When I was but a small wee lad, barely knee high to a barnacle, my great great grandfather, who was an ancient and wizened octopus, came to visit me and impart some of his wisdom. I remember his words as if it were yesterday, “No matter what else you do in life, my boy” he pontificated, “don’t be a steaming great knob end. That’s all you need to know. That’s all I have to say to you my boy… Do what you want in life but just try not be a fucking dickhead about it. Do you get me?” He left then. He left without so much as a single backwards glance. He left before I even got a chance to respond, and I never saw him again. I believe he got eaten by a marauding parrotfish shortly afterwards.
I am ashamed to say – however – that I took no heed of these words of wisdom that had been spoken expressly for my benefit. I took no heed at all. It was water off a duck’s back as far as I was concerned. Instead of heeding these words that had been spoken for my benefit I went right ahead and did exactly what I had been warned not to do. And I suffered the consequences too, of course – we all suffer the consequences, do we not? Every last one of us has to suffer the consequences of our heedless ignorance and there’s no escape from that. Absolutely there’s no escape from that…
There’s no moral to this story of mine, by the way. It may look as if it is heading in that direction, but it isn’t. No moral need be drawn. Nothing of that sort. Those who are destined to tread the path of the incorrigible asshole must tread it and that’s all that need be said on the subject. That’s all there is to it. That’s just the way of the world my friends and so there’s no point crying about it. Cry for a moment or two if you absolutely have to, but then move on. There’s nothing any of us that to change the way of the world, after all, no matter how enthusiastic we might be. Even our ‘Great Buddy in the Sky’ can’t change the way of the world. Contrary to popular opinion, contrary to what we would like to believe. Nothing is that simple.
Everything is ‘contrary to what we might believe’, isn’t it? You’d wonder why we bothered really, wouldn’t you? Just why the hell do we bother believing in anything, right? Idiots that we are. Maybe it’s just because we’re suckers for punishment. Maybe it’s because of that perverse streak inside us that just wants to make life as difficult as possible. That old ‘perverse streak’ has got a lot to answer for, hasn’t it? We like to give ourselves a super-hard time and nothing can put us off.
We pick something to be ‘true’ as flippantly as you please and then we work as hard as we possibly can to make it actually be true. We move heaven and earth. We fight tooth and nail; we fight for all we’re worth. We try to get everyone else to believe it too, given half a chance. If they listen to us! If they don’t get the upper hand first and force us to believe their bullshit instead. Eventually, after we’ve put ourselves through the ringer, we will – with infinite reluctance – give up on it. But not until we absolutely have to. But not until we’ve ‘suffered to the maximum’, however. Not until we’ve squeezed every last little drop of pure misery out of the situation. Now isn’t that the truth?
