“Found on Mars — A statue of Elvis”
Larking around with Hunter S Thompson
“The great debate turned out to be a false alarm, more or less. It meant nothing, it solved nothing, it decided nothing, it addressed nothing, and it was nothing…A clean sweep, except for a frantic ripple effect that petered out before noon the next day, when the Ronald Reagan show hit the United Nations and the tabloids hit the supermarkets with a front page headline that said:
Found on Mars — A statue of Elvis”
Hunter S Thompson (from “Songs of the Doomed”)
After another beautiful day in my spiritual home of Ironbridge I’ve given the lead for this article some considerable thought but I’m drawing a blank and perhaps my earlier Facebook post encapsulates everything I want to say today:
“Fred and Mary posing for the weirdo who can’t (some might say, won’t) stay away. What the hell right? This is real life. Naming swans. Feeding ducks. Sitting in the river like a lost and bewildered dog as the intermittent sunshine comes and goes behind the trees that come alive at night to the sound of owl song. Do owls sing? I’m fucked if I know but this is real life and not the madness of the “News” on your telescreen of doom.
Selah”.
Well, nearly everything. You see, I cut a frustrated man this evening. This article is the latest in a long line of posts this week alone whereby I couple a lengthy piece of writing with over a dozen original images, REAL images, and whilst they are not from a capital city of the world or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, they are real, in the moment and paired with lengthy pieces of original writing. The result? Two people in the entire world (and both from Canada) have read and appreciated these articles whilst the rest of The Matrix couldn’t give less of a fuck. What’s worrying is that at least one of these Canadians is a secret agent in the pay of Justin Trudeau and is at this very minute drawing up plans for my deportation to a rat infested gulag in Ontario where I’ll be beaten with sticks and hung upside down every night like a bat. But what the hell, right? The other conclusion I’ve drawn is even worse.
Quite clearly The Matrix has spoken and my writing and pictures fucking suck. Yes I know we live in the “Goldfish Generation” where no-one reads long form writing anymore and anything past a 45 second TikTok video is now seen as exhausting. I also realise we are a numbed down, dumbed down species only able to function on cheap sex, cheap thrills and cat videos as we watch society burn all around us but come on, surely my writing is worth more than the fuckheads who just cut and paste utter rubbish they find on the internet and pass it off as their own? Is my writing really worth less than these half bright dingbats who can’t be fucked to take their own photographs, let alone twisting someone else’s words or the mechanised shit churned out by AI and ChatGPT and copy and pasting this vacuous garbage akin to a 7 year old with blunt crayons?
Maybe I’m wrong and I should use boring stock photos and copy and paste articles such as “7 reasons why you should buy Bitcoin” or “10 ways to make money writing online”. It seems a lot easier than actually, you know, engaging the grey matter and actually formulating your own opinions and actually, you know, writing?
Or maybe my writing does actually fucking suck?
Perhaps. But what I’m certain of is these pond life are pissing in the gene pool and whilst the scum rises, I’m dead in the water.
Anyway, do you want to buy some Bitcoin?
Thanks for reading. For more opinionated fare such as this, here’s one I prepared earlier.
"Tales I Tell Myself" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.