It’s felt so long since my last post that I’m beginning to wonder if I can tell the time anymore. In writing this out of a simple need to write anything at all I realise I’ve very likely said all this stuff before, but then life is complicated enough so I see no harm in repeating and recycling ideas on and on into the distance. Everyone else seems to be doing it. One day I’ll start making more of an effort again.
I often wonder what the end of the world will look like. It won’t be a whole lot of fun to hear the death bell toll for the human race, but that won’t be anywhere near as bad as seeing it happen. Seeing all those idiots, glued to their phones, frantically shitting themselves as they realise every worthless bit of flash and fakery that define their lives has in fact added up to the grand sum of fuck all, running away from something they have absolutely no hope of escaping, will be really quite deflating. Not that I’ll be behaving like any less of an idiot (and nor will you), except that I have already decided that come the final, bleak, desperate hours of the garden-variety homo sapien I’ll be holed up at home watching the traffic jams and other assorted varieties of futile fleeing, getting gently inebriated and smoking what may well turn out to be my last ever cigarette. But hey, it might never happen, and in twenty years or so your children or someone else’s may have worked out the secret and burst through to the other side of this life and into a utopia we can only dream of in 2023.
But I’ve always thought it’s best to look at the worst-case scenario, just to be sure, because it’s clear that God hasn’t got a clue what paradise on earth should look like and I’m not sure science is doing a great deal better. So here are some of the things that we should be keeping one eye on at the moment, pretty much randomly selected from a blend of fact and imagination. You’ll be thanking me one day, for the heads up, or more likely you’ll be wishing you had paid a bit more attention in class.
- Floods and fires. Everyone knows that we’re all due a lot more floods and fires, pretty much forever. It will take some time, and endless news coverage but soon we’ll have to accept that the key is adaptation, which is what humans think they’re so very good at. It must surely be easier to adapt to our problems than to make the slightest effort to cut back on all the disposable crap we like. So, in time, people will just become used to getting a text alert telling them their home has burnt to the ground or has rapidly filled with a thick soup of rain water and sewage. It’s fine, we can rebuild. Because we’re human. Eventually we’ll become so adept at adaptation we’ll even be able to go about our daily lives whilst actually on fire or wading through smelly water five feet deep. Hey, we might even find it enjoyable. Because we’re human. Because we’re so damn great at everything.
- Earthquakes/Volcanoes. Earthquakes are a slightly trickier proposal but the golden rule when it comes to volcanoes is this: don’t live near one. Sure, say the experts, farmland is more fertile near volcanoes and tourism brings in money, but if it were me I’d be quick to point out that watching your house, family and feet disappear in a stream of molten lava is unlikely to be offset by a the joy of having a field full of prizewinning carrots or being patronised by a fat American. They say that the best way of keeping hazardous tectonic events at bay is by using technology and reminding everyone to hide under a table but, as recent events in Morocco have shown quite conclusively, this is utter bollocks. We deserve earthquakes and volcanoes in a way – they put us nicely in our place.
- Dogs. There may come a time when there are so many fucking dogs in the world that they end up taking over. Not that I mind dogs, but there do seem to be rather a lot about these days, many of them seemingly surplus to requirement. Especially the dangerous ones. Until they take over completely we’ll just have to get used to them being bred and trained, by complete lunatics, to drag us to the ground and rip our faces off as and when they please. The whole fuss with these American Bully Drooling Murder Hound XXXL, or whatever they’re called, is just more proof that the only species truly capable of harming us is ourselves. The solution is simple: any owner whose dog attacks a human should have their head ripped off by a lion, just to help put things in perspective for them.
- Social media. Eventually even the most avid users of social media will realise that social media is not much more than a huge fizzing jet of high velocity bile. Social media is already dividing the planet into two: those who can’t be bothered with it and those who use it all the time because they have no life whatsoever and without its vacuous omnipresence would cry themselves into a desiccated mess every night. Let’s be blunt: social media is nothing but an empty distraction; another distraction to keep us occupied, another addiction to add to the list, the great irony being that it is able to slowly, insidiously destroy society whilst also pointing this out to us as it’s doing it. What social media does is make us jealous of each other and then want to rant at or with the nearest person to hand. It should never be forgotten that social media was invented, and continues to be controlled by, weird sociopathic pricks that you would never have shared your crisps with at school.
- Gender confusion. It occurred to me the other day that if things carry on the way they are with our confused and crippled sense of gender reality we may end up simply dying out as a species because we’ve forgotten how sex works and who to have it with. Men in slingbacks will be clogging pre-natal clinics, angrily insisting on the NHS fulfilling their right to have children, despite the fact there is no way on biological earth this could ever happen. Non gender specific couples will happily walk the street, wrapped up in a warm cloak of unspoken celibacy. Most heterosexual men won’t be able to even look at a woman for fear of instant arrest and chemical castration and most women will have started taking puberty blockers on their 5th birthday in the hope that soon some crazy scientist will have started their own pick-your-own cock and balls farm, with a grafting service available at a very reasonable price. Terms and conditions apply. We’ll forget, in all our indignant rage with anyone who doesn’t think exactly the same about us regarding gender issues that procreation ever existed and will just be something we’ll read about in history books fifty years from now. Not that we’ll have books by then, because they’ll have been replaced altogether by another ‘powerful tool’. Besides, we’ll be too stupid to read by then.
- Artificial Intelligence. Only humans could be intelligent enough to create something so stupid. Only humans could be stupid enough to create something more intelligent than themselves. The self-congratulatory pioneers of AI are now busy counting all their money and furiously back-pedalling in the hope that when we become permanently enslaved by some vindictive computer programme called NX-DigitalHerpes-ZL17 we won’t be able to remember the trouble they’ve caused. Fortunately, there is some hope, chiefly due the fact that since AI is first and foremost a human construct it will be so deeply flawed and prone to failure that the worst we can expect is to come home from work one day to find our clunky South Korean robot helper busy trying to fuck the oven. We’re also missing the point – like global warming, social media and single use vapes, technology has already taken over and it’s taking the piss out of us every single minute of every single day.
- Economic Collapse. When I was growing up the economy in general went through cycles with two distinct phases. There were periods of growth and relative plenty and then every few years the whole think did a prolapse in its pants and everyone one was plunged into fiscal misery for a while. Now we seem to be lumbered with a non-stop financial blocked toilet and no-one appears to have the right plunger for the job. Across the nation many working class parents are having to feed their children from a food bank just so they can afford another tattoo, while the middle classes are having to cope with the spiralling costs of their Ocado deliveries and struggling to keep up with the latest lease payment on their entirely unnecessary new Range Rover. The posh and the rich aren’t letting themselves worry about such frivolities because they have money and so, crucially, they don’t care. The war that will ensue from status anxiety should keep us occupied for quite some time.
- Vladimir and Kim. Let’s just be honest. Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Ill are just a pair of impotent, puffy faced turds who are desperately trying to solve the problem of their mutually tiny genitalia by threatening to destroy the world and everything in it. These two bell-ends provide an object lesson in just how pathetic it is to see someone indulging in a gargantuan power trip every single day of their lives. It would be worth considering getting rid of them but we all know that some other plutonium grade arsehole will only take their place. Perhaps then it would be better to stop worrying about a nuclear Armageddon and just get on and have one, but only if I get wiped out in the first wave; I’m sure that would cheer a few people up and make the whole experience so much easier to swallow.
- Celebrity plague. I can see a time not far from now when a deadly, Covid-esque virus, created in a lab somewhere dodgy and designed to target pointless famous people, is accidentally (so they’ll say) released into the human population. In Britain at least, the sudden death of Ant and Dec (small, vulnerable, daft and completely reliant on the goodwill of others) will cause a modest implosion in celebrity culture. For a few weeks we’ll wonder what on earth we’ll do for light entertainment, but things will get much worse when all of a sudden their mysterious demise is followed by the grisly passing of a fat handful of people who are far more famous than they deserve to be: Clive Myrie, Clare Balding, Amol Rajan, Claudia Winkleman, Chris Packham, Judi Dench (sorry, Dame Judi Dench), Roman Kemp, Zoe Ball and Jay bloody Blades, to name but a few. The cultural vacuum and subsequent black hole this will create in our collective lives means that we will spend every waking hour trying to fill a pathetic, worthless void that would in truth be better off left to its own devices; an opportunity rather than a setback. Realising that having been brainwashed by these cretins for so long we’ve been left with no original thoughts of our own we’ll eventually stop communicating altogether and so society will crumble as everyone stays at home and watches re-runs of Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh until they starve to death. It’s bound to spread across Europe and then onto the rest of the world. Well, it might; it’s not like I’m Mother Shipton or anything.
- Collaborative wasps. I have decided that the greatest threat to society in general is wasps. By that I mean organised wasps. There are over 100,000 species of wasps in the world so it would be realistic to suggest that there are at least two wasps for every human on the planet. Now, for years we’ve been slapping, swatting, squashing and gassing the little fuckers left right and centre and they always keep coming back – usually, but not exclusively, in the garden of a gastropub. Such is the nature of evolution that one day wasps will eventually realise that they could quite easily get their own back if they just co-ordinated themselves a little more effectively. One wasp isn’t enough to guarantee success but just imagine what would happen if every human was permanently harangued by a pair of the flying bastards. Nothing, literally nothing, would get done as every human spent their day ducking and flailing and contorting themselves into knots to evade their ultimate nemesis. The infrastructures we have come to rely on would grind to a halt. Millions would drop dead from anaphylactic shock in the first few days. Effective medical treatment would be impossible and the internet would stop working as computers got clogged with insect repellent. If the wasps really stuck to their guns even sex would stop happening and so the population would slowly dry up and die out. Hell, we wouldn’t even be able to drink water properly because every glass would be kept occupied by the wasp trapped under it. Jesus, it’s a terrifying thought. I don’t even know why you brought it up in the first place.
It’s a fragile world, the one we have now; the one we have moulded and manipulated to serve our needs. I’d love the idea that we’re heading in a good direction but you and I both know that simply isn’t true. Still, as you can see I’ve always been prone to a touch of light cynicism and we should really focus on the positives. I promise I’ll let you know the minute I think of one.
G B Burton. 17.09.2023
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 