"...life is like a pint of Guinness: 90 % black with 10 % white sitting on top..."
There is a toilet in my workplace, and in that toilet (3rd floor, 1st cubicle, my seat of choice) can be found the subject of this enquiry, something not entirely dissimilar to the above. I spend time there (quality time), but recently these precious moments are losing just a little of their magic. Gradually, what I had assumed originally to be a fairly banal racist joke, the product of some hairy knuckled monkey, once handed a tie and a desk, who might (if he has the capacity for ambition) aspire one day to marry his own cousin and breed a new generation of rebuttals to the critics of eugenics, began to concern me more and more with each subsequent visit.
If it was an attempt at racism, it didn't make any sense (allowing for the kind of mind in which such thoughts ever might make sense). Neither London, nor the UK, nor the planet in general is 90 % dominated by black people, with a 10 % minority white population, so whatever kind of commentary on race relations the half-arsed ejit had meant, their product had its own independent meaning. So slowly, but most surely, it got interesting. At first, still not convinced, I sought an answer within the racial paradigm. Perhaps a cultural angle? In our MTV base generation perhaps (pop-)culture has become 90 % black...but even if this is even mildly true, like the blind kid who just masturbated in the bath, I just couldn't see the white floating on the top. Ultimately the mechanics simply didn't work however I looked at it. I was free to abandon the racism thesis, and cast out in new and exciting directions....what did it mean???
Briefly I considered the idea that it is some sort of sub-Freudian reference to the workings of the human psyche. Like the metaphorical iceberg, the tiny part of the workings of our mind that are apparent (even to ourselves) are but a fraction of its true depths. Below the ten percent of relatively pure (white) operation lies a heavy mass of dark (black) neuroses, base instincts and carnal desires. The white of course is not something separate and of itself, but rather is in essence the very same. Indeed its appearance is a product of the workings of the darker mass, but it remains there, the filter through which everything deeper must pass. But then I realised I was being a twat.
As things stand my working hypothesis is this: life is largely mundane. You spend 8 hours of your day in an office, which is an extremely bizarre environment, doing things that on the whole you wouldn't choose to do. You probably spend a further hour and a half at least traveling to and from work. At times it feels like you barely see the light of day. The pressure that then gets placed on you social time to be 'fun' is immense; the more sparse the supply the greater the need for payoff. But in truth, the time you have to yourself is also largely mundane. So in fact most people's existence is, lets say for argument's sake, about 90 % mundane (mundane at least in comparison to some sort of expectation that I think may resemble an episode of The Real World). But then are those moments, those shining moments, where just for a fleeting time it feels like you really are an interesting person with interesting friends who together do interesting things. That is the magic 10 % of your life. The 10 % of your life that, should it ever have occasion to flash before your eyes will actually have cause to give you at least some small motivation, whatever the mortal danger you find yourself in, to somehow survive to keep on padding that 10 %.
So in short this commodal etching (which inspired hormonal bitching) is art in the truest of senses. Once released it has a life of its own. Or maybe the lesson is simply that I need to find a new cubicle-of-choice. A marriage to Kevin Federline is on balance better for someone's mental health than this kind of thought process when you're taking care of business.
If it was an attempt at racism, it didn't make any sense (allowing for the kind of mind in which such thoughts ever might make sense). Neither London, nor the UK, nor the planet in general is 90 % dominated by black people, with a 10 % minority white population, so whatever kind of commentary on race relations the half-arsed ejit had meant, their product had its own independent meaning. So slowly, but most surely, it got interesting. At first, still not convinced, I sought an answer within the racial paradigm. Perhaps a cultural angle? In our MTV base generation perhaps (pop-)culture has become 90 % black...but even if this is even mildly true, like the blind kid who just masturbated in the bath, I just couldn't see the white floating on the top. Ultimately the mechanics simply didn't work however I looked at it. I was free to abandon the racism thesis, and cast out in new and exciting directions....what did it mean???
Briefly I considered the idea that it is some sort of sub-Freudian reference to the workings of the human psyche. Like the metaphorical iceberg, the tiny part of the workings of our mind that are apparent (even to ourselves) are but a fraction of its true depths. Below the ten percent of relatively pure (white) operation lies a heavy mass of dark (black) neuroses, base instincts and carnal desires. The white of course is not something separate and of itself, but rather is in essence the very same. Indeed its appearance is a product of the workings of the darker mass, but it remains there, the filter through which everything deeper must pass. But then I realised I was being a twat.
As things stand my working hypothesis is this: life is largely mundane. You spend 8 hours of your day in an office, which is an extremely bizarre environment, doing things that on the whole you wouldn't choose to do. You probably spend a further hour and a half at least traveling to and from work. At times it feels like you barely see the light of day. The pressure that then gets placed on you social time to be 'fun' is immense; the more sparse the supply the greater the need for payoff. But in truth, the time you have to yourself is also largely mundane. So in fact most people's existence is, lets say for argument's sake, about 90 % mundane (mundane at least in comparison to some sort of expectation that I think may resemble an episode of The Real World). But then are those moments, those shining moments, where just for a fleeting time it feels like you really are an interesting person with interesting friends who together do interesting things. That is the magic 10 % of your life. The 10 % of your life that, should it ever have occasion to flash before your eyes will actually have cause to give you at least some small motivation, whatever the mortal danger you find yourself in, to somehow survive to keep on padding that 10 %.
So in short this commodal etching (which inspired hormonal bitching) is art in the truest of senses. Once released it has a life of its own. Or maybe the lesson is simply that I need to find a new cubicle-of-choice. A marriage to Kevin Federline is on balance better for someone's mental health than this kind of thought process when you're taking care of business.
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