this up. I wouldn’t even say like Einstein, that I have any relative value, in terms of an IQ. I haven’t even thought this out and there lies the problem. Thought. It’s puts us there and takes us back again.

Just say! Then just believe! Just do! What ever IT is! Just love! Just feel Pain! Just Help a guy out! Give your salary away! Believe in a faith! Believe in u in someone else! There is no time! Take a tiny first step alone!

Evil arises out of complexity. First we were nothing and unto dust we shall return. I was going to end this by saying, 'just tell me what happens the moment I die.' But no fuck that I’m cheating death, just like I’m aiming to cheat life.

There’s an alternative ending to one of the first productions to one of my favourite plays, ‘A Man for all Season’ by Robert Bolt. The ‘Common Man’, comes back on stage after one of his guises throughout the play, the executioner has just be-headed Sir Thomas Moore and say’s.

‘ It’s not hard to keep friends alive. Just don’t make trouble. Or if you are going to make trouble, make the sort of trouble that expected…(to the audience) if you see me in the streets recognise me…’
The quote not entirely accurate, just realised my copy is missing – so read it if you can.