pinkfloydpsw's Blog

That woman’s ass is far too big to be crammed into the faux leather trousers she has on, they maybe fitted her well once but now she is spilling out of them where the forces of the material are overstrained. I’ll bet she didn’t look like this before she had those children. It’s nearly as crammed as her children’s guts have just been with what can be described only very loosely as “food”. Under her instruction these two podgy, fat-fingered youngsters were, at a high enough volume for all to hear, required to “finish your tube”. It’s a full stack of Pringles (other brands are available) they’re having each we’re talking of here, keep that in mind. I feel the concern for these two potential future diabetics may be misplaced, I would be right behind this short, round, badly dressed woman had she been encouraging the finishing of a salad or maybe a baked potato. The idea of finishing your food comes from times of scarcity when there was a precious nature to it, and an uncertainty that larder supplies would last, or production would continue, or a kind summer would provide; it was not to get people to be fat. These two have clearly never known an empty belly, in fact I suspect that food is a substitute for love or parenting or discipline in many cases.

Food makes them feel pleased and so they act pleased instead of dissatisfied, but to mistake that somewhat peace granting condition of temporary happiness with real contentment and mental stability in a youngster may be a mistake, in fact it bolsters the idea in the youngster’s head that links food to happiness, a problem many then face in adulthood when heading to the fridge after a bad day in work or a breakup. I know a few people that struggle to uncouple food from real progress in life and grab at it as a solution rather than hitting the gym or going for a walk. The foolish little blimp helps her brood not a bit with the choices made that provide the pleasure of calories and feel of a laboratory produced chemical soup that makes the inedible morsels of HPF fool the tongue, and so the brain, into releasing the sort of endorphins that our ancestors anticipated when there was a feast foraged and not a famine faced. This parenting seemingly also extends to being oblivious to screaming, she maybe can no longer hear the shrill sounds of her offspring, immune to it like a hospital employee that is used to the emergency siren, but at least they have branded clothes and filled stomachs so job done, pin the parent of the year badge on immediately. I see why folks pay for premium on their travels, it’s not for the complimentary drink or the comfy seat, it’s so that little Britney and Archie aren’t belting out every stupid fucking thing that passes through their young brains over the top of one another to an unwilling audience that wouldn’t have bought tickets to this performance given a choice.

I suppose this is why everyone has earphones in now, negating the possibility of useful human interaction and maybe a conversation, or even the possibility of falling in with people and making a new pal. I wish I was oblivious to it at this point, I’m kind of mitigating by writing this as I bear witness to the spectacle. I wonder if one of the most striking problems is that these folks desperately don’t want to be parents, they want to stay young and sexy and vibrant, but their internal chemistry has robbed them of that condition where they made sense and maybe came to realise that in an over-populated world there doesn’t need to be more mouths and outstretched hands? They apparently did what everyone does and had offspring anyway, then resolved themselves to thinking it was the best thing ever. Now their goal is to make everyone share in the misery that is their every day, where the possibilities of a slim ass, a lay in, a social life, a hobby, being able to still be attractive to each other post baby fat and fatigue, have long since faded. I think that makes it better for them in some way, and if you’re like me you will certainly restrain your natural urge to slap the little shits, then slap their half asleep and half inebriated parents also, and turn to await the applause from the crowd, because you realise that the battle between ordinary rights and the rights of those that have children to infringe them is long since lost. When somebody has a child you are automatically wrong no matter what way you act, full stop. So we give in and tailor the social fabric to the notion that if you squeezed out a mini-me or two you now have a trump card to every situation that arises, and so do they. Ideas concerning consideration, silence, peaceful travel, are forgotten or only catered for in the premium parts of the vehicle.

I am a man with no children, you’ve likely assumed that fact already, but I’m not a grumpy man by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I particularly against people raising kids. The problem with the sea being polluted is that it doesn’t look polluted, we have to trust what we see on TV to let us know that it is. The same could be said for these people, meaning that when we watch TV we absorb the narrative that children are always valid and parents are always noble, that our real and often experiences are obviously in error. I often wonder why Jamie Oliver failed in his mission to get our children eating better food, I suspect it was because parents gave in to the children wanting grease and chips and cake, it may be far to late to do anything about childhood obesity now. There were about five heavily overweight children in my high school, maybe a few more that I don’t remember. Ten years after I left school I worked in a school and there was a big difference, there were a lot more that were obese, ten years after that I worked in a college and the difference was massive, it became hard to spot anyone that was slim unless they had a disorder of some sort.

I’m on a ferry from Northern Ireland to Scotland and my observation, which is often what I think in other situations where I am forced to be around parents and their broods, is that most people are people who have taken all that they were born with, all that they have strived for, and all that life’s luck has had to offer, and ruined their near future by trying to create and sustain through the labour of parenting their own immortality, as if this is something that you were ever really ready for when it happened. It’s a shot in the dark gamble over what will happen, you have no idea who these people will be in a years time never mind twenty. Your genes and your instincts say to produce more of yourself, we desire each other for this purpose (though the best part is the practice and not the result IMHO), but we often grant to ourselves the idea that we are evolved beyond this simple base code. The rational human gives great thought to parenting, the sensible person often doesn’t bother, so what I’m witnessing currently is mainly the herd human that just kept making that possible life error over and over again in many cases. The instinctual animal playing out their genetic survival mechanism without thought, autonomically, like the simple yet completely unnecessary saying of “please” or “thank you” to Marge at the checkout like you’re doing anything other than what you have been conditioned to do in that circumstance.

I get that people love their children unconditionally, a friend told me recently that he never intended to have any children but when she was born he instantly knew he would “jump in front of a train for her without though”, but what if your kid turns out to be an asshole, or worse a Tory voter? You will, of course, brag about them to other parents when they get a gold star or pass an exam or get into college, we vicariously live through our offspring and see them as a part of us, our creation, our continuation, and you’ll in some form take credit for every prize they gain in their life journey, yet it’s very unlikely you would go to jail for them and serve their sentence if they murdered a bunch of people.

With adoption and fostering it is still difficult to find parents for those that have none, and so many single parents that might welcome a partner that could raise their kid as if it were their own, but if so many people want to be parents, as if they are convinced that it was a good thing, then why do they so heavily favour their own genetic replication, are their genetics superior or is there instinct at work here? Of course I know I am wrong with this one already because of the genetic bond, I had a stepson once, I was good to him and I think I was by far the better parent that he had available and for nearly ten years, but when I split with his mother I saw the last of him and his anger towards me was palpable, and his mum had been shit to him and to me. I would content that this isn’t about being, or acting, as a force for good in the world, nor is it about needing children to support you in your dotage as was once the case, or even loving and being loved and bringing love into the world…it’s base code and it’s the most selfish, unrewarding, labour intensive, time consuming, thankless task of all things you could have done. The 0 and the 1 of human in its lowest form, as an organism just like a virus trying to survive by mutating and replicating itself indefinitely.

The problem is that this virus has won, it now dominates every part of the environment and the social, and that’s problematic in itself, and the phenomenon just plays out at its worst mostly where it worst could. I saw Simon Reeve on the TV interviewing a young woman who was living in a single room shack constructed of corrugated tin by the side of a road on his travels around north Africa, she had six children, one of which was a baby. Her husband had travelled to a neighbouring country to find work as there was no work in this one. What kind of decisions were these people making by bringing six people into the world when they themselves were already in hardship and struggling for the basics? In western countries we now have less children, and some of us have none. Affluence and education seem to be inverse to population growth on the face of it, but there may be other factors. We have contraception since the RC church is not so strong as it once was, we have terminations carried out by medical professionals when we need or want them, we have pensions and welfare so we don’t need to be supported by our children when we are aged. We make better decisions, but not the people on this ferry with me, not them…

As always I am willing to be wrong, and this is just a rant really not a dig at good parents (you know who you are). It was written with anger and frustration in the fore of my mind in a situation I felt uncomfortable in and that may say a lot more about me than it does about whether I’m correct. I’m likely not this harsh most of the time, I just like to explore ideas and start arguments I may or may not win…

Paul S Wilson