A Short Comical Tale About Unfunny Things

Woken up by seagulls

Photo by Abdul Samet YILMAZ on Unsplash

1.

You only realise what a cruel wastrel youth is when it’s too late. I’ve thrown thousands of days over my shoulder without even paying attention and wasted my best year’s keeping my head down. Decades squandered. It’s exhausting just thinking about all the misspent time.

I wonder if I’ve wasted all that time just because it’s easier than trying. I wonder if I’ve feared being judged, or dismissed, or disliked. I’ve feared so many things. My old friend fear. That bastard.

No more. I will not be a ghost. This life is not a dream. This life is an awakening. Especially after you’ve spent so much of it asleep.

2.

Even at the interview it was obvious my potential new boss was blissfully unaware. There’s nothing surprising in that. Most people behave like zombies driven by archaic impulses and fragile egos. This women was obviously no exception. I knew straight away that she’d been made to feel insignificant. Probably her parents. They fuck you up your mum and dad. She was plainly lugging around an emotional ball and chain. Even though we were all on our best theatricals during the interview I could tell she would end up being a massive pain in the neck. She wouldn’t be able to help herself.

But what can you do with these insights? I needed the job. Or more precisely, I needed the money. I mean, don’t we all?

Within a week of my new employment my now boss was back to being frazzled and had slumped into her usual anxiety, constantly craving for attention, perpetually fishing for praise and compliments. She was peculiarly pleased with her alleged smartness and her problem solving, problems she herself had inevitably caused through being utterly inept. She was especially pleased with her self-proclaimed leadership skills, despite being uninspiring and commonplace, an average baboon so to speak, she was convinced she was a Silverback. A delusion she protected fiercely as if even the smallest nudge would collapse her entire universe.

I guess on some level we’re all pretending to be things we’re not, like children dressed in adults clothes. There are naked Emperors everywhere. But the energy squandered maintaining the charade is exhausting. Being at work was fast becoming a Promethean torment.

I could see quite clearly that I had two options. I’d either have to inhabit the delusional world of my boss. Or I’d have to stop wasting my precious time and treat life with the respect it deserves.

Both choices meant certain ruin. So I chose the second option because, well, at least that was only financial ruin instead of throwing my actual soul over a cliff.

3.

We humans have two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth, two hands and two feet, all connected to a brain wired for strong social tendencies. This is the standard yet fine-tuned mammalian biological tool kit needed to survive in a hostile environment.

For a few million years this mammalian tool kit pretty much did the job. Then things started to get complicated. Someone planted a row of beans that grew into a social hierarchy where just being a mammal was no longer good enough. Social class and power became increasingly important. These days you have to be a mammal with delusions of grandeur and a financial bloodline.

Who’d have thought that planting a row of beans would have such unpredictable consequences. They say you reap what you sow. Those early agriculturists couldn’t have imagined they were sowing societies full of delusional zombies driven by fragile egos. Societies full of people like my boss.

4.

I got up at 06:30 in the morning. I had slept badly, tossing and turning through another night of thoughts flinging themselves at me like bricks in a hurricane. I showered, got dressed and drove toward the office. On the way I passed two accidents. In the second they were using the jaws of life to cut through the wreckage. People couldn’t get to their offices fast enough these days.

I parked and walked to the A Salt & Battery Café, where I sat at a window table and ordered coffee. The sun was a halo of pale yellow sitting low on the horizon. Seagulls stood along the harbour wall occasionally launching themselves to glide through the early morning mist. A ferry chugged out toward the archipelago.

At 09:17 my phone started ringing. I turned off the ringer. The barista gestured and I smiled and nodded and she poured me another cup and said, “They’re such beautiful birds,” looking toward the gulls, “they seem so at ease, like they’ve seen through all the bullshit and they’re having none of it.”

I smiled, “I know how they feel.”

At 12:48 I ordered the Captain Haddock Platter.

My phone kept buzzing on silent like an angry wasp so I opened the café window and dropped it into sea.

By 15:50 I paid my bill and left.

I arrived at the office at 16:10.

“Where the hell have you been?” My boss, hyperventilating, “I’ve called you umpteen times. You can’t just go AWOL.”

I looked out the window at the circling gulls.

“I’ve been watching seagulls all day. I did notice you calling, so I threw my phone into the ocean.”

She said nothing. Some silences are so much more beautiful than others.

“Look, I couldn’t face another day of all this,” I swept my arm like a wing toward everything. Another purely blissful silence embraced us, “All this bullshit. All this pretense. All this psycho nuts behaviour.”

I could see the gears shifting in her head. I could see the narrative being created in real time.

“How are things? How are you feeling?” she said.

Wow.

“Oh I’m fine, but I’ve been thinking about dying,” I said.

She took a step back.

I laughed.

“No, I just mean that life is so incredibly short, just a bzzzzt and it’s all over,” I said, “Don’t you ever worry that you’re wasting it all? Don’t you want to start actually living, instead of,” I looked her up and down, “being this?”

She pierced me with an intense look of fear and anger and just for a second, there she was standing naked in front of me.

“What the fuck does start actually living mean?” she said, and I have to admit I couldn’t work out if she was being profound or moronic? Funny how similar they can seem, like laughing and crying.

“I don’t know,” I said, “have you even noticed the way seagulls slice right through the air as if it’s not really there, have you ever noticed that? I want to do that, I want to slice through all this bullshit and start actually living like a human being.”

“Good luck with that,” she laughed triumphantly.

I said nothing and just smiled and listened to the beautiful silence and as I turned and walked toward the door I saw I had powerful strong wings with beautiful black feathers and I knew I could launch myself into this life and after all this time I was finally waking and I felt myself circling above all the fear and anger and down there far below me was a small figure running about shouting and waving his puny fist amongst the rows of beans, there he was, my old friend fear, that bastard.

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