Tysonian · Institute · of · Sport

If there is one thing I have learnt since moving to London is that to survive this city you must have money, the other is that it is generally not acceptable to openly fellate a thalidomide sufferer in Leicester Square, in fact such behaviour results in a collective frown and a beating. Perhaps there then, lies the allure.

To get money, one must have a job, this is generally harder said than done as, unlike most places I have lived, in London even the most flea-infested incest-derived piece of scrotum meat able to balance upon its legs long enough to spread its filth into the fruit isle is capable of landing a job at ASDA.

As luck would have it, I landed a job with the elderly, providing meals on a daily basis. This then, requires a car. With £150 in my pocket I trawled the pages of eBay for the perfect automotive solution, or at least one that did not smell of cats piss and sex.

Many days later I took collection of my Skoda ‘Rapid’, an ignominiously title surely derived of hard-brow Czech engineers attempting to get one back at the soviet game plan through calculated irony. Such malcontent can be the only explanation for a sideways opening bonnet ensuring easy loading of the boot from the road.

In my short ownership the malevolence of this car has known no bounds. Like a six year old high on sugar and parental indifference in the hot Australian sun it continually threatens to overheat on my frequent motorway journeys only to pester me for fuel, oil and a good bollocking.

On one particular trip to south Wales, while I was tied up plotting vengeful pain on my transport in such a way as to not leave me stranded, I hit a squirrel. Screaming like a mental on helium I took it inside and placed it atop the dash. I decided to call him Jeremy and tried to make it comfortable with a wiring loom and some left over condoms from the Skoda’s previous chavy owners and set off for the Swansea Animal Rescue Centre.

Along the way I noticed that my friend’s dazed and twitching demeanour had given way to something more limp and glass eyed, no longer could I wait. Immediately I pulled to the side of the road, yanked on the handbrake (remember this, its important) and commenced resuscitation. I clutched his tiny, blood-soaked, body in my left hand and raised slowly, carefully to my mouth taking care the wipe the crusted snot from around its staring eyes and newly dry snout.

I puffed delicately filling its fragile lungs then taking time to massage its heart with my right index finger on a repeating loop, but it was no good. Its lungs were full of blood now and my work had only aided in the further spilling of its intestines. A result less pleasing than the one intended. I concluded then, that burial might be appropriate.

It occurred to me as I walked amongst the tombstones of a nearby church that smeared with blood as I was, I might be mistaken for a mental. The fact that my coat pocket contained the mashed remains of a squirrel was also likely to support this conclusion. I would have to undertake this alone.

There was a shed nearby I suspected likely to contain useful gardening implements like a shovel or some such thing. Lacking a key I flung myself at the door to break it down only to be humiliated by my gaunt frame as I rebounded onto the pavement skinning my knee. I lay there a moment flat to the bitumen behind a privet bush should the vicar be looking for the source of the ruckus, before slinking my way round the side of the hut, there I found a window, and a brick. My entry was assured.

In one swift move I delivered the brick into the hut neatly taking out the window in a satisfying tinkling of glass, as quick as I could I scrambled through the frame into the darkness. Feeling around in the dank, sun deprived room my hands feeling about frantically, I was sure any moment I would be discovered by the proprietor of this holy place who might very well grab me by the scruff of the neck and with his sweaty little hands introduce me to ‘the body of Christ’, the dirty fiend. Soon enough though, I’d located a shovel and in one swift motion I’d thrown it out of the shed and followed it through the newly broken window.

Time was against me, the light was drawing dim, so I dug keenly by the grave of a woman who died of an unpleasant skin disease, stopping only as I reached the standard six feet. I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out Jeremy and tossed him into the hole. As he lay there, a tangled array of meat and fur, I began my eulogy, remembering how we met on the M4 near Pontarddulais it was an exciting time, I’d never done a eulogy before, traditionally I’d been band from funerals.

I walked off down the trail toward my car almost overwhelmed by an inner peace similar, I imagined, to those people you see walking dogs early in the morning inanely discussing the weather. As I rounded the turn I discovered that in my haste I had broken the handbrake and rolled down the hillside and into a tree.

I have decided, as it would appear, to change the nature of my blog here from being simply a place to post my made up ramblings that accompany my stand-up, but to mix these with actual snippets of me, my last post being testament to this.

This is, however, not the only thing that has been occupying my mind of late, the following is an example:

Recently I read an article which got me thinking of the concept of diminishing returns with respect to society. As I understand things this is essentially the idea that as systems become more complex not only is more wrought from them, but so less is derived from any unit of energy similar to spreading butter over increasingly large pieces of bread. The analogy for this in society could be our habit of solving problems that face us: rain is unreliable, so we irrigate to produce crops, the canals experience silting so we start a dredging regime, this success affords more people and more irrigation is needed, then we need a management team to coordinate the dredging.

What we see now is that we have amazingly complex societies requiring innumerable levels of bureaucratic management systems (none of which, obviously, can directly be producing consumerables). Eventually the complexity reaches a point whereby it is impossible for a single individual to comprehend making a head person, with absolute control, unworkable, so we network splitting responsibility between various hubs. Possibly the ultimate current example is globalisation where there is a vast interconnecting of systems worldwide.

This is potentially a vulnerable way of doing things. It is well known that ecosystems (natural, self-regulating networks of often enormous complexity) can be devastated by the introduction, or extinction of a single organism. For instance, kill the bees and you kill the plants that rely on them for pollination, then the animals that feed on those plants, then the animals that feed on those animals, and so on resulting in a new, much more simple ecosystem.

The same could be for society. As we deal with diminishing returns in we increasingly stretch supply chains to cope and squeeze our more wealth the systems become tighter and more highly stressed so if there is a failure at one point, it impacts on the next, which impact on the next so on and so forth until a major breakdown is seen. One of the drives for this is profiteering. Capitalism demands profits, which demands efficiency, which demands housing small stocks of goods at the point of sale supported by numerous, small and frequent deliveries from increasingly distant, and centralised points of manufacture.

An imaginary example could be a single factory manufacturing antibiotics world wide with an inexplicably complex array of supply chains criss-crossing worldwide supplying hospitals and maximising efficiency. Should a flood hit the factory shutting it down, the demands of efficiency demand limited stockpiling resulting in the world running out of antibiotics within a couple of days. Worse could be a similar example regarding energy production, the power grid collapses due to the knock on effect of a fault at one hub, and the petroleum refineries stop working. Since stockpiling is inefficient fuel supplies collapse in days resulting in no deliveries to the power stations, causing an inability to restart them.
And so as further problems and challenges as seen as we increasingly try to strip more from less greater complexity is created to manage or solve these issues exacerbating the need to derive more from less.

I thought that possibly, one way to deal with this could be to abolish the price system of capitalism we have, instead having an informed and decisive way of partitioning resources to ensure equal supply of need. This leaves me uncomfortable as this infers some form of technocratic society, or the formation of a technate whereby decision making and partitioning of resources is decided upon by experts who’s knowledge and expertise most qualifies them to do so in combination with the usage of technology to increase efficiency: worryingly reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. However, this is a false pretence anyway as it implies greater management of resources, meaning increased complexity contradicting the original purpose. Damn it! I’ve thought myself redundant!!

Otherwise, we could systematically reduce our complexity. Should we reduce complexity to the point of everyone living in small, rural communities existing by subsistent farming, if we get a breakdown in the system in one community, everyone else continues as before and is unaffected. Unfortunately, I like the benefits if living in this society, in the city of London, and don’t fancy growing my own crops and slaughtering my own pigs.

Look at me, all serious, analytical and deep! And doesn’t even get me onto the ramification of a pandemic in such complex systems, or the obsession our world has with irrational beliefs in various sky-fairies that serve to distract us from the important and focus on ritual and who’s bits you may play with, and how! At least then, I will be saying my nonsensical funnies at the Funhouse Comedy Club later this week.

Thoughts anyone?

Following reading Chris's post on the subject I was inspired to do the same. It is my hope that, upon reading this, you will have a mildly enjoyable time followed by a sense of not feeling that you should shun me in public. Either way, Chris: be this on your head.