I have a pretty clear view of the world, I know what I think but I’m fucked if I can put it down in words, whenever I’ve tried it has gone off at random tangents and in different directions until it fizzles into failure. I suppose I should just keep it simple and direct but it’s all very well saying that modern life is a simple confidence trick and we are all being scammed from the cradle to the grave but people demand evidence! This is to be expected and fair enough but to me the scam is so obvious that if anyone needs an explanation, they’re never going to get it. Either that or their vision of reality is about to be shattered. I’m not into conspiracy theories but I am a cynical bastard and what follows are some of the reasons why.
I suppose my first
anti Establishment feelings started in the late eighties when I started taking
drugs so conforming to the stereotype, though at the time my drug of choice was
legal. By 1990 I was regularly consuming
illegal drugs too and through much trial and error I came to realise that the
illegal substances I liked actually had a far less negative impact on my health
and life in general than the booze. This
went against everything that society had told me thus far, for a decade I’d
been bombarded by drug awareness campaigns while the joys of booze was being
shown on television and not just in the adverts. There I am going off on a tangent already,
the point I’m trying to make is, with this awareness came the realisation that
the government was lying to me. This was
no longer a quietly voiced suspicion, this was an unquestionable fact,
something I had learned through my own experience. In the early nineties this came as a bit of a
shock, nowadays they barely try to hide it.
Despite leaving
school in 1984 it wasn’t this book I read for O’ level, instead we read ‘Animal
Farm’ and learnt to fear communism – funny that… I didn’t get around to reading ‘1984’ until
the early 2000’s and this also lead to a profound change in the way I looked at
the world. Once I began seeing Orwell’s
allusions in the society around me it was like one of those magic eye pictures
(hours of amusement when you’re on acid) I kept seeing more which is hardly
surprising as this was the time of Bush/Blair.
Nowadays I can’t stop seeing them, Orwell explained how it worked but
the social media world has made it so easy its criminal. For an example of a more typical Orwellian
allegory, something selected here purely for speed and convenience, in the UK
we have a ministry for Defence.
If you need me to explain that please refer to the first paragraph.
Since 2000 I’ve
worked in the industry directly connected to my favourite hobby. This description barely gives credit to what
is, in effect a weekend passion, in which I try to extract fish from their
watery homes, in beautiful rivers, lakes and beaches around the country. Over the last twenty three years I’ve worked
in manufacture, distribution, marketing and retail, I have a decent knowledge
of the products involved because I use them at the weekend. So it is from a position of strength that I make
the following statements. Most of what
the marketing men tell you is bullshit.
They cleverly play on their customers fears, get inside their head and
convince them that the latest new product is the answer to all their
prayers. They invent problems where none
actually exist then sell us the answer for it, I could go on. If this is happening in ‘my’ industry then it
is happening everywhere, throughout business and throughout society. ‘They’ are trying to con us, all day every
day. All advertising is a lie.
A few years ago the Princess and I spent a debaucherous weekend in Amsterdam to celebrate my fiftieth birthday and in the midst of this, whilst imbibing the most expensive Hash I’d been able to find and contemplating life, I had a moment of clarity. Everything was stripped away and it dawned on me what really was important in life and equally, what wasn’t. Materialism is meaningless. The relationships we have with our family and close friends are everything. John Lennon was right, all you need is love.
So those are some of
the main experiences that shaped the way I view the world, add to that a
healthy dose of Punk Spirit* and you end up with this cynical bastard. (*Is
that the right description? I mean, I’ve
always been a person that shuns the mainstream, if something is fashionable I
tend to think “fuck off”. And I like
loud, bouncy music.) I don’t know if this will turn into a failed resolution
but at the moment I feel like trying to document the absurdities of life but I
might forget or I might go off on a tangent or six.
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