Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Samantha Cameron in a bikini*

I went to the mall. I suppose it's a cliched thing to do on a bank holiday. I don't really know because usually I work on bank holidays - or until now I will have worked on bank holidays, except work is coming to an end - at least, the kind of working that I'm doing now, if you can call it that, and I suppose you can.

(TL:DR. TL:DR. Too Long: Didn't Read. I can feel you stroking your index finger down the mousewheel already, looking at the mountain of text ahead - not that I've written it yet, but I know that I'm going to - and wondering whether you can force yourself to keep going, to trudge through the increasingly stodgy dumpling-like turgidity of prose, without even any demonstrable reward in sight, apart from knowing that you started something and didn't finish it - that you were able to do something and not quit halfway through... for which, many thanks. But TL:DR. TL:DR. Or TB:DR. Too Boring, Didn't Read. Is there some equivalent passive-aggressive gainsaying response? Something like FO:YC? I don't know. That just seems a bit juvenile. And it is a bad thing to be juvenile, apparently, probably especially when it's particularly a temptingly thing to easily do.  Telling someone to fuck off is just like putting the letter 'i' in a TO LET sign. It's the obviousness of it that makes it shameful, even if it has an intrinsic humour that taps into a childish part of the brain - it's a toilet! - but still, sometimes the obvious thing to do is the right thing to do. Which is why I did the obvious thing, and went to the mall.)

I read a story today about a rapper I'd never heard of very much, who'd crashed a jetski into a bridge. Which was hilarious and also pitiful at the same time. The idea of someone crashing a jetski into a bridge is funny. Because bridges are quite large things, and they don't tend to trick you by wobbling around very much. There is that element to it: the idea of the silly man crashing into a bridge on a jetski, ploughing straight into it, as if it wasn't there, but discovering that it was, in fact, very much there. But then there's the idea that this is a human being, with a soul and with dreams, just some other person, as real and as bright and as flawed as everyone else, who happens to have driven a jetski into a bridge. I feel sorry for him, although I repeat I hadn't really heard of him very much. I kind of know the name but not a great deal else about him. If you played me something he did, I might have heard it, and I might shrug my shoulders and say "Oh" but that's about it. But that doesn't matter. It's just some man crashing a jetski into a bridge. Like the man who inflated his buttock with a high pressure hose. Funny, but sad really. If he'd blown his head up like a balloon and popped his brains all over the room, I don't think I'd be chuckling as much. But then again, that still is a bit funny, if you're detached enough from that other person, if you can imagine it all like a cartoon, which it isn't. Because he's got a face, and you don't want him to be hurt. Or I don't, anyway, cloyingly sentimental nonsense of a sadsack that I am.

I nearly walked into a concrete staircase when I went to the mall. That's what that last long, miserably rambling paragraph was leading up to. I nearly walked into a concrete staircase, which might have given be a bump to the head, or sent me into the path of a passing car, where I could have been run over and killed. Unlikely, you might say, and you'd be right, but people's buttocks inflate with high pressure hoses. People drive jetskis into bridges. It happens.

And I thought about what people might discover if I had been killed. What would people try and understand about me? What would they look back on and see? Would they look back through notes I'd made in books about being happy, and decide I was happy, and that this was tragic, because I'd seemed happy? Or would they look back through tweets and other things I'd written, and decide I was sad, and that this was tragic, because I'd seemed like I wasn't happy? Or would they look through my internet history and see that I'd spent a lot of the morning looking at 'sexy' photographs by Dave Lee Travis - then what?  Would they have thought I admired Dave Lee Travis and his pictures, and found them possibly arousing? "Oh that's sad," people might have said, "But at least he enjoyed those Dave Lee Travis pictures before his accident." And then I suppose they would have said: "I wonder if it's that Dave Lee Travis, you know, the one who got a Gotcha from Noel Edmonds?" And they might have done some searching on Google and discovered that, yes, it was him, after all. "Oh well, at least he saw those nice pictures before he died." What if that was the last thing going through my head? A picture by Dave Lee Travis. What a thing to be thinking of. But that's how it happens, I suppose. There are no big speeches and sudden exits. One minute it's this, the next it's that.

I suppose the only way you find out any of these things is if you ask. Perhaps that is the sad thing, when someone does drive a jetski into a bridge, or gets blown up like a balloon, or walks into a concrete staircase, or whatever; you don't have the ability to find the answers to the questions. You're always trying to reach out into the void, to think what someone might have been thinking, or feeling; you're always a hundred thousand miles away from knowing what they really do think.

That's why we go to the mall in the first place, to have some kind of certainty in life. Go to the mall. Find something. Find something you might like. You can't have what you do like, not what you really like, so find something you kind of like. I wandered around the shops, and I thought "I kind of like that. I don't mind that. That's nice, but it's too expensive... do I deserve it?" and felt those things that all of us feel, I think, when we do this fruitless kind of comatose hunter-gatherer thing, on a bank holiday, along with everyone else, because it's raining and there's nothing else to do. Pick a thing you want. Decide whether you want it or not. Make the decision, have certainty. If you want it, you can have it. If you want to get it, get it. Hand over the money, it's yours. It's for you.

But then, I find it equally dispiriting in those places. I feel so much that it's not for me. This isn't for you. You don't belong here; I don't belong there. All the massive posters in the windows - perfect white teeth, perfect skin, perfect smiles, perfect people. Look at this! Have this! Get this! You deserve this! You're entitled to this! You can have this if you want it! Treat yourself! Spoil yourself! Spend! Enjoy! Be! But then I look more closely at the windows, at the shuffling, awkward, fuzzy figure with baby elephant hair and ill-fitting fat person clothes, and I think: No, this isn't for me. This place is not for me. Where is? I don't know, but not here. And so I leave, quietly, not having bought anything, and that's all right, I tell myself, because I wasn't meant to do that anyway.

TL:DR. That's fine, I don't mind at all. By now you will have given up, having decided you D want to R it because it was TL. You may have even decided to write something in the comments. "What are you doing, writing about this?" you might ask. "I don't think I enjoyed this as much as other things you have written, it's disappointing. It's like you are trying to be difficult and unreadable." But then that's not you talking at all, is it; its me, telling myself. You could be writing something along the lines of "I haven't read this post but I can't say I agree with it, based on the headline and the first couple of paragraphs, so here's what I think". And you're welcome to that, too, of course. I don't seek out these things. I don't go trawling for controversy. If nothing else, trying to be difficult and unreadable, except with a huge amount of patience and persistence, does delete the obvious path to going trolling around looking for people to annoy, then getting all happy because at least I have attracted someone's attention by being CONTROVERSIAL and CONTRARY and being a real ICONOCLAST so that one day I might be invited onto a television programme to be similarly CONTROVERSIAL and ICONOCLASTIC. At least I haven't done that. And I wouldn't like to do that. And I'm glad I don't. I don't want a billion comments telling me I'm wrong underneath, or a billion and three telling me I'm right. I just write because I write because I write. Sometimes I write for others and sometimes for me; this is very much for me, and I can only apologise for it in advance, if it's not quite what you hoped for, or might have been expecting.

I went to the mall. I came back. I wrote. How am I feeling? Am I unhappy or happy? Am I pleased or dismayed by Dave Lee Travis's pictures, which I have obviously introduced into this to make this whole self-indulgent stain of a blogpost somehow absurd and ridiculous, so I can get in first before you attempt to ridicule it? Ah, I will say, I meant it to be nothing to enjoy all along; I even introduced a minor celebrity's attempts at erotic artworks, as a kind of parallel with my own shambolic amateur-hour efforts at writing something. But you couldn't sell this blogpost for £900 in a lacquer frame, I will tell you that much. You couldn't sell it for anything.

Sometimes, the jetski hits the bridge.

* This post has nothing to do with Samantha Cameron in a bikini. I don't apologise for this fact.

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