A little (almost) free writing

I was scrolling through Facebook the other day on some flight of voyeuristic fancy – not the most spectacular of phenomenon in humans, there are hundreds of millions of people doing exactly the same thing on a daily basis – and I stumbled across a friend’s status, which read;

‘HELP! iPhone 5 in black or iPhone 5 in white?’

Well, I thought, white is always a whim. ‘I’ll be different’, you think, ‘people will respect me’. Then a month later you just feel disappointed in yourself. Black is the long term choice. It’s the same with cars, you see the guy in that big, expensive, white executive car? Now he doesn’t always have the confidence to pull that off – you have a row with your wife, or you find out your kid’s pregnant, or you fall flat on your arse on the Tottenham Court Road on a Friday evening about 5 o’clock; you get in that car and you’ll be shrinking in your seat. Here you are in a shit mood and you’re driving a big old look-at-me-my-dick’s-so-big-white-fly-boy-car. You don’t want this sort of attention right now. Your daughter said she wants to call it Crystal if it’s a girl. All you want to do is be driving a nice I’m-not-here-to-show-off navy blue number. Or if you’ve got a black car, see, then you can pop your collar, crack on some Led Zeppelin and not give a single fuck. But you’ve got a flashy white one; a car which demands confidence every time you get into it. No, the only things which should be white are kitchen appliances and toilets.

Silver fridges. That’s the thing. They’re the white car of the kitchen. You look at those silver fridge people – maybe they’re plopping a little ice into a glass from the built in ice-maker – self satisfaction all over their dirty little faces, and you realise everything you’re thinking when ranting about all this is nothing but a fascist aggregation of choice by way of your base human instinct to hate anything that’s purporting individuality in others while shamelessly marketing yourself in every possible way to be seen as ‘individual’ – it’s a rather ugly human competition thing left over from our stood-not-so-upright days. So you’ve got the majority of society basing cultural choice on the path of least resistance and maximum social acceptance, consenting, en masse, to the predetermination of culture and, as our desires become more commodity-driven, a perpetual shift in the priorities of society away from a focus on intelligence, independent-mindedness and constant exercise of one’s critical faculty to one whose people accept (and even revel in) mere functional intelligence, eroding the desire of the people (the plural noun and with exceptions) to continue to expand their understanding of the world past the age of 16 (notice I say understanding, not knowledge, there’s a difference), substituting in the immediate gratification of acquiring items of a human-imbued falsified value instead. So eventually society resembles chicks in a nest waiting fervently to have the next tasteless regurgitated crap sicked down their throats. This allows our market economy to begin to control us, as society becomes a subversion of the reason for its evolution. Ultimately this virus spreads like wildfire through all of youth culture, and tomorrow’s adults will look back in ironic nostalgia, never knowing how immense their contribution was to the fading out of anything more high brow than Hollyoaks from the social vernacular, and all we’ve really got is people sticking sequins to their vaginas and taking weird contorted-faced pictures of themselves for their ‘profile’, and it all culminates in a Cheryl Cole.

So the thing to do seemed to forget my instinct to hate white iPhones, white cars and silver fridges, however smug the people who chose them were. At least they were transcending the norm. I left him a comment:

‘Get a white one’.

And then I thought; no, you can’t just choose a white one because it’s the minority choice – that’s the definition of pretension, and I wished I’d just told him to make his own mind up. This wasn’t the end of that particular train of thought. A million other things were buzzing through my mind, but life’s too short, isn’t it?