I’m a morose kind of guy. Morose and unforgiving. I never forget a bad turn. Not in thirty or forty years will I forget a bad turn and you can be sure that I’ll pay you back sooner or later. You might have forgotten but I won’t have. On the other hand, my friends say that I have a good sense of humour, which is important. Which is very important. Without a good sense of humour you’ll find that the day very easily turns into a miserable chore. The bad times will become frankly unbearable – they will become utterly gruelling. The bad times will actually destroy you, in fact. You’ve got no insulation you see, nothing to cushion you from the knocks that you are bound to receive in life. Those rotten old knocks.
The good times will become gruelling as well – they will become just as gruelling in their own way. If you haven’t got a sense of humour then you’ll take the good times too seriously you see and that means you’ll ruin them. You’ll ruin them both for yourself and everyone else. The stress will eat you alive. No matter what happens – good or bad – it’ll turn into a disaster – your life will become frankly hideous to you and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself…
‘How do you like that?’ says life as it gives you a knock. A nasty old knock that you didn’t see coming. You didn’t see it coming at all. You thought that everything was fine; you were probably whistling a jaunty tune at the time. The way one does. Whistling away without a care in the world, and the next thing – ‘knock!!!’ Life has sprung another one on you. On top of everything else. As if you hadn’t had enough to be getting on with. Which you did have. More than enough. And then you’ll get to thinking about how unfair it all is. Your nerves will be strung tighter than piano wire and piano and everything grate unbearably. Life itself will grate on you.
Your mind will be spinning like a vast impossibly heavy iron wheel suspended in the heavens – impossibly heavy but just hanging there all the same. Hanging above your head. Slowly turning. Your doom is coming. It’s coming and there’s no way for you to get out of its way. Everything’s happening in slow motion and you’re overcome by a horrifying sense of déjà vu. You know that you’ve been here before and you know it isn’t good…
Life will give you a few old knocks along the way alright. Knockity-knock, Knockity-knock, Knockity-knock-knock. ‘Who’s there?’ you’ll ask. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘It’s me’, a dry whispery voice will reply, coming from a corner of the room you didn’t even know was there. ‘I am the hot desert wind and you are a pile of dust in my path…’ You are full of fear upon hearing this – you know the meaning of the word ‘fear’ all of a sudden. You thought you already did know the meaning of the word fear but you didn’t. You were very mistaken in this regard. You can feel the hot wind whipping around your ankles, causing your ridiculous pink trousers to flap madly. It’s time to start running again.
