Wednesday 27 February 2013

Books, Books and Books


Yes that’s right I’m going to talk about books.  For those of you who are already struggling, books are those things that look a bit like DVDs that you’ve probably seen old people have on their shelves, next to the Madonna CDs and packets of Haribo.  They look a bit like DVDs but are worse because they’re bigger and have less interesting artwork on the front cover.  Old people tend to collect them and unlike video games you don’t trade them in when you’ve finished with them.  I think this is essentially because people who have books want to show other people that they can read in much the same way that I put the heads of wild animals on my shelves to show other people that I could snap at any second.

A book is different to a DVD.  As ridiculous as it sounds when you open a book the first thing you’ll notice is that there is no disc.  It will also take several hours, probably days, to finish and if it is bad it will actually take you even longer to finish than if it was good which is sort of the wrong way round.  Books are usually quite long because they were invented in a time before Playstations when people were very bored and willing to give anything a go.

If you can overlook its many deficiencies then a book can still sometimes be nearly as good as a film.  Obviously not a good film like Top Gun or The Wrath of Khan but a bad film like The Lord Of The Rings or anything by Joss Whedon.

What I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t write books off completely.  You might one day find yourself travelling on a bus or a train and unable to stream anything.  Or if you believe in reincarnation you might be unfortunate enough to be born into the sort of family that doesn’t enjoy Mario games.

My bitterness against books is perhaps at least partly fuelled by my own experience of trying to write one which essentially represented a frustrating two year period of my life (alright five) which ended with 400 pages of waffle of which only 40 or 50 pages were any good before the hard drive on my computer broke and I lost everything anyway and thus began a vendetta against books and technology for their conspiracy to waste my time, the only notable result of which has been my continuing failure to get round to buying a Kindle.

My main problem is I find a lot of books waffle needlessly.  This is not necessarily the fault of books per se.  I find a lack of succinctness in anything rather irritating.  If I had my way everyone would use the least amount of words possible to express themselves.  Preferably they wouldn’t feel the need to emote at all.

Job interviews would be condensed to multiple choice questionnaires, saying GOOD DOG would constitute successful small talk and the question “Maybe we could go for a drink sometime?” would be replaced with either the words “I love you” or the words “I want to fuck you” as it seems rather illogical that not being thirsty at certain moments of my life could jeopardise my chances of enjoying a fulfilling relationship or having meaningless sex.

This attitude is probably a contributing factor as to why I don’t do very well at job interviews and have very few friends.  And why I’m single.

What was I talking about?

Ah yes books.  Obviously they’re much more inspiring, substantial and more likely to tell you something meaningful about the human condition yadda yadda yadda but who really cares or wants any of that anyway?  Look outside at that man shouting at a bin.  And over there is a woman laughing at a cat.  Do you really care or want to understand why?

Mario on the other hand is a plumber whose only joy lies in collecting gold coins and jumping on the heads of other people.  Call me simplistic but at least that’s something I can relate to.

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