Sometimes being alive can feel so damned effortful. A really difficult week; ask me why, I couldn’t tell you. I think that I’m picking up something floating in the ether and I reckon other people can feel it as well because lots of people just seem out of sorts. ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove; then would I fly away and be at rest.’ Maybe it’s just reading about too many bad people doing bad things. I need a news detox, that’s for sure.
In retrospect, the week was actually really good. I had a couple of family members staying over which was really nice, I had a couple of days off work, and I saw the film ‘Baby Driver’. You should see it ASAP, it’s terrific. It’s this year’s ‘The Martian’ as far as I’m concerned. Plus whoever chose the music for the film is an out and out genius. It is ridiculously violent a la Tarantino but even the violence slides off the mind, I just remember the funny bits. It’s also full of eminently quotable lines, kudos to the writer(s). My favourites thus far are ‘Who doesn’t like hats?’, ‘More like Bonnie and Bonnie’ and ‘He’s got a hum in the drum.’ Excellent film plus the car chases are catnip to a petrolhead such as myself.
So, how to cheer up my fellow empaths who are down in the doldrums out there? Ogden Nash, seemples.
Someone sailed the ocean blue.
Somebody borrowed the fare in Spain
For a business trip on the bounding main,
And to prove to the people, by actual test,
You could get to the East by sailing West.
Somebody said, Sail on! Sail on!
And studied China and China’s lingo,
And cried from the bow, There’s China now!
And promptly bumped into San Domingo.
Somebody murmured, Oh dear, oh dear!
I’ve discovered the Western Hemisphere.
And that, you may think, my friends, was that.
But it wasn’t. Not by a fireman’s hat.
Well enough wasn’t left alone,
And Columbus was only a cornerstone.
There came the Spaniards,
There came the Greeks,
There came the Pilgrims in leather breeks.
There came the Dutch,
And the Poles and Swedes,
The Persians, too,
And perhaps the Medes,
The Letts, the Lapps, and the Lithuanians,
Regal Russians, and ripe Roumanians.
There came the French
And there came the Finns,
And the Japanese
With their formal grins.
The Tartars came,
And the Terrible Turks –
In a word, humanity shot the works.
And the country that should have been Cathay
Decided to be
The U.S of A.
And that, you may think, my friends, was that.
But it wasn’t. Not by a fireman’s hat.
Christopher C. was the cornerstone,
And well enough wasn’t left alone.
For those who followed
When he was through,
They burned to discover something, too.
Somebody, bored with rural scenery,
Went to work and invented machinery,
While a couple of other mental giants
Got together
And thought up Science.
Platinum blondes
(They were once peroxide),
Peruvian bonds
And carbon monoxide,
Tax evaders
And Vitamin A,
Vice crusaders,
And tattletale gray –
These, with many another phobia,
We owe to that famous Twelfth of Octobia.
O misery, misery, mumble and moan!
Someone invented the telephone,
And interrupted a nation’s slumbers,
Ringing wrong but similar numbers.
Someone devised the silver screen
And the intimate Hollywood magazine,
And life is a Hades
Of clicking cameras,
And foreign ladies
Behaving amorous.
Gags have erased
Amusing dialog,
As gas has replaced
The crackling firelog.
All that glitters is sold as gold,
And our daily diet grows odder and odder,
And breakfast foods are dusty and cold –
It’s a wise child
That knows its fodder.
Someone invented the automobile,
And good Americans took the wheel
To view American rivers and rills
And justly famous forests and hills –
But someone equally enterprising
Had invented billboard advertising.
You linger at home
In dark despair,
And wistfully try the electric air.
You hope against hope for a quiz imperial,
And what do they give you?
A doctor serial.
Oh, Columbus was only a cornerstone,
And well enough wasn’t left alone,
For the Inquisition was less tyrannical
Than the iron rules of an age mechanical,
Which, because of an error in ’92,
Are clamped like corsets on me and you,
While Children of Nature we’d be today
If San Domingo
Had been Cathay.
And that, you may think, my friends, is that.
But it isn’t – not by a fireman’s hat.
The American people,
With grins jocose,
Always survive the fatal dose.
And though our systems are slightly wobbly,
We’ll fool the doctor this time, probly.
It leads to generosity and jollity.
But it also leads to breach of promise
If you go around lavishing it on red-hot momise.
