Too Cool for Skool

I teach, sort of. I get paid to talk to people. I do it all day long, with a few, very short breaks for breath and sanity. When I'm not being paid I feel cheated if people try to strike up a conversation for free. I wonder if I can get a taxi-meter that I could wear? Worth a thought.

 I get home on a Friday night and think to myself - bliss, quiet... now if only the neighbours would shut the fuck up. And I turn on the telly, or listen to the news, or go online (where I can pretend to conviviality) and much of what I see is people attempting to engage one another by discussing what's 'cool'.

Somebody tweeted at around six o'clock on Sunday morning, asking if anybody had been up all night, thus proving themselves 'cool' (it was pretty chilly, I'll admit) or whether they, like the tweet-author ('twauther') had simply got up early on a weekend, which apparently made them sad and old. It made me think about the whole farcical business of being cool  - I hope it's something you grow out of, although I confess I never really grew into it.

Staying up all night isn't so much cool as stupid and drunk - but we've all done it. We've all been young and stupid and gullible. I never 'got' The Smiths, but some fans were so credulous as to believe sticking a gladioli up your arse was 'cool' for a while. Afghan coats, Bay City Roller trouser-ettes, smoking, believing that caffeine and added marketing will give you wings - they're all just daft ways of spending money to feed the pressure of peers.

I have felt the pull, but found the gravity of the in-crowd too weak to attract me for long. I'm happy in my own little orbit. Independence is truly cool but you humans don't seem to like that at all. You are attracted to the individual, the rebel, then spend your time slavishly copying said renegade until you all look exactly the same. Didn't that ever strike you as odd?

I reckon you try for cool because beautiful is unattainable - we're all essentially ugly. Have you ever properly looked at real people? The ones in the street, the ones in your street? Ugly, ugly, ugly. I don't find people in general attractive at all and our ideals are so far removed from truth as to be virtually unrepresented in real life. Men in particular are turned on by cartoonish exaggerated features. Even I go a bit gaga for Jessica Rabbit yet tits like that would be abhorrent formless, flobbery  bags of fluid in real life. I shudder at the very thought.

But wait, you say (I know you so well) MY beloved is beautiful. Of course he/she is; they're not wrong when they talk about chemistry. There are also numerous references to the intoxication of love; of love as a drug. So, putting two together (see what I did) I've solved the mystery of the game of love - it's the coolest drug on the planet, the drug at the heart of cool; the one you most want to be addicted to.

Love - helping a fundamentally ugly species 

procreate since the dawn of time.