Laugh!

Speaking of comedy, comedy is umbilically linked with tragedy. You can hardly set the two apart. The faces of human expression, this schizoid bastard son of prose and theater, have for centuries kept us rapt with laughter and tears. Indeed, in every great tragedy, there is volumes of comedy, and every comedy when looked at from a certain perspective is morbidly tragic. Schadenfreude, as it is, forms the basis for this two-headed monstrosity. As people, we take both great pleasure and despair in the suffering of our fellow man. It's natural. You see a morbidly obese child trip and roll off the hillside like a bouncing ball of red pudding: comedy gold. But what about its well-being? Is it hurt? God, maybe it broke its neck. Oh, gee, oh well. Often, the funniest works find their inspiration in a deep-seated hatred towards something that's roiling inside us: a person, an ideal, a gender, or a god - anything. Which is why the greatest comedies often have a darker side, a little itch on the side of hilarity that's perhaps saying there's more under the gleaming, hilarious surface. Something darker, perhaps more insidious. Comedy is subversive, and tragedy moving. But there's no disparity. It's all really just the different faces of the same Alzheimer-ridden chimera.

Shambling!

If the dead someday get fed up with simmering six feet under and rise to roam through the night, I wonder if some of them could be persuaded to become a part of the house keeping industry. From my point of view, they've already started spring cleaning flats and houses across town. There was this lady cleaning my home once every two weeks. Man, she gave me the willies, so I'd often wondered if she slept in a bed like the rest of us or if she returned every night to her cozy crypt. She didn't really say much either. On the other hand, she is cross-eyed, so you can never tell if she's looking at you or watching the old tumble drier. Maybe it just isn't happy with the way society treats ghoulish, cross-eyed house keepers. Life is full of weird mysteries.

Rejoice!

Life has a way of smudging out your time with that proverbial, sticky thumb of his. It's literally like wiping pencil marks off a wet sheet of paper with an eraser. Exactly like that. I feel like I never left that hangover behind on Sunday.

It makes you want to slap the air around you and spit at the flashing lights. A little like one would feel after a wild night of partying, only there aren't any great party memories to fall back on. No modestly harmless sexually transmitted diseases, not a drop of vomit on your shirt, or a three sentence tirade on why fucking the IMF over is all right tattooed across your arm.

Stories. Timeless and ageless, they're what shape human conception about the world. Societies, great and small, they all sprouted from that night Jimmy got really drunk, screamed from the roof, "Oh god, it burns, my pee burns!", and grandly wet everyone below.

Life stands quietly, at the sidelines. Watching, watching. Slowly savouring, sucking on that sticky thumb of his. He grins like a copious wanker, almost childlike really, as the stories splatter warmly over his wicked countenance.

Brownies!

They should bring back the days of horseback riding in the open street. The long lost equestrian art should be open for all the world, unwashed and civilised man alike. Indeed, piss this modern-day dense traffic bullshit, with its infernal cars, whizzing motorbikes and fucking ugly-ass trucks and pickups clogging the world. Horses can make excellent time too; perhaps not as fast as your average beamer, but still. Better to tread in the occasional sample of fresh horse brownie, than inhaling those nasty car fumes ever single day of your life, I say.

Also, now there'll be plenty of half-priced stallion heads available on the market for you Godfather-complex types.

Relapse!

With the insane, it's not so much how they behave, it's about what sort of conversation they're having with themselves. It's kind of silly in a way, but their behavior largely depends on their imaginary companion(s). These relationships, bordering on the parasitic, inhibit normal social interaction to varying extents. It's a lot like having a neurotic muppet latched to your face that you're compelled to obey. Episodes as such can range from mounting kittens with bottles, to believing in one's innate ability to fly off steep ledges. A serial killer, for example, would simply be sexually repressed manchild with a particularly enthusiastic imaginary companion.

On my run this morning, I saw a hobo having a very stimulating conversation with his imaginary companion; something to do with dental hygiene. These varietals are mostly harmless, except for that one off moment of lucidity every month or so when they start clawing at you for loose change and the nutritious muck off your boot.

But the other kind, I think their imaginary companions do really bad things to them. They go on a regular basis from being distraught and miserable, to angry, and finally violent, flailing their hands in the air at the imaginary terror muppets. Most of the time their ravings are largely ineffectual, but as the terror muppet latches on tighter and tighter every passing day, they become drawn deeper into the psychosis. Soon enough they're either monstrously deranged sociopaths, or drooling zombies.

So my idea is this, if we could somehow beat these imaginary mops into submission, we could ideally have a world full of socially acceptable mad people. And then we'd move on to producing billboards specifically aimed at selling products for imaginary people. That's like a whole new target demographic!

Duplicity!

It starts when you're little. Some of the first things you figure out are how to cozen, cheat, con and, possibly, flimflam in order to get your way. You start thinking, well, Mum's already brought me to the toy store, now if I just break down and bite a couple of employees she'll HAVE to buy me that Transformer Furby! Then school kicks off and you continue to fabricate all these new and interesting lies to pull through yet another uneventful semester, from telling the kindergarten teacher your Granddaddy kicked the bucket while he's out shooting quail in the backyard to buying the dean a 21 year-old Glenlivet as a good-will gesture. By the time you are confronted with the job market, that's when you realize you're in already waist-deep in the roiling shite; doomed to become a drone for the rest of your pathetic and insignificant existence.

You open your eyes, you take the red pill and the painful truth finally hits you like an epileptic ox. You're not as free as you thought, you're working for THEM and it's not a sweet life. Maybe you should've taken the blue pill.

Now, go have a damn drink ya pillocks.

Diplomacy!

Staring at the keyboard for too long leads to all sorts of unpleasant revelations, I’ve come to realise. A few days ago, after gawking at the rows of utterly uninspiring keys for hours, the lines between realities began to blur, and finally something deeply perturbing started to happen. The damned keys started somersaulting out of their sockets, undulating in a malicious plastic wave across the room. The wave orbited my head for a time, finally settling into some sort of mad polka dance around my coffee mug. Many of them even waved at me with their tiny, ineffectual hands; every so often occasioning a rude gesture, accompanied by what could only be taken by tiny plastic cubes as vigorous pelvic thrusting. Oh, but they spoke too. The space bar had one or two things to say - mostly unpleasant stuff. Some tripe about how I slam it down too hard when I type and trauma. I told the space bar it's a small price to pay for being between those two gorgeous, sexy, big-breasted 'alt' twins, who are always ready for some action. I took the gob of lint it left in my morning coffee as a clear rebuke. Anyway, the 'enter' key kept on moaning about the same bloody thing, about how I clearly took solace in the fact that 'escape' and 'backspace' were always around to bail me out of trouble and that enough was enough. As the belligerent little bastards refused to see reason, the strike trudged on for the remainder of the week. Realizing that the stalemate had no clear resolution in sight, I did the only sensible thing any civilized man would do. I located their makeshift cardboard hovel, doused the ingrates in lighter fluid as they slept and set them ablaze. The plastic oozed and bubbled as their little screams died down with the flames in a messy, noxious puddle of failed dreams and melted plastic.

And so that’s how I got this shiny new keyboard.