The Vaquitas Porpoise

People are wearing things. They’re sporting blue bracelets and outrageous tattoos and bald heads or beards or flags or make-up or decals or pins or memes on teeshirts and kilts and colours all over every available surface and piercings up the yin yang and it is becoming harder and harder to brush your way through the debris to the person now. 

It is almost as if there is no person in behind the decor. Sometimes I think that because usually when you eventually fight your way to where they are, they’re on the cellphone and might as well not be there as far as anyone is concerned. But that is neither here nor there nor over there. 

The point would be it has always stood the test of time to have the personality before you have the image. That way you will actually have some kind of presence and you can be noticed and won’t starve to death because nobody realized you were there because they thought you might just be a store mannikin all dressed up and on display. They will remember to invite you for dinner and will offer you blue-cheese nibbly bits as appetizers.

It will save you money to have a personality rather than an image immediately because you will know which pin to wear and won’t have to wear all 16 pins for every social cause. And you won’t have to pay for a tattoo that you’ll regret when you are old and it sags and that tattoo of Britney starts to look like a melting Shrek on fentanyl.

The point would be that before you pierce your forehead to insert bone horns with metallic embellishments and pearl inlays, think of your grandchildren to be. How do you think they’ll feel when you pick them up after school with your bat wing arms flapping in the wind with red hearts and crocodiles all over them and fangs coming out of the top of your head and a purple chin which was once meant to represent the futility of meaning and autonomy in the 21st century and which now just looks like you drooled your grape juice again. Look. Have some dignity for heavens sakes! Think of the children! But never mind all that.

The important thing is in the flotsam and jetsam of your existence there is a place to be that is less-than-spectacular. Everyone has a less-than-spectacular place to be but unfortunately these places are becoming endangered much like the Vaquitas porpoise of the Gulf of Mexico. Gillnet fishing has decimated the poor porpoise who had a purpose but the Mexican government is not enforcing the law and so it behooves us all to save the porpoises. This does not mean you must go out and tattoo a porpoise on your arse. Nobody notices. Better to…. But I digress. 

Less-than-spectacular places are as vital to people as free speech.  We all need a place where no one knows we are where we can sing bad opera, wrap our feet in tinfoil, watch bad movies and eat cranberry tuna sandwiches. No one needs to know you eat cranberry tuna sandwiches. That’s your secret with the universe.

That’s about all I have to say. Of course, if that were all I had to say I wouldn’t be going on and on like I do now would I? The thing about any stance in anything is that, when you are going to be questioned, it is imperative to find someone to blame. That is the true spirit of our times. 

So I blame the loss of less-than-spectacular places on these bloody tech idiots. 

They hate us. They have always hated us. 

They have hated us since they sat in the back of the classrooms like the pasty-eyed nerds they were with their horn-rimmed glasses and their made at home lunch and their ill-fitted polyester pants and their ridiculous tricks like jumping over chairs. And so they started making us all miserable when they grew up. For one thing, they’ve gone and invented AI. How vindictive can you get?

We could have been nicer to them I suppose. But then, we hardly noticed them because they weren’t wearing the right pins. Unable to live the life, they decided to spy on our lives. This is why there is no privacy anymore and no less-than-spectacular spaces. Even our vacuum cleaners are watching us. 

They know our bank accounts, our spending, our entertainment, whether we scratch our ears or bite our nails. They know what we eat, where we go and how many angels fit on the head of a pin. If they knew what angels were. Which they don’t. Clearly. Maybe we should step in and stop all this nonsense? That is hard to do when we can’t figure out what colour hair to wear in the morning. I mean, social change might mean giving up the little to get the big. We can’t have that! We wouldn’t exist then. 

Here’s an earworm in apology: