I looked at my audience. “Did you ever find yourself in that particular place where all you can do is sit there in a state of baffled silence and scratch your head and wonder numbly over and over again how you could possibly have been so utterly useless for the entire course of your life? Is that perhaps a familiar place to you?” Needless to say, the front row of my audience looked back at me very sternly when I asked them this, so as to indicate in no uncertain terms that they could not in any way relate to this imaginary scenario of mine. They looked so stern, so facially immobile that they looked for all the world as if they were suffering from acute indigestion. The poor fools were positively rigid with disapproval!
This is of course the opening removal of a classic gambit of mine. I’ve used it many times and it invariably works in my favour. Indeed it does, indeed it does. You should try it yourself sometime! Just ask your friends or colleagues if they can relate to that particular situation where the revelation hits them one day that they are utterly stupid and that they don’t have a clue about anything at all and that any good sense that they might fondly have imagined themselves to possess had was in reality nothing more than a tawdry exercise in flagrant self-deception. Ask them that this and then have yourself a good hearty laugh at the turgid, constipated expression that you will see come over their faces. You’d be laughing on the sly of course; you wouldn’t want to go upsetting folk any more than necessary now would you? That wouldn’t be diplomatic…
Some of us were made evil, whilst the rest of us were just born that way, isn’t that the truth? Some of us were just born that way. That’s a joke of course, I’m not really evil, I’m just a bit cantankerous. People annoy me because they’re so damn predictable – they’re like windup clockwork toys to me. How can you bear to live from day to day like that, I often wonder? How can you bear to live in such a bloody predictable way? Where’s the joy in that? What’s the point to that even, I think to myself. And yet I know very well that many folk get a lot of satisfaction from this predictability. If things go to plan then they’re delighted. Things could be better. They’re positively rubbing their hands together with glee. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ they’re saying to themselves, ‘everything is going exactly as I planned it…’ And when something doesn’t go to plan then you’ll never hear the end of it. The howling and gnashing of teeth you’ll hear then! The complaining and moaning you will have to put up with when that happens!
It’s kind of depressing when you think about things like that, isn’t it? The average gobshyte in the street thinks that it’s so wonderful when you can get your poxy half-witted goals to come true. It’s like a bloody sexual release. It’s the best thing in the world. All it really means of course is that you have somehow managed to impose your own dismally banal and terminally uninspiring ideas onto the universe. As if the universe needs that. As if that’s an improvement. When I hear that someone or other has succeeded in realising their goal that just makes me want to groan out loud – ‘You bloody boring bastard,’ I want to say…
