Monday 18 June 2007

Busy Bodyitice

Mothers are tricky, especially mine. My mum seems to be afflicted by a virulent strain of 'busy bodyitice.' This terrible disease effects subjects by stimulating an uncontrollable need to do stuff. I'm careful to use the word 'stuff' as the tasks dictated by the virus are completely random, or at least it can appear so to an outside observer. I conducted an experiment once, while I was still at school. My mum use to come home in the evening and say, "This house is a mess!"

Wait, this can't be I thought. I ran through a mental check list: Kitchen, wiped down, stairs hovered... er ... sitting-room? SITTING-ROOM! I thought I had found the source of the problem. The next day I would go on nothing less than a crusade of cleansing, not ethnic cleansing mind. I cleaned like Marry Popins and Barry Scot's bastard child. Every surface, every floor, beds were made. The time of judgement was upon me, mum had returned... She came, she examined, she proclaimed, "This house is filthy!"

I knew the house wasn't filthy because I had purged everything! It was super shiny like a hospital. Maybe not an English hospital. This is what first alerted me to something being very wrong. How could I combat a disease of the mind that blinded the subject to the cleanness around them?

I had a revelation of sorts, maybe it wasn't an illness at least not in the way I'd thought. Maybe this had been with mankind since the beginning. Long ago, before the advent of Tesco's and the Dyson, it may have been a very useful survival trait to be a busy body. The constant demands for survival: looking for food, protecting the offspring, finding shelter, would inevitably lead to a rise of busy bodies.

As I watched some ants in the garden, it struck me. When was the last time you saw an ant stop for a cup of tea? Fucking never that's when. They'd die, tea cups are huge.

But what did this mean for the future? Imagine in year's to come, as technology ultimately makes our lives easier, what would become of the busy body? Sitting in a chrome room (everything in the future is made of chrome) with a Hal 9000 voice fulfilling your every whim. This state of affairs would cause the busy body to explode with pent-up energy. My future descendants, inevitably being affliction, would succumb and eventually detonate. I could hear their last words reverberate through the corridor of time, "This chrome room is filthy, filthy, fiiiiiiillllllttttthhhhy!"


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