Pesky Time-flies

I had been thinking I might write something here every week but what is it now? A month later? Well, they say play to your strengths and I am reeeeally good at doing nothing. To get anything done I need deadlines to scare some life into me. I’d need to tell someone that if I don’t post once a week they must chop off one of my fingers. Which will slow down my typing too I imagine.

But then again, why would I want to put myself at the mercy of the whimsical week ? Dont’ we all suffer the evil clutches of its arbitrary sevenness  enough already? Those seven slippery fingers flipping us through time like a pen in the hands of some fidgeting deity.

How annoying it is when you think about it. To be forced into a loop like that. Why must we repeat things so much? But then when you have as many things that annoy you as I do you just have to give in some times. If I never did, I don’t know where I’d end up. I’d like to know though. Probably out on a little boat shaking my fist at the sea for bobbing me around so much. A bellyacher bobbing in a bath of bile…

But if I could choose something to melt in a bath of bile, it would probably be the week. I could dance around in some kind of ritual public digestive process, chanting, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday’, as I dropped them in – ‘Plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop.’  Hsss hsss hss. Victory for a culture finally emerging for its hazy days.

I don’t recommend typing out all the days of the week in row like I just did, it’s depressing. The seven ‘plops’ were surprisingly satisfying though.

So yes, down with the whimsical week. It is ludicrous when you think about it. Everybody, for literally thousands of years, operating on this system of 7 days repeating, just because some babbling Babylonian had a thing for 7. I have a thing for 5, me. I’m on the same page as Bosco on that one. So why not 3 days work(Bunday, Hillday, Enday, say) and then a 2 day weekend(Upday and Downday)? We’d be absolutely flying…

No more planet making it around the sun and not knowing where to start – exactly 73 weeks in the year, starting on Bunday every New Year’s. Birthdays on the same day every year. A boom in the weekend-break industry. No more overworked oompa loompas. No more rhymes that don’t rhyme to remember how many days are in each month. Just dump the months. What have they ever done for us? No more having an aneurysm trying to figure out what day dates fall on. No more forced smiles and ‘TGIF’ s from people who secretly can’t wait to get back to work because free time exposes their broken spirit and makes them feel useless. No more me bitching about the 7-day week.

It’s not like it isn’t doable. It’s just that nobody cares. Too many other idiotic repercussions of systematic legacies to deal with. It’d be like trying to get a fly out of one of those refugee tents. Everyone sitting there with all the other hundreds of flies casually exploring their disbelieving expressions. And me muttering, ‘The wood is the trees, the wood is the trees…’

Although in these less fly-ridden climes I think the problem is more like blindness. The brain removes the cage-bars from your vision since you can’t remove them physically and seeing them isn’t helping.  In which case it’d be more like one fly in the room, but no-one can see it – and if you open the door and start trying to usher it out, waving your arms and giving reproachful instructions, your sanity might be questioned. And the sucker-punch is that even if you manage to get it out before they restrain you, as it finally leaves, another one comes in. Like tag-team wrestling. Because there’s always some infuriating catch-22 dynamic at work. The 2 flies(called ‘Twenty’ and ‘Two’ maybe) making triumphant angry faces and slapping wings as they pass each other. Deadly buzz.

It’s this kind of infuriating dynamic which has allowed this scandalous 7-day scam to hold us back for so long. I think ‘tag-wrestling-fly-politics’ is the academic term for the phenomenon. The way it works is that the actual power to change things can only be passed on from one grotesque annoying creature (just think of Gordon Brown) that’s all buzz and no bite, to another. So only when you’ve finally exhausted, bartered or corrupted every ounce of originality and courage that you possessed, will you be given a position where you can then apply yourself to distracting people from any real underlying issues in order to make sure that everything stays exactly the same.

A swat-team is what we need. Invade their homes, wrap them in fly-paper, cut out their webbed tongues.

On the subject of flies, I often think that if there is an alien race that planted the seeds of humanity on Earth to watch it evolve as some kind of experiment, or giant reality tv show or whatever, flies would be the best way to monitor things. Tiny flying cctv cameras. They should be tested for transmitters. Granted, if you were flicking through the channels you’d be getting a lot more shanty towns than fancy gowns(I don’t know why I have to do that) but actually shanty town’s are probably where the real entertainment’s at. No flies on them. Figuratively speaking.  

 It occurs to me that for all this talk of annoying things and flies in particular, I am probably the most annoying of all. But I’m not sorry. If I  tried to structure this in any way or make it more readable it’d become a chore and I’d never do it.  I might as well tell you that I don’t ever intend to be all that coherent here. If I’m going to do this with any frequency, it’s going to be a blurting stuttering thing that lets me buzz around wherever I want and alight on anything that takes my interest. Whatever comes out may not belong so much in a newspaper as crushed under one, but to be honest, I don’t really give a flying ffff…Friday.