January

She stands on the street corner
too much make-up, too little clothing.
Searching while waiting to be found.

Your eyes meet and, for a second, you connect.
she smiles; almost shyly, nearly sweetly
revealing something truer beneath her rouged skin.

She shares that much of herself with you,
an enticement that’s also barbed.
Whatever else she has to offer
won’t be quite so cheap.

Dream-monger

You sit and seduce
young minds, unaware.
Their window to the world,
the stories you share.

Strumming fears, weaving dreams,
your intentions are sound.
You pry out their hearts,
lay them out on the ground.

Carrots with nails,
sticks wrapped with wool.
Oh how you make them dance
the Pied Piper of fools.

The sagacity you dispense!
Without want! Without care!
The ends justify the means, afterall,
how is it not fair?

Oh Dream-monger,
if only they knew!
The demons you face!
How hollow you feel!

They’ll understand one day,
that tired old saw.
Rationalisation’s puny
when faced with the maw

Of a truth so intrisic,
so utterly bare:
Most of your dreams…
…are woven from air.

-Marc
(ps I gave up on meter years ago)

Monkey see, monkey do

I read something interesting in a management journal lately. Allow me to paraphrase it for easier (and more entertaining, mwahaha) consumption.

A bunch of monkeys were introduced into a large cage; a cage so large that it had whole trees, creepers, bushes and perhaps half an elephant or so. And at the top of this cage was suspended a huge bunch of bananas. Bananas the size of boomerangs. Bananas that would be certain to attract the attention of any lesbian couple very, very quickly.

Said bananas also attracted the attention of the monkeys and before long one enterprising simian clambered his way to the top of the cage and attempted to grab the bananas. At this point the scientists running the experiment turned on sprinklers around the cage and gave the entire monkey population a thorough soaking. The daring young monkey, spirits literally dampened, slid dejectedly back to the ground.

Once the smell of wet primate had faded, though, another hungry monkey made his way to the top of the cage. Again the scientists upped their water bill and made the local utilities company really happy. Again and again the cycle repeated until the monkeys gave up, pointedly ignored the bananas and went on with life in the cage as best as they could.

The scientists then removed all the sprinklers and introduced a new monkey to the cage while removing one of the old ones. This young chap, unaware of the biblical-esque floods that his actions would trigger, eagerly scampered towards the bunch of bananas. He was, however, tackled and soundly beaten before he could get there by the rest of the monkeys who were really quite vain and didn’t want the newcomer to unleash a hairdo-wrecking torrent. Again this replacement was repeated, removing the old and putting in the new, and again and again did the remaining old monkeys prevent the new comers from going anywhere near the bananas.

One day the scientists removed all the remaining old monkeys and put in one new monkey. As predicted, the new monkey made a beeline for the bananas… and was stopped dead in his tracks by a concerted clothesline and a right jab to the face from two of the other monkeys followed by what can best be described as a can of whoop-ass being opened by a barrel full of monkeys on one particular monkey who didn’t enjoy himself very much, no-sirree.

It’s interesting to note that none of these monkeys had ever been drenched. They only stopped the newcomer because they themselves were in his shoes in the past and were stopped in the same brutal, though effective way. It was just the thing to do. Managers can learn a lot from monkeys, and learning how to think outside the box and outside organisational norms is one of those lessons. Times change and opportunities that turned out to be unexploitable at first could become viable with new technology or other resources. We should never be held back by the hubris of the past.

Of course, we should also learn not to fight over something as trivial as a bunch of bananas, too, or act like this other daring young monkey:

-grin- risk management is also relevant to the aspiring leader. Dynamite will kill you while you won’t really dissolve in water.. unless you’re a polar bear. hur hur.

-Marc
‘the present’s just a pleasant interruption to the past’

It was a dark and stormy night…

Flying scrotum-monkeys and assorted winged vermin soared (or flip-flopped) through the air above the decidedly ramshackle little hut that stood alone in the field behind the decidedly ramshackle huge mansion that bore the neon logo of the National Inebriated Creative Writing Society.

An electric fault some years ago had left the ‘Creative’ part of the sign sparking on and off like a firefly which had just ingested its body-weight in white happy-happy powder. Incidentally, this was first viewed as a terrible portent from the Prose Gods by the more soberly religious in the society. That is, until some young wit pointed out that the loss of the word has hardly a loss at all, per se, given the viewpoint that once a piece of ‘work’ becomes unrecognisable as work it automatically has to be creative in nature. just like modern art and paintings made by elephants in zoos. Thus the Society’s elders cheerfully decided that the almighty Prose Gods intended for them to focus on vicarously achieving creativity through inebriation. The accountants at the local brewers were reportedly very supportive of this new philosophy.

But we digress.

A jagged bolt of lightning, universally regarded as a powerful Literary Tool of the Prose Gods, struck the 10 storey tall antenna above the little hut, killing a covey of scrotum-monkeys and causing hot balls (hur) of fire to rain onto the field in the process. Cerulean arcs raced down the antenna’s length at the speed of write, finding a conducively conductive copper cable at the base that guided the current to pierce through the insulated roof and into the gloom below.

Gears whirled. Sparks arced. A monster stirred. A madman laughed, then choked on his dentures.

(to be continued sometime, was supposed to describe how this blog was created. It’s a monster. Sort of. The bastard offspring produced betwixt my fetid imagination and the crazy, crazy world out there.)