There is a story about how long, long ago this there was this super whizz-kid business entrepreneur, well-versed in the arcane art of selling shit to idiots, who had the idea of something he called ‘life’. ‘Wow,’ he said to himself – or so the story goes – ‘just suppose, just for the sake of it, that there was this thing called life and we all had one and we could run around doing this thing that we might will ‘living’? How radical an idea is that? This is how the story goes anyway and who am I to question its veracity? My job is only to relate it to you and let you think whatever it is you do think, which – quite frankly – is none of my business. The story might be true after all and even if it isn’t it serves to make us think. It gets the old mental activity going and that’s the main thing. A bit of old mental activity. That’s always the main thing.
In any event, the point is that the idea had serious commercial implications, not to mention applications, as with the benefit of hindsight we can now so clearly see. No surprises there, obviously – only it wasn’t quite so obvious back then of course. Do bats fly in the dark, do pigeons shit on your head, etc, etc? So that’s the story, that’s how it happened and ‘the rest is mystery’, as they say. The men in sharp suits took over then, monetarizing whatever could be monetarized and copyrighting everything in sight. They were very busy making the legitimate profits that were theirs to make. ‘God helps them that helps themselves’, as the saying goes, and no one – including God – has any time for the losers. If you’re a loser then that’s entirely your own fault, as we all know very well. Ask anyone. It’s entirely your own fault – not only were you dumb enough to lose (when you didn’t have to), but also you’re a bad person. You’re a bad person because you lost. That’s a double whammy, isn’t it? So if you don’t like the old ‘double whammy’ and you don’t want to cop a load of it for yourself make sure you’re not a loser! Simple really, isn’t it?
That’s the story anyway so make of it what you will. Far be it from me to suggest that there might be some sort of a moral there that we can all learn from! Far be it from me, far be it from me… Some people did well and some people didn’t and that’s the way of the world, as you yourself know well. It’s all a matter of mental attitude, or so I was taught at school. By the dreadful schoolmasters. By the terrible, terrible schoolmasters. Or so I was taught at school. I was as stupid as the day was long back then, always keen to listen with full attention to what any old gobshyte had to say. Those were the days, you see. There was never any shortage of people talking shyte anyway – it’s a national resource, after all. I look back on those days with undisguised horror of course. I look back on those days with rage and despair.
As you make your way through life you’ll find that you will make the same mistakes that I made, I think. I think you’ll find that. The very same ones. Bad mistakes. That’s what they call ‘the smell of success’ I do believe – the sweet, sweet smell of success. It always brings a tear to the eye, a tear to the eye and a lump to the throat. I was only a little sprat back then, I was only a wee shrimp of a thing. A pure little maggot, feasting away on the flesh of that living corpse we call society, or the body politic. I grew quickly, fattened by the blood of my victims, fattened by the blood of my victims. I became a full-scale corporate monster, a dinosaur, leaving my calcified bones strewn throughout the length and breadth of the Paleozoic Era, fossil residues that were – although I was not to know it – destined to be studied in great detail by a race of super-intelligent owls from the far future.
Destiny is a funny thing of course. Can one rely on it? Is it possible to be a person whose destiny is to have no destiny? Is hell real? Do vampires truly exist or is that just in films? Did aliens create the world? The future stretches ahead of us – so vast, so hazy, smoky and mysterious, seeming as it does to stretch on forever. It is an uncharted wilderness that is full of both terrifying threats and exciting promises. We race towards it blindly, determinedly, fixatedly – our blinkers firmly in place, trying our best to keep our date with destiny. We’ll be there before we know it. We don’t know what is in store for us, but we hope it’s nothing too bad…
