Everywhere you look it's gloom and gloomier. If it's not the growing number of bankruptcies, then it's the coldest winter since Moses parted the Red Sea or the increasing price of everything from cotton to Kit Kats... It's the end of the world and I don't really feel that fine. Couple this all with the fact that Britain is slowly succumbing to a flu epidemic; the cost of everything else that isn't affected by the global food shortage is going up and that gurning twot Cameron telling us we all have to pull together and its never been grimmer to be British.
My boss told me today that he was impressed by my sanguine and quite reticent attitude towards the impending redundancies (read: my impending redundancy) and other crap that's queuing up to destroy us all and I had to be brutally honest. It's shit, but if we spend the remainder of our lives sitting around whinging about the future then we might as well just give up now and slash our wrists. Of course, it's mainly just us, the Europeans and the Yanks that are feeling the pinch. Countries like China, Brazil and even India are barely noticing this so-called global crisis; it's only a global crisis because the western world says it is.
It's a bit like when I used to work in comics - as far as comics magazines were concerned the comics world revolved around the USA. Spider-Man sold an average 100,000 copies a month, when in Brazil comics such as Monica's Gang and its 12 other spin-offs sell in excess of 3,000,000 a week! Or the fact that in Japan a comic selling 100,000 was deemed a failure; or that in any developing country comics were considerably bigger business than they would ever be in the USA. India has a bigger consumer base for comics than the USA - yes, it has more people, but the USA is completely and utterly ignorant of the fact that just about everywhere in the world has a bigger comics industry than them. A good analogy would be for the BBC to focus all its attention on Rounders, claiming that it is the biggest sport in the world and the most important. The US comics industry reminds me in a weird way of Born Again Christians (or any fundamentalist religious twat) in that their God is the only god and everyone else is some kind of infidel. BACs seem to be the ones I identify with the most because I know some and I was once christian (by birth and certificate and with a small c); they seem to think it should be a sin to not believe in god and more of a sin if you happen to believe in some other religious groups' god. My colleagues and I came in for a lot of stick from Born Again American Comics Wankers back in Borderline's day because we dared to suggest that there were actually 250 times the number of comics fans in the world who didn't give a shit about the fucking X-Men and didn't think Jim Lee walked on water or could shag 200 women satisfactorily at the same time while pleasuring the egos of precious fucking comics fans... But, guess what, I'm digressing. While comics fans would like to believe that they hold the key to the future of the world; they hold the key to a locker full of superhero porn comics and a large roll of Andrex...
I fully expect countries like ours to be considered 3rd world by the time Tiger Economies have become the norm. I mean, come on, we're a small island with fuck all going for it in a world where some people are happy to work for peanuts producing ishit for the old and new idle rich. How long before someone in this country realises that we have no future whatsoever and the world is actually run by a man called Chang from the back of a takeaway in Singapore?
How much do you earn a year? Think about it. Think about your kids, your mortgage, your expenses, the cost of your life. Reconcile this to the fact that the late Gerry Rafferty received £80,000 a year from the royalties on Baker Street alone and he pissed the majority of that up a Yeovil wall. If you or I had £80k a year, I'm sure we'd be happy to be quite well off; but we don't. We don't sit around our paid for homes, getting smashed out of skulls on our drug of choice because we've written the words or music for something that is popular. We might contribute a lot to this world; we might be the fucking cogs that make this part of the big machine go round, but unless we can write a hit song, or a book, or be half talented, have huge tits or be in the right place at the right time, then we're fucked. The best we can expect is a shag on a Saturday night, a few pints now and then and a visit to our favourite restaurant or takeaway whenever the coffers allow it. Even someone like me, with no kids and supposedly more disposable income than most might as well shoot myself now and have done with it.
Most of us are just plebs; schleps who do a job and hope that we have some money left before the next pay cheque comes in. There are people out there who might have worked hard for what they have, but because we don't work in a meritocracy, they get considerably more than we'll ever get for providing something that doesn't enable the world to go around. If the entertainment industry disappeared tomorrow, we might get a bit bored from time to time, but equally we might shag and go for long walks and talk to each other a bit more; but we wouldn't die - would we? Yes, it would be boring, but it wouldn't cause mass death. Yet there are arseholes of champion proportions earning more money in the blink of a gnat's eye than we'll ever see in our lifetimes. Or there are ignorant excuses for humanity playing football or some other pointless sport who will earn more money tying their shoelaces up than you or I will earn if we live to be 300.
We, my friends, are witnessing the end of civilisation as we know it; from out of this will come a horde of cretins not fit to wipe our collective anuses; people that will be able to sit there and make you want to gouge your own eyes out with frozen earthworms as they waffle on about how fucking brilliant they are at being a tosser. And the weather is shite...
God, I fucking hate everything at times.
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