Bring on the Clowns

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I'm still pondering upon lessons I have learned from life to date. Lessons that I wish I could go back and teach to myself as a teenager.

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Yesterday, whilst sitting on a train covered in platform ooze after a fall, I became aware of the fact that a pair of eighteen year old girls were looking at me and giggling. I thought back to when I was sixteen and the sexual power and unattainable quality that eighteen year old girls seemed to have at that time.

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Well, some things don’t change. However, some things do. I am older and wiser and have discovered several things. One of those lessons is …

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Life is absurd

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We live in a Universe that contains genocide and puppies, black holes and acne, cancer and ice cream, love and pus, The Macarena and Napalm.

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Depending on your beliefs, human beings are either the product of Divine Grace or fantastic improbability. Sitting at our computers in the Developed World we represent the very pinnacle of human development. We have copious food, clothing, shelter. We have access to fantastic technology. All those physical limitations that held back our ancestors have been conquered. We are free to explore the full limit of human potential.

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What do with do with this bounteous gift? Download pictures of tits, watch Big Brother, get drunk and snooze on the sofa.

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We make the same facial expressions when procreating and going to the toilet.

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Our universe is irrational and silly. We are irrational and silly.

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Why don’t more people stand back realise how silly this all is?

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When it comes to the absurdity of existence, people can be broadly lumped into one of two categories; those who realise this and those who don't. Those who have twigged tend to laugh at fart jokes, under-achieve and play with themselves. Those who don’t tend to become bosses.

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I am in the curious position of having had grey hair since my 20s and the aura of someone who takes things very seriously indeed. In a suit I can pass off as boss material even though I am not.

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But not for very long.
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In the course of business I found myself interacting with many people who genuinely were boss material. Sometimes it was all I could do to stop myself rapping some of them on the forehead in meetings and calling out 'Hello. Hello. Lighten up it's only a game'. Boss material people can never snap out of character, believe that what they do is important and that their goals justify pooping on people left right and centre. Boss people believe that they are the rational ones, the guys who get things done.

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That's absurd. Boss people live and die alone. Most are never really happy. Read biographies of famous bosses of years gone by. Their final moments are inevitably pathetic. Their achievements prove to be an illusion. I particularly enjoy the stories about how the corpses of William the Conqueror, Rodrigo Borgia and Oliver Cromwell were treated. But if that's a little too distant check out Howard Hughes, or Stalin, watch Citizen Cane or contact me directly for details of recent bosses I've endured who eventually were shafted as they shafted unto others. Yes sirree, there's nothing finer in life than a cold beer, comfortable shoes and a screwed boss story.

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Most bosses are fundamentally insecure. We're all born with a sense of the absurd and even those who push this sense to the back of their mind are troubled by its whispers in quiet moments. I've met some bosses who have realised this but are too far gone to change their ways. Without their mindset and motivations that have taken them where there are they are nothing. It's too late to find another path.

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Sometimes, when flying over or driving through towns and cities I'll look out of the window and think about how each town, each district, each street has it's prettiest girl, ugliest girl, it's most successful man, least successful man. For the people living in each town, district and street these matters are of great importance. It's all so serious. To me, with the perspective that 35,000ft of space conveys, no, no it's not serious. I get the same thoughts wandering around old ruins. I think about all the people who lived and died there and wonder 'Did it matter? Did any of it really matter? Did the people who lived here managed to get a few chuckles in along the way?'.

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Mmmm, this is all sounding a bit Buddhist.

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I'm not proposing that life is pointless. Not for second. But if our life does have any meaning it only comes from what we make of ourselves and those around us.

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Everything else is silly.

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Go. Go now. And take the piss out of something or someone serious. They're gagging for it.

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