Er...: Laughing Men Co.

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Phew! This has been one of those weeks where a lot of things seem to happen and when you take the time to think about it you realise that you were just going around wasting a lot of energy doing almost nothing. I ran up stairs and down stairs for reasons that make no sense to me and I walked around with lots of useless books in my bag and hands for most of the week feeling very productive and now I can't even remember where those books came from. The first week of varsity is like drinking too much at some party and having a vague memory of how all that vomit got on your shoes the following day. I have scraps of paper lying everywhere and I have no clue where most of them came from. I'll use my super sleuth skills later to solve this case, I'm just too damn lazy right now.

The highlight of this week is the company I'm starting when I acquire a heap of money in the near future. I met an old high school acquaintance yesterday and just to bore the nonsense out of him I decided to tell him about Laughing Men Co., which is going to be the biggest, wealthiest and least profitable company in the world. We're going to convince (at gunpoint of course) the top ten people on the Forbes list to give us all their money. We will then proceed to build an empire that will be the second home of the world's strongest, fastest, tallest and most intelligent men and women. With the skill of these insanely talented people at our disposal we will find devious ways in which to lose money. Laughing Men Co. will be headed by a board of 13 directors (me being at the head of the table) in a room enveloped by Cuban cigar smoke. The directors will all wear expensive Armani suits that cost more than the house I currently live in and no one will know what their faces look like because they'll all be wearing black hoods. From their ivory tower the directors will laugh, giggle like little girls and snicker as the company loses vast sums of money. We (by which I mean my 12-year old sister and I) made some advanced calculations and with the capital at our disposal Laughing Men Co. will be around for almost a century before our money runs out. I'll be dead by then so I won't care that lives have been ruined by 13 crazy, laughing people in a room.

P.S. If you've just wasted two minutes of your life reading this post I'm sad to say that there is 99.999999% chance that you will never get them back... unless the Chuckling Time Machine that Laughing Men Co. plans to build in the future actually works.

“The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods;
I’ll not believe it”- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What our age lacks is the passion older civilizations seem to have had. Kierkegaard said of the modern age (he was speaking in a religious context) that you can hardly call its inhabitants sinners; they (i.e. us) are lukewarm beings whose sins are of the vague and wretched sort. The older civilizations really sinned! They murdered, they stole and they lusted in the proper sense of the words. These terms hardly qualify in describing the modern human being. In a time when love just means being nice to other people passion is almost dead. Look at the stories we tell on TV, they’re getting sillier every year. As a kid I watched lots of TV because they had good cartoons on, shows like Darkwing Duck, Bikermice from Mars and Captain Planet. I see that they’re barely showing cartoons on children’s shows anymore, all they go on about is the presenters and what they get up to. Apparently we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet and yet we waste our lives away talking about the cellulite on some celebrity’s thigh. Did you see how lumpy Jennifer Smith’s thighs are? They have pics of it in Warm Magazine. WTF?! Douglas Adams is right, it’s mice that actually run the show and dolphins are second in command.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Like the lovely Mrs Browning I believe that the spirit of old is not dead yet. It is locked away in some cupboard and it’s still fairly easy to get hold of the Golden Key with which to open that forgotten cupboard. That Golden Key is, believe it or not, literature. Stories have always been the favourite art form of human beings all over the planet because they are an ingenious way of preserving a society’s wisdom and even more importantly, they are entertaining.

The epics have not died out my friends; they’re on shelves in your local bookstores and libraries. If you’ve never heard of those places just look around for dusty looking people and they’ll gladly show you the way.