The feeling of complete and utter inability is overwhelming. Strange tunes hum in the background, the sound of the bright and successful as the top 40 count down. She wonders at the number of times she has sat in the same seat under the glare of the same work lamp, with the same stereo blaring innocuous tunes busy making their artists their millions.
She has a past paper in front of her, 3 sheets of obscure symbols and misguiding numbers. There is also months of notes open, in a folder big enough to knock someone out with. If it magically levitated itself and knocked her unconscious she wondered if she’d be any closer to understanding it all. No. Someone up there has not only decided that folders do not levitate, but that she will never understand this crap.
The tune changes, and they say she’s crazy, that she’s losing it. It ain’t a question of brain.
Time dissolves, and deciphering diagrams she never understood in the first place redefines the words meaningless and pointless. She packs up her books, switches off the light, and silences the stereo. She walks downstairs, and continues the never-ending masquerade.
-Did you get much done? Says the innocence of parents induced by teachers in denial to presume all is as it should be.
-Yeah, I think I did. She replies. She is the bit part, the one that must learn her lines, but mustn’t add anything. She is the Dawson, the Harry Potter, the one that must play by the rules. And her friends are fascinating characters, and each has a story worthy of a TV series, along with several spin-offs. And although they would be snubbed by the Emmys, they would no doubt get plenty of recognition from many other equally prestigious institutions.
Around the country everyone is copying, stealing her play. She knows there’s nothing much new in it all. All of everyone everywhere, and all of her friends too, they each sit and make the false report to parents away in cuckoo land. Each studies their scripts, and highlights their lines, with double underscores for where they must rebel, and make it look natural.
All their friends are incredible, and should start their own religion, and soon the world would be entirely polytheistic, with an entire pantheon of living deities. And the world will tremble before them, and forsake all other abstract beliefs and entities to honour these Gods living in their midst.
And each will have their own selection of Gods to venerate, some overlapping, but never entirely. And there will come a time when these ideological differences will no longer be tolerated, and that will be a time of religious war.
So we sit back and think, maybe it is not such a bad thing that those closest to us are not recognised for the supreme beings they truly are.
So she sits, and watches some inane teen flick of a TV show. Something that someone, somewhere out there, thought might make them some money. Because, the kids these days, it’s not like they’re listening, just spending. Spending the last ounce of themselves on anything that promises to get them out, to take them away. So someone, somewhere out there, is making money out of them, and stealing a little bit of each of hundreds of thousands of lost viewers with every title sequence. So the credits role, and the list of show that uses a song of Dido’s as soundtrack grows.
-Just kill me now, they pray, and let me breathe, breathe something less innocuous than the smog of life-sustaining oxygen. And they’ve all smelt carbon monoxide when the cooker wouldn’t light, and water vapour’s even less interesting, and while helium’s fun for a little while, it’s not as revelation-inducing as they always thought it would be. What about Californium, or some other obscure element at the bottom of the table with a dumb name? How comes we never get to inhale Californium?
And someone, somewhere out there, can tell you what it smells like, and that’s dull and uninteresting, but doesn’t let you feel it, and doesn’t let you take it into your lungs, to distribute it to every cell in you. And then there’s someone else who’ll catch on and they’ll tell you the answer, the reason why you cant’s breathe it, because if you did, you’d get cancer or something equally horrendous that might as well be cancer. And then someone else will say it’s because we’re psychologically inhibited, and could smell it if we really wanted. If we only….
And someone else says it’s because economically we haven’t as yet reached the particular level in between construction of the tower of Babel and interstellar trade agreements that would allow an enterprising individual the financial capacity to sniff Californium. And then there’s more, the people that say it’s Tony Blair’s fault, and if we only voted for them next time around, they’d end all this bureaucracy and pass a Californium-for-all legislative. And they go on and on, and you can pretty much guarantee that someone, somewhere out there, will be blaming in on global warming. They all talk at once, and the moss gathers stones.
It has been pointed out on occasion that a rolling stone will not gather moss unless covered with sticky-back plastic, but luckily someone, somewhere out there, has the scientific insight to realise that not even this is true, as moss is generally damp, and sticky-back plastic generally utilises water-soluble glue. However, moss does, exhibit fairly filter-paper like qualities, so should, in theory gather many rocks, and given time could form mountain ranges. In this way the entire plate-tectonic theory of famed geologists is overthrown, and a well-known phrase is inverted. Thank God there are such people in this world.
Then in the infinitude of voices, one pipes up that the reason we must not and cannot smell Californium, is that it is the vapor of the Gods, and not for mere mortals such as us. Reply, reply:
-and I have found and ancient prophecy that the smelling of Californium other than for scientific research by someone wearing a white coat and stupid glasses would initiate a chain of events that would inevitably lead to the destruction of time and space for all eternity.
Suddenly no-one is interested in compressed stardust and fudamental plant-like life forms. For surely eternity is a subsection of time, and would therefore be destroyed along with it.
But, right towards the back half of the infinitude of voices, just one of them is sticking to the original question.
-So why don’t we get to smell Californium?
-Hmmm. Tough shit is why. Because life just happens to suck that way.
And a deep calm prevails for a few seconds as something everyone intrinsically understands the inner workings of is stated out loud for once.
Before some one else pipes up.
-Exactly, exactly. Which is one more reason why you should vote Tory next election. See? sell your soul to the heinous bitch of a baroness, get a free party leadership.
-That’s not why, don’t be an idiot. The reason, You wanna hear the reason? The reason is ‘cos I said so. You got that, you stinkin’ no good trouble makers, nobody smells Californium but almighty Bob. The sooner you get that through your thick skulls.
-But how thick is thick, I mean, who decides whether a skull’s thick or not,
And someone, somewhere out there has devoted their entire life to the study of the thickness of skulls, and gets a free Oscar for the movie of his life story to go along with his Nobel prize and honorary degree in advanced lack of social skills.
-But surely any degree is an honour.
And it all goes on and on, very fascinating, and full of valid points to know and tell.
Until someone, somewhere out there, is stupid enough to try smelling the bloody element without even buying a bad costume as a lab student, let alone actually going through the years of study. Some people, you’d think they’d lost track after the first 'someone, somewhere out there'.
