Waking Thoughts

When I wake up, the first thought I think is that everything in our lives is going drastically wrong. The second thought I think is that I probably shouldn’t have bothered waking up. Maybe it’s the waking up bit that I’m getting all wrong. Maybe it’s the waking up bit that I totally misconstrued along with the rest of humanity. Perhaps we weren’t meant to wake up. That’s got to be it. That’s the clincher. Nobody thought there was any decent reason to get out of bed until somebody somewhere thought it would be an awfully good idea if they could clip their toenails. They just had to go and ruin it. Before we all started to wake up the future of humanity seemed so positively bright. But no, toenails. And so people started to wake up.

At first people tried this whole waking up fad just to clip their toenails. It was the passing trend of the day. Their feet used to feel so cripplingly heavy under the wrath of the eternally expanding toenail. But then, we made the enormous intellectual leap to remove them, and it was to our collective shock as a somewhat forward-thinking race that this weight at the corner of our feet was suddenly relieved after the act of clipping. It was only then that we realised we could actually move our feet. A perpetuity of slumber tends to have this effect on people. Or so I’m told.

And of course, when people realised they could move their feet, perhaps that was where everything went totally, irrevocably wrong. People took to the ground, walked a few miles and felt an instinct the like of which they had never felt before – thirst. And from this thirst, humankind created Wetherspoons. And from Wetherspoons, humankind created disastrously patterned plates. This I believe is what intellectuals call ‘the age of chaos’. Once they had plates, they realised that those slabs of meat they’d been chunnering on for centuries actually had somewhere to sit throughout the process of their chunnering.

I’m no great thinker who can assign an arbitrary name to an equally arbitrary period of quasi-history, but I really do feel that it takes an awfully backwards society to invent the restaurant. If we had everything the right way round, when we’d go for one of those tediously overrated ‘walk’ things,  we’d continue to stroll the countryside to get to the point at which we found solace, and perhaps, enlightenment. But sadly due to the way in which our minds had been nurtured throughout causality up unto that point, this wasn’t the case.

Whoever created us all in a cheapo job lot foolishly thought to forget this enlightenment nonsense. Why don’t I, the creator, build in a defect where instead of striving on a constant journey to enlightenment, an inbuilt physical flaw of the human race™ will require them to stop along the way for a nice cold Woo Woo and a rest of the legs. Even worse, a subset of the species would be willing to settle for a rum and coke and a back massage.

You see, it’s precisely when I wake up and have thoughts like this that I realise everything in our lives is going drastically wrong. And after having such a thought, I decide it’s best that my head hits the pillow again.

Ryan Croughan is the unfortunate soul who keeps the Minor Spillage ship sailing. Sailing? Probably better to say paddling. As well as producing, he finds time to present and provide voiceovers. He also says he doesn't like the sound of his own voice. Bit odd really.