Spo’s world….

January 23, 2006

I sat here yesterday, stared at this screen for what seemed like eternity and ended up writing some McGuffin about superstition – that my apartment building in Jakarta had no floor 13 due to Western ways of thinking and no floor 4 due to Asian ways of thinking (apparently 4 means death in Japanese or something) – and after waffling about the confusion this caused for pizza delivery, I linked all that in with how, even though I didn’t really believe in God and religion as far as a pub conversation went, I still wouldn’t be that happy living on floor 13 (pub conversation = you think about it for 5 seconds and give your answer and move on like I am doing now, except really, if you gave the subject more considered thought, you’d say something far more sensible like “I just haven’t seen anything to really swing me either way, but I’m still open to the possibility which incidentally is how I feel about life on Mars, the Americans never landing on the moon when they said they did, the extinction of Dinosaurs by a meteorite and the possibility that if indeed Christ existed, then Tom Cruise is more than likely the Anti-Christ”…

…..Anyways I wrote that I wouldn’t be happy living on floor 13 as in the end don’t tempt fate if you can avoid it and there’s plenty you don’t understand – and then finally I linked all this back to how earlier that day Liverpool had lost to Manchester UTD in the 90th minute due to me accidentally putting my trousers on before my socks which for me is bad luck for the rest of the day.

But that was yesterday and I lost it all in a moment of “ctrl c” “ctrl v” madness - after which I felt like it just wasn’t possible to remember such a ramble in quite the same way, so I thought “feck it!” and got drunk on red wine and started watching season 6 of the West Wing – I was then made to feel extraordinarily stupid due to realising that I actually need to watch this programme with English subtitles because it shoots by so quickly that if you don’t concentrate extraordinarily hard on what everyone is saying at all times, then you miss extraordinarily vital things and will have no idea what is going on – I used to think that I watched with subtitles to help Hanh, who’s native tounge is Vietnamese and always found that if someone had a funny accent or spoke with a dialect she didn’t quite fathom, the written word was there to fall back on – but now I realise I have become accustomed to watching with them after 3 years in Asia and seem to have forgotten my own language when spoken with pace (the wine may also have been a factor).

This is not surprising seeing as during this last week there have been instances of me forgetting my age (thought I was a year older) , how to tell time using clocks with hands (“the little hand nearly says 9 and the big hand says between 7 and 8 and that’s…..erm 9.45?… ”

and any semblance of mathematic ability (175’000 is 17.5Metric Tons…. NO!.... and if you have a 1 in 76 million chance in the lottery with one ticket and then you buy another, you then have a 2 in 76 million chance which is the same as a 1 in 38 million chance….. NO!) - leading me to wonder if perhaps I didn’t get away with all that youthful drug taking after all.

SO today I decided that after watching Martin Sheen go through hell trying to negotiate the political mine-field of the middle eastern peace accord, it still seemed a far easier situation to fathom a solution than the one I am embroiled in at work: trying to persuade people that when talking about the global business of buying and selling tea, it doesn’t matter which office does the work and who claims the profit, as long as the business actually gets done – argument being that in the end surely all rivers run to the sea and this helps everyone in the grand scheme of life – and then people told me that politics is exactly that – be it running a country, running a company, or running the mafia - everyone has their own angle and it’s all a giant game of chess, choosing to move your pieces at the right time is the key and all that nonsense....

...and I thought ”well really it would be much better if everyone thought about the greater good at the end of the line and tried to get there a bit quicker without so much piffle paffle and bureaucracy, all these meetings, think-tank nonsense and business speak bollocks” – that it would be better if one person was allowed to make decisions on the spot and get things moving, rather than having to check with everyone else to make sure they were all happy with their cut of profit, their level of involvement, their level of chin stroking time etc etc – that there should be trust that one person knew what they were doing and would make sure everyone got what was coming to them equally at the end of it and people should just do what they were told and bloody well get on with it.

At this point I was told that I was sounding like a communist dictator – and after a little pondering, I agreed with them but argued that communist dictators might actually have a point as long as they didn’t get drunk on power, start killing people and steal everything for themselves.

I then went off on a ramble about the “World of Spo” and how there would be far more modes of transport and habitat that involved floating and flight such as jet packs, flying cars, hover cities and those skateboards from Back to the Future II – Human/Animal army experimentation to create the ultimate soldier - food that tastes like Original Pringles but has the health benefits of carrots - general knowledge tests with cinema tickets so you don’t sit with fools who play with mobiles and talk all the way through the god damned movie – segregated sin city areas where anything goes and if it all goes wrong then you knew what you were walking into and it’s your fault and we don’t have enough time for rehabilitation as we’ve got enough people in the world so you will have to go and work down the mines until you sort your rotten little head out – and general anesthetic for children on long haul flights (and leg room for everybody!) – conservation based on how cool animals were – cloning Al Pacino and using the Al Pacino clones for the majority of TV - far more places connected with Ski-lifts and escalators – being connected to drips at work so you get the right vitamins and water for the day - wage caps in football and a minimum home grown players rule – the gradual reduction of teenagers from society - Televised supreme common sense courts that can operate outside the law, use punishments as a form of entertainment and can bring a swift halt to the likes of Gary Glitter’s existence, Michael Jackson’s career and the music of Crazy Frog – and finally the use of paper scissors stone as a national way of solving petty disputes that once played could not be argued with under penalty of death.

At which point I was told that it was paragraphs containing such random thoughts as the above which suggested that if I were allowed to make decisions without consultation, then my company would surely cease to exist and furthermore that if I ever got into government office then the future of this world was possibly at stake – I protested that this was my off the cuff version of Spo’s World and obviously I’d take council – it was more of a pub conversational Spo’s World than a final blue print

But it was no good – although people agreed there were some interesting ideas – (for example, that of general anesthetic being used when traveling long distances as long as you weren’t involved with the control of direction and speed, that hoveboards were indeed overdue and that more Al Pacino was undeniably a good thing) – in the end, sin cities, drips at work, a lax attitude to the law and conservation as well as meddling with nature to create super soldiers was inevitably going to cause chaos and needed far more thought before I’d be getting their votes.

Fair enough – I realised the thought of absolute power had indeed gone to my head and I had threatened to create a world of laziness, chaos and debauchery – I needed to be stopped – whether I had weapons of mass destruction or not – and the people had spoken by not voting for me in the first place – which is why we live in a democracy - Full circle.

Spo | January 23, 2006