Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01/04/2013
The Brain Drain
As I
turned on the television, I had been feeling great all day. I had
been running, been cycling, had a great idea for ending world
poverty, and after a cup of tea had begun to map out an
organo-metallic cure for cancer. An attractive girl had phoned me up
to line up a date, and my latest expressionist painting was coming
along a storm.
Life
was as rosey as Homer's dawn of similar hue, and better than that, it
was stimulating and worthwhile.
And
then, on that warm spring day where the flowers had spent the whole
of it smiling at the sun, and the birds had sung so much I feared
their beaks would wear out, it happened.
I
turned on the television, and flicked through the channels. Reality.
Home Improvement. Property. Politics. Reality. Politics. Reality.
Property. Property that's a bit warmer than the other Property.
All the
strength, all the optimism, all the joy, began to leech out of me,
flowing out of my formerly strong body and oozing away between the
cracks in the floorboards. I didn't knpw what was happening, I
thought initially I had perhaps overdone things a touch and was going
down with a touch of the flu, but as time went on and I carried on
channel flicking, seemingly unable to resist.
Tanned
faces and fake teeth leered out from amongst the LCD. Blue skies
shone down on white box houses on the Mediterranean. Businessmen in
cheap suits leered over the badly finished houses they were going to
let out to unsuspecting tenants at exorbitant rates. Relatives
re-discovered each other as audiences cried tears the music told them
to shed on cue.
My
eyelids became heavy, yet I could not sleep. All I could do was sit,
my head seemingly nailed in place, and absorb what was coming out of
the screen. My thinking became muddied. I kept trying to remember the
exact speed of light, but failing. Then I couldn't even remember it
approximately, and then I couldn't even remember it at all.
A
terrible feeling of apathy came over me, and as quickly began to feel
less terrible. What was the point in thinking? What was the point in
creating? What was the point in easing suffering, or feeling
pleasure? The only good was in consumption of the mindless, of the
empty, of the trashy. To join the masses.
And
there was no way to stop it. But, was it really so bad?.....
High
in the control tower above the city, the cabal watched their monitors
as the same thing happened to all who were formerly good in the
country. The writers, the artists, the poets, the engineers, the
designers, had been...erased, as it were. All now would be as
unthinking as all the rest. Their work was done, and the land of
mediocrity they had created slept for the first time. The first stage
was over. It was time for the next to slowly begin.
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