The Idler

MY STUPID LIFE

Confessions of utter idiocy, including a doomed scheme to use bubble-wrap as a sleeping bag, by GREG ROWLAND.

You have to be slightly clever to realise just how stupid you really are. Absolute ignorance is truly a blissful state. Just look at any six-month old baby that you might find to hand. The ignorant little baby has no knowledge of plate tectonics, John Leslie, Wittgenstein, Brian Clough, Ryvita snack recipes or the latest goings on with Anthea Turner. Yet the little baby, floating through an unexplainable ocean of colour and sense, is as happy as Larrys Grayson, Hagman and Flynt combined.

It’s possible to continue this ignorance as you progress through your adult life. You may by now be aware of Anthea Turner, but lack the necessary intellectual vigour to form any critical judgements about her - or indeed about a media world that saturates us with the sub-atomic details of the rich and boring. If you have retained this innocence, as you wander the aisles of Tesco’s, bathed in the warm light of consumer benediction, picking up a jar of Dolmio and delighting in your Dolce Vita sophistication, then I congratulate you. You’re stupid and you’ve made it stick. You are verily one lucky bleeder.

However, poke your head above the parapets of idiocy and you are lost. You now begin to see just how stupid you really are. You begin to see the piercing light of true intelligence somewhere just beyond the horizon. Just like Prestatyn, you’re sure it exists but you don’t know how to get there. But as soon as you get the faintest glimmer, a vision of Noam Chomsky in your Coco Pops perhaps, you are destined to drown in a sea of your self-made stupidity.

Many of us therefore live stupid lives, half-knowing that there is something clever out there and are just self-aware enough to know that we have as much chance of finding it as witnessing a sweaty scene of double anal-penetration on an old episode of The Liver Birds.

Foremost in the lives of the stupid comes ambition, that murky harlot who teases us with the promise of “personal fulfilment”. But the concepts of “personal” and “fulfilment” are bulging non-sequitors, boils on the butt that, if not lanced under proper medical supervision, threaten to fill your pants with puss. Put two non-sequitors together and you get something else entirely. But I’m not sure what that something is. You’d have to ask someone clever.

Fulfilment, as Mistah Buddha said, is impossible in the material world. We compound this problem mistaking fulfilment for desire. From the looks of things, Buddha owed much to the Mr Kipling school of fulfilment. His chubby smile is, in my experience, only achievable after eating an entire box of French Fancies (without the strawberry ones).

So, desire is like an episode of Casualty. (Here is where I begin to differ from the teachings of Buddha.) It goes on and on forever, when you really should be doing something else on a Saturday night, and you feel consequently worthless in its torrid pursuit. And there is no reward or fulfilment at the end, just the promise of another week of someone screaming with a broken pelvis.

Neither desire nor ambition can ever be satisfied. Ambition is just the social, externalised form of desire - the “look at me, aren’t I great?” part of the desire mechanism.

Think of those much greater than you and I, my brethren. Think of he who is Bruce Forsyth, king of primetime game shows for thirty years yet desperate to be accepted in the big site of all our imaginary desires, the United States. Think of how pitifully he chummed up to Sammy Davis Jr and wanted to join the Rat Pack some twenty years after the said rats had packed it in. Or think about Bill Clinton, who had become as powerful as any man could ever become, but still had unfulfilled ambitions in the area of squirting spunk over intern’s dresses. Or dear Larry Olivier, whose unfulfilled ambition to play centre-forward for Wolverhampton Wanderers haunted him to his grave.

Bruce, Bill and Larry were all great men. How much do we pale in their shadows? Yet you and I nurse ambitions whose unlikely resolution would just lead us onto yet more and more ambition. Most of us will be disappointed at the first hurdle as the pursuit of drear ambition knocks us flat on the arse.

The alternative to the active pursuit of ambition is equally stupid. It’s about being totally passive, a passivity borne of an arrogance that you’re too good to pursue anything; an arrogance itself borne out of the insecurity that if you do try anything you will be found out as a talentless git and are no more special than the everyday folk whom you secretly despise. You can sit and wait for your boat to come in - or in my case a flotilla of ceremonial ancient Egyptian barges from the Cheops Dynasty that alight at Blackfriars Bridge.

Few of us have any potential to fulfil, but we are too stupid to realise it. So, if you’re like me, you will embrace your lack of potential and celebrate the fact that you can open a packet of crisps without spilling the entire contents over the carpet (one or two examples of “droppage”, as the post-structuralists call it, are permissible - you don’t want to beat yourself up over a few crumbs of Quavers do you?)

I am now so stupid that I can’t think of anything to say to anyone. Woman delights not me, nor man either. And I’m not too crazy about those starfish.

These starfish just lollygag around the ocean floor, smug in their pentagonal contours, waiting for a big break that they think the world owes them. Well I’ve got news for you starfishies - no-one’s interested! Least of all the seahorse, who has a nice steady gig modelling for plastic sand moulds sold in webbed net packs along with small rakes, buckets and sieves at most seaside holiday shops.

The arrogance of the seahorse, an aquatic creature that bases its whole identity on a much larger land-based quadruped that can run fast and go “neigh” never ceases to astound me. So, most of my life is spent blinking in dumb wonder at the tawdry exhibitions of existence that pockmark the universe. I just can’t take it all in. I’m like one of those obscure Massai tribesman who had never seen a TV before and is suddenly exposed to Wheel of Fortune and is unlikely to be propitious in his choice of vowels for “Famous Event” _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (Answer: The Post-Modern Apocalypse.)

Blinded by the dim gaslight of a thousand paltry pinpricks of dreariness I find myself surveying My Stupid Life and can find only one answer. The answer is “Yes”. Let me share with you some of my most stupid moments.

My Stupid Life begins each day when I wake up and drag myself into the bathroom. Barely able to focus I catch sight of myself in the mirror and am greeted by a soft-focus visage of glowing skin, sparkling eyes and a wistful pre-Raphaelite look of uncommon beauty. This is what I call the Early Morning Honeymoon of the Face. By the time I have finished scrubbing my teeth my vision has returned to its twenty-twenty precision. The gauze effect - used by such effect on Captain Kirk’s female conquests in Star Trek - has now vanished. I am greeted by the spectre of what I really am: a bleary, blotchy bad blokey face. A face that was drawn and then discarded by a Sixties Underground Comix artist’s crappy assistant. Here begins the first disappointment of another day in my stupid life.

I will do many stupid things on any given day in my stupid life. Just yesterday I experimented with cookery. I took a slice of Walls Vienetta and put it in the microwave. This was an astounding success, producing a small portion of a delicious choco-cream syrup drink. Truly, the Vienetta is a milkshake in suspended animation. Flushed with success I decided to strive onwards for other re-formats of my favourite delicacies. This is one of the things that characterises the stupid life. You try something once and it works so you try more stupid variants of the same idea that are doomed to failure. I took three fun-size Milky Ways (though what’s fun about having less Milky Way than a normal-sized one is one of those post-modern con-tricks that slices up my feeble mind like Parma Ham at a smelly Deli) and placed them in a bowl and put them in a microwave on full power for two minutes. Dreams of culinary grandeur can dissolve in such a short time. Within two minutes my hopes of a regular cookery column in The Observer faded to a small sludge of caramelised goo that stuck so heartily to the bowl that I couldn’t scrape it off and so I consequently had to throw the bowl away. I got told off about this.

But it doesn’t stop at microwaves - I am very stupid in the way that I assume technology can solve all problems. This I blame on Star Trek. I have spent untold monies on high tech equipment that I feel will turn me into a combination of Orson Welles, Picasso and John Lennon. Needless to say, these dreams too are crushed. The best case scenario is for you not to be able to work the stuff at all. It’s far more depressing to find that you can make the equipment work but have less creative inspiration than a hermit crab after a particularly boring day spent inside his shell.

However, this love and trust in technology extends beyond the hi-tech. I was once on tour with my band in Paris. This being a low-budget affair we were staying on the floor of a spacious friend’s house. Everyone else had bought sleeping bags to fend off the November nip. But I thought I would be clever. Rather than lug about a big sleeping bag, surely bubble-wrap would provide a more effective blanket against the cold? I discovered that there were a few flaws with this thesis. Bubble-wrap is not warm. The bubbles retain no heat whatsoever. It tears very easily so that you awake with a few sad tatters around your feet. Worst of all, and this is hardly a revelation, bubble-wrap pops. So every time I moved I not only woke up myself but the whole room. I have since eliminated bubble-wrap from the list of sleeping bag substitutes and am now toying with the idea of clingfilm.

But, just as Falstaff was the cause of wit in others, I can cause others to act stupid by my mere presence. It was not long ago when I was stopped by the police in the early hours of the evening and accused of deliberately walking too slowly. Duly chided, I was instructed to walk “more purposefully” if I insisted on walking the streets at 8.30pm. In an unrelated incident, a wig was thrown at me once, which managed to knock me to the floor. It was just a wig, but it’s symbolic intent was much more portentous.

My teenage years were also shot through with arrant stupidity. From trying to coax roaming cows out of a tent in Wales by singing the greatest hits of Jimi Hendrix to being overly nice to girls, my foolhardiness was unremitting. Why did no-one ever tell me that being nice to girls was the worst thing you could do if you wanted a snog? On visiting one such girl, I once tired to dodge the fare on the train with a discarded travel card. The inspector asked me if I was over 65. I had stupidly taken an old person’s travel card. To experience sarcasm at the hands of the most stupid band of men ever to walk the earth - the British Transport Police - was chastening indeed.

I also envy the dreams of others. My unconscious provides fantasies so bland that they would make vindaloo taste like cottage cheese. A typical dream of mine will involve walking in to a shop - it might be an Argos, it might be a Boots - and asking for a particular item like a plug board or some plasters. After waiting around for a while the assistant will return and say that there are none left, at which point I also realise that I’ve misplaced the keys to the house. Other people, as they tirelessly inform me, have interesting dreams full of sexual adventure, high surrealism, serendipity and chocolate-covered football pitches. My stupid life, unfortunately, extends far into my unconscious.

My unconscious thinks it rules. Hence I will obey its every whim when gambling. My unconscious tells me that it can see into the future and predict the outcome of sporting events. No matter how many times it is proved wrong, the id still gets one over on the ego and informs it that it will be different this time and that Wimbledon will beat Manchester United 4 - 0. It is indeed a stupid person who believes that his stupid brain can influence events that happen in the real world - particularly when you can’t even influence yourself.

If, like me, you’re really stupid, you will see the world through metaphors derived solely from dumb TV shows of the Sixties and Seventies. Because, you see, life is like Runaround - the ITV kids game show hosted by a pre-Eastenders Mike Read. After the loveable cockney cunt asked a question, the hordes of kids would have to “runaround” three sections of the game-board. Two would be right and one would be wrong, and you got a yellow ball if you stood in the right area. Much jostling would ensue as the kids chose safety in numbers, assuming that the more people who stood in an area the better the chance of them collectively having the right answer. And normally this worked. But there was always one kid who would dart between the three sections, following and then abandoning the flow, making complex but futile judgements about his probability of success as the blinding lights flashed and the sirens hooted. At the moment of revelation, this one kid would invariably be occupying a section all on his own. As the answer was revealed he would desperately try to jump next door but would soon be spotted by the cybernetically enhanced eyes of Mr Read. Mike Read would whisk you away with a clip on the ear (this was 1975) and declare to the laughing masses “What a wally!” Some of us have been standing in that wrong segment for most of our adult lives, sometimes trying to jump into adjacent squares but then changing our minds and sticking to our so-called principles. While all the time a voice of gruff fatherly authority shouts beerily down our lugholes with a Readian equal emphasis on each syllable - “What A
Wa Lee!” You could try and jump next door with all the other kids, but if you’re stupid like me you’ll stay in your lonely segment, hoping that, despite the overwhelming evidence, you’ve made the right decision. You just had to be different, didn’t you? Welcome home my friends, to the tale that never ends - welcome to My Stupid Life.

Greg Rowland