Memories

Remember how you used to frolic and play in the meadows as the young calf you once were? Remember how you used to tackle and score tries so well in rugby, back when you had time and mates to do it with? Remember how you lost your virginity in a car-crash where one thing really just led to the other?

I sure do. And boy, does it peeve me good.

Remember that time we did that thing...

Reminiscing is a wonderful way for people to relive past glory and pleasant memories; it allows us to escape back to a time, when things were simpler, when petrol (as I remember) was only 79c a litre, when Bubble o' Bills were the ice cream to have and when you would happily trade your sandwich for a shiny Charizard Pokemon card.

For those with some sort of substantial background, they can remember how their initial was pulled out of the ballot and they were sent to Vietnam, how Johnny lost his legs and how they all got the clap from one particularly dirty whorehouse which they later found out to be occupied by the Vietcong. Oh, good times, good times, they would say.

But how they cause us to live in the shadow of our former selves. Oh yes, you would say, I was once cool, I once traded by sandwich for a Charizard, I once did a summersalt into a pool and I once broke my arm - see, heres the scar! But what have you done lately, my dear friend?

Remembering things makes us remember things we cannot do anymore, things we should have done and things that we would have done if we had our time again. For all the great memories we think about, theres another ten which we have suppressed, knowing that the mere thought of them would surely tear our brains apart and cause them to spurt out our nostrils and onto the nearest trophy or certificate we have.

Like that time where we wasted our holidays watching TV. Or that time where we got in trouble for burning mummies' wedding dress, or that time where we got molested by that paedophile at confession, or that time we saw our dog get run over and watched as its' entrails burst out of its face.

Remember that time when...

That's the worst thing about remembering. It's always so hard to forget once you've remembered something. But it's not the bad memories that haunt us the most, it's the good ones. The ones that you know will never have an equal, that ones that remind you that you'll never be that happy again and the ones that remind you of your former, fun, spectacular self and all the shenanigans that you used to get up to that you can't anymore.

Often, it's the pain of knowing you'll never have another memory like that again that makes reminiscing the hardest. Like that time where we broke into the principals office and took a crap on his chair, or that time where we set that cop car on fire by accident. It's not the memory of your dead dog that kills you, it's the memory of your dead life that kills you. To look back on past glory and know that you are now condemned to a life of mediocrity and humble service to whoever may be the leader of your country at that time is very hard to face, especially when your whole life was all about how you were going to be the next big thing at Hollywood, or about how you were going to cure all disease and be the first man on Pluto.

How could we forget when...

The grandiose memory of what was is something that is best forgotten. If we could all learn to forget the things that we remember, it'd be so much easier. We wouldn't feel like we were living in yesterday's shadow, and there would be no way but forward. Memories drag the human race down and back.

So next time you're at the pub with mates thinking about that one time you accidently put a bomb down the mayor's pants, think again. Think about how you should be not thinking about stuff that you've already done, and perhaps turning towards to future is more productive than looking back at things you can no longer do.

Friends, hate your memory.

Not Smoking

I've been doing some thinking.

Or rather, I haven't been doing some thinking.

You see, I don't get a chance to think. I have to be constantly doing something. I'm not allowed to just sit down for 5 minutes, take a break, look at the clouds and think, "boy, they sure are fluffy." I don't get to chill out and clear my head, looking at the passing traffic, being silent and just being instead of doing.

I am your average non-smoking person. And chances are, so are you.

Yes yes, smoking WILL kill you, smoking is expensive and smoking is a dirty, dirty habit which causes fires, brown nails and let's face it - a pretty bad smell. But what happened to the occasion?

Really, it's a small price to pay for a bit of peace.

Yes, the smoker of today gets a chance to take a break. But the numbers of smokers are diminishing greatly. In the heyday of smoking, up to 75% of all males smoked regularly. These days, these sad, non-smoking days, that number is less than half that.

And you know what has gone up with the decline of smoking? Stress.

I don't have to show you any statistics to prove that to you, dear reader. You yourself are probably stressed about something. And it's probably because you don't smoke.

Not only has stress risen across the broader public, but illicit drug use. Back in the day, you had two choices, really. Nicotine and Alcohol. Now and then a bit of mary-jane would show up. Maybe some acid if you were lucky. But now! Wow. The choice. All those chemistry drop-outs have been doing something with their unemployment. I could list all the drugs suprisingly readily available to you both below and over the counter, but I would be wasting your valuble seconds - after all, you're just sneaking a read of a blog between emails and phone calls, aren't you?

And there's more! What's that poking over your keyboard? That's right! All those donuts you've been eating because you haven't got your happy little cigarette to keep you entertained while you're watching TV, driving, reading the paper, walking to the shops, waiting for a coffee, after sex, between shots at the bar, while you're trying to get off and at your best friends funeral. Instead of turning to your lung-cancer causing death stick, you've been turning to your pant-busting, waistline-pressuring sex-drive-reducing friiiiiieeeddd chik-an! Your jam donut. Your biggie fries. No my good man or woman, a pile of fried ice-cream ain't gonna hide your insecurity, your fear of being seen in public doing nothing but chilling out for a moment.

But I tell you what will.

A cigarette.

Go on. It's about the only acceptable way to hang around outside a building without being moved on by security, arrested for loitering or shot at for being a drug dealer. The tragic thing is, they are now trying to get our faithful smokers to move away from that, the mecca of the smoker, the front of an office block. There are signs appearing - "No smoking out front of building".

Good God. There are no words for this dire, desperate, terrible situation.

Soon there will be no place for those who want to chill out, fight off their urges to eat and kill people and unwind for 5 minutes from their busy lives. Busy with trivial events, yes, but busy nontheless.

How do you think JFK stayed so god-damn sexy?

So give them a break. And yourself. Go buy a pack of cigarettes and take 5 minutes every now and then to have a look around and think about what's happening with you. Next time someone goes on about smoking, just ask them. "Care for a cigarette?"

Lawns

Aren’t lawns just bloody dandy. There’s nothing quite like walking down the streets of your pristinely up kept suburb, marvelling at every man’s little slice of Sir Walter’s finest. The lush, fresh fields of your suburban paradise, lining the sidewalk, lining the streets and lining the minds of every proud backyard owner with pride, pleasure and satisfaction.

All so wrong and all simply the misguided pipe dreams of your average pathetic homeowner.

Your dream.

Take a good hard look at yourself you terrible, terrible turf-laying, seed-sewing, grass-mowing dimwit. You just signed yourself up for a lifetime of spine wrenching labour, endless watering and a horrific battle between yourself and all manner of things trying to kill your lawn – and maybe you afterwards. You don’t have to go far to see that having a lawn is a terrible mistake – just look at the chemicals section of your local garden centre. You will end up spending copious amounts of money on its upkeep. You will end up wasting months of your life on it. And after all these trials and tribulations, you will have to do it all over again.

Yes, the garden centre or landscape supplier makes lawn ownership look very attractive. They have the nice little display down there, a metre squared of every imaginable type of grass, they have Couch, they have Kikuyu, they have Durban and Zoysia and Ryegrass and of course, the staple of the Australian backyard, Buffalo. You stand there, marvelling at this immaculate piece of grass, wearing your shorts and your white t-shirt with an odd stain down the front from some of your other weekend pursuits. You’ve got the keys to your BMW in one hand, your Blackberry in the other and you’re only here because you’re trying to get your mind off not only your fear of retrenchment but the fear of your wife and kids – the fear that they will hate you if you do not have the nicest, prettiest, most impressive piece of lawn in the whole suburb.

What you don’t know is that they actually have someone employed full time to keep their little turf display looking so tempting. That same person will greet you, smile, and talk proudly about his or her little pride and joy, their turf display they labour over so much. They will tell you to take off your shoes and walk on their turf, feel the softness of the greenleas couch, feel the sponginess of the ST85 buffalo, and feel the happy balance which is struck between the two by the unconquerable kikuyu. You, the unwary, dare I say, stupid gardener fall victim to this sweet siren song that the turf man or woman sings to you in tones not only that you can hear, but tones which resonate at such a frequency that even the grass can hear it – and love it.

He will make you buy his turf.

You will ask questions; you will say that someone you know has Sir Walter buffalo and that they say it is the best one. The turf man or lady will agree. They will also say there is a price break at 100m2, and that the supplier will deliver it directly to you. They smile, shake your hand; take your money at a rate of $11.50 a metre squared. You leave feeling good. Feeling like you’ve really done something, like your life is finally going to come together after years and years of a mysterious absence you could never really put your finger on.

And so that tremendous day finally arrives. You see that truck you’ve been dreaming about, it pulls up at your driveway; it has thousands and thousands of rolls of turf on it. You think the truck driver has the greatest job in the world, being so close to all this turf! Wow, he must have an amazing lawn, you think. He is your new God. The God of the Lawn. And you must defeat him at all costs.

The turf truck - the object you have been dreaming of since last weekend.

He operates the crane on the truck to bring the pallet of turf onto your driveway. He smiles, gets you to sign, bids you a nice day and is on his way. You are left staring at your mountain of turf. Oh, cock, you think, how am I to get all this turf around the side with my puny, office job muscles, my obese wife who is too busy watching Kerri Anne to do anything else and my little brat children with their heads stuck in an Xbox or something you have no idea about?

And so in earnest, you go to your shed (that you built on a similar Saturday where you struggled for hours to understand the bizarre instructions supplied to assemble it) and retrieve your wheelbarrow. You throw a roll of turf in and go to take it to the backyard, but – your wheel barrow has a flat tire. Luckily, you also have a bike pump in your shed – after all, you do have that bike you bought on a similar weekend and used once and then decided Lycra and being ran over isn’t you thing. You pump your tire, labouring up and down, up and down, movements that you believe will bring you to the enlightened state of having a wheelbarrow with a pumped tire.

What you wish your wheelbarrow looked like.

And so an hour after the turf arrived, you can finally getting moving. But from all that pumping, your back is now sore, as due to the extremely sedentary life you usually lead, you are not used to this sort of violent abuse of your body. And so you go back inside to your obese wife who looks at you and your man boobs in great disdain and promptly gets up to look in the fridge. You sit on the couch and watch the cricket, just to check the score, you say. After a good hour of resting your back, you get a second wind and up you get, up and at ‘em, to lay down that hard-earned lawn.

You charge at that pile of soil and grass that will soon be your lawn, the greatest in the neighbourhood. You lift that first roll and – Oh my God! That is really bloody heavy! You labour so much with it, and drop it into the wheelbarrow nearly throwing yourself in with it. Nevertheless, you persevere with admirable diligence; after all, you didn’t earn this house and your wonderful family by not fighting for them. You manage to get through twenty rolls – with each roll getting just a little bit lighter – before you need a break. After you’ve put down that last roll, you realise something.

You haven’t prepared the backyard for the turf.

Oh my God, is what you are thinking. Billy’s toys are everywhere; this isn’t soil, it’s dirt. I need to cultivate this whole patch. How will I ever get through all this myself?

You decide to regroup inside over a beer and a dry turkey sandwich – made begrudgingly and rather poorly by your lovely, size 42 wife. You thank her as she struggles around the kitchen weighed down not only by her disgusting eating habits, but the feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction that marrying such an anonymous, boring husband and submitting herself to the meaningless life of an upper-middle class housewife – too rich to work, not rich enough to be extravagant – has left her with. You haven’t been able to look her in the eye and say she is beautiful since you got married – since that glimmer and shine that was once in her eyes died, like your lawn is about to.

After much deliberation, you decide to abandon the pursuit yourself and to get some landscapers in to do the job – and do it properly. You get on the phone and call every landscaper in the yellow pages. You eventually find one who is willing to start the job that afternoon. You thank him most gratefully and eagerly await his arrival.

Well, you did call every landscaper...

He arrives around one o’clock in the afternoon. His name is Deano, so you know he must be good. He owns and operates Deano’s Landscapes and Garden Care. Wow, he owns a business. That’s more than what you can say for yourself, you helpless corporate slave with your despicable little tie and your pathetic little cubicle and your stupid little title. You can’t even lay a roll of turf for Christ’s sake. Deano has a look around, yup, the land needs work, he says. He quotes you for the job. $1500! My God Deano, is that right? Yup, that’s right, says Deano. But for you, says Deano, I’ll do it for $1350. Ok Deano, you’ve sold me, you will say.
He starts by himself, and says that tomorrow he will bring a few of his boys to help out. He turns over a fraction of the land and then he is finished for the day. He says that you should probably buy some good topsoil for the lawn or it might die. Oh my god. This fucking lawn, you are thinking. So you get on the phone, quickly as the landscape place closes in 10 minutes. You beg and squeal for your topsoil. You plead with the operator over the phone to get it to you first thing in the morning. He says yes.

First thing in the morning (7 am) and Deano and his boys are there, digging up your backyard. Your wife is pissed off at you because there is a bunch of mysterious men searching for treasure in the backyard during Oprah. No darling, it’s just the landscapers, you say. Go back to your mind-numbing talk show bollocks.

Deano comes and asks. Where is the topsoil? Ah those stupid bastards, you think. They said first thing in the morning! You get on the phone and ask where the topsoil is. The responder says something about it being next on the run and it shouldn’t be too long. Deano and his boys are waiting around, apparently bored of looking for treasure, but they are actually waiting for the topsoil.

Pirates will invade your backyard thinking there is a treasure hunt.

Eventually it arrives (at 12pm) and Deano and his boys start laying the turf. They spread the topsoil, they unroll seemingly endless amounts of turf. Oh, it is beautiful. Oh, it is finally coming together, you think. You watch as your life is rolled out on top of a fresh layer of nature’s finest soil. The beauty of it all nearly overwhelms you, so you go and masturbate quickly to pass the time.
Unfortunately the horny Asian housewives being done by brutal Black ex-gang member’s porn website you normally frequent is undergoing maintenance, so you make do with a co-workers Facebook pictures.

By 5pm it is all done. Your life is complete. Deano thanks you, says he will send you a bill, you congratulate him on a job well done and give him and his boys a case of beer to share. That makes you feel like you’re really giving something back.
You go to bed with your whale-wife, feeling content for the first time in years. You have a lawn. Tremendous. It’s all done. I’ll never have to worry about that again.

Oh, my dear man, how wrong you are.

A month later, the grass is getting mysterious brown circles . You go to the landscape place, they say you have army worm. Yes, there has been a particularly harsh outbreak of it lately. They are sold out of Professor Mac’s 3 in 1 which would solve that problem. Come back next Thursday. So you do, and you fork out your $22 hard earned dollars and go home and hose it on. Lovely.

Your lawn if you don't mow it twice a day.

Six months after that, it’s going brown again. Apparently you have to fertilise it or it dies. Oh god. This lawn is non-stop, you are thinking. I’ve already had to buy a lawn mower and sprinkler system to keep it looking nice. I’ve spent hundreds on weedkillers to keep it all just grass and not bindis and clover and wintergrass. This is terrible.

And the saga goes on. The grass goes purple in winter; heavy rain causes large patches to rot and die; the dog has been digging it up; army worm has struck again; particularly shady patches have died and won’t grow back. You can’t be bothered to mow the lawn yourself so you pay someone $300 a month to mow it for you. Billy has gotten a strange rash from it, your wife gets hay fever because of it. Your blood pressure has been up recently. Your dog itches and scratches itself raw every week from allergies and you regularly find ticks on it. The vet says that you should make sure the dog doesn’t get any more ticks, so it stays inside and has taken to pissing all over your clothes. Worst of all, your neighbour’s think you’re a deranged psychopath who is obsessed with his lawn the way you carry on about it. There goes your dream of being the pride of the suburb.

Your dog if you own a lawn. Note absence of hair everywhere except behind the head.

It consumes hours of your life every week regardless. The endless struggle between you and your lawn has taken its toll on you. You are tired, restless, overwhelmed by the responsibility which has been leaning increasingly heavily on your shoulders lately. You can’t take the pressure. You can’t handle it any longer. You no longer care that you have a patch of lawn that is the pride of the neighbourhood, a patch of lawn which your neighbours envy and which nearly got your house into Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

So you call up the landscape place and ask for the full paving package, with the biggest, heaviest pavers you can find, forever immortalised into your backyard in a sea of concrete, never to be removed, not while you’re around, at least.

And now, every night, you go to bed and thank God that Adbri make an 80mm thick paver to crush your lawn, and you also thank God that you don’t have to mow it.

If that’s not enough reason to stop admiring and start hating lawns, then I don’t know what is.

The Ocean

No one is entirely sure where it came from. No one is entirely sure why it’s here. All we know is that for as long as humanity can remember, it has been a royal pain and a right obstacle blocking the path of humanities’ progress for eons.

Some say that the ocean is composed almost entirely of ‘water’, and that when you jump in – you get wet. Since the dawn of time Man has struggle over water. The first recorded contact with water was when Ug the caveman went out for a walk one day and fell in the ocean. “Uooog… Noog Boog ah grunt noog boog!” were his words, as recorded on his iPhone.

History has long since forgotten how to translate this primitive language, but we believe this may have been what he said: “I was ambulating in my neighbourhood one delightful morn when I happened, perchance, upon this rather voluminous body of what seemed to be molten ice. After much deliberation I decided that this mass was easily viscous enough for me to walk over without being devoured by the mass, and, foolishly,I decided to challenge this liquid adversary by placing my right hoof on the surface of the mass. Oh, what a worthy adversary it was.”

It is believed that Ug suffered terribly for his adventure ; his foot got wet. When he withdrew from the liquid mass, his foot then got a little bit cold, and on the walk home dirt, sand and small twigs got stuck to his foot. Needless to say, it was terribly uncomfortable and embarrassing for Ug as he walked through his hometown.

Ever since this fateful day, men around the world have been trying to conquer the ocean, or to at least tame it and show it who runs what planet. Unfortunately for humanity, when the ocean was delegated the planet of Neptune, it didn’t take it too well, especially since they also placed it in charge of storms and earthquakes, both of which were the job of the oceans’ beleaguered parent, Mother Nature. The relationship between the Ocean and humans became further complicated when the Greeks personified it and started building statues of an old man with tremendous breasts, scraggly hair, holding a pitchfork and started labelling it “Poseidon”, as documented in the classic man versus ocean novel, The Poseidon Adventure

The Old Man and The Sea - one of many classic pieces of popular culture depicting mans epic struggle with the sea.

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Despite humanities’ pathetic disposition of trying to destroy everything it can see man still tries to find beauty in the things it hates, perhaps foolishly. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a view of the ocean, and why they would want to see a seething, spitting, polluted, wet mass of water huffing and puffing at their door, throwing sharks at them is beyond me. In the warmer months (and the colder ones for certain parts of society which are a little less able in the cognition department), people even jump in the ocean claiming that they enjoy it and that it soothes the heat even though the ocean stings their eyes and attempts to drown them. People even spend months sailing the oceans, claiming that they get a sense of adventure and connection with the ocean, apparently unaware that they can embark on a plane and get there much more quickly, complete with a warm meal wrapped in foil and a nice little 3 ½ inch jack for their headphones so that they can listen to the safety briefing in Nyangumarta. All without getting wet.

The foolish humans have also given sanctuary to the sea, which they believe needs help because it really can’t help itself. Although tsunamis, hurricanes and shark attacks are well documented, the mindless proles from Australia decided it was a good idea to fence off 344,400 square kilometres and call it one of the seven natural wonders of the world. That’s all very nice, if you consider being immensely wet, poisonous jellyfish and grounded coal carriers wonders. Not to mention millions of stupid humans called “tourists” who flock to the site just so they can have their photo taken with a jellyfish stinging them.

Our circuitous relationship with the sea goes even further back than Ug, with science suggesting that we actually lived in the ocean at one stage, only emerging out of it thanks to breakthroughs in telecommunications and diplomatic relations with the earthbound trees, who gave us the secret to life above ground and hence indirectly initiated civilization as we know it. Other species have since tried to escape the ocean’s terrible grip, such as the well documented case of the Dolphins (as satirised in the popular TV series The Simpsons) and the crocodiles, bothattempts which simply led to humans eating these creatures in unprecedented numbers. It is quite obvious that these occurrences prove irrefutably that the human has a fundamental and instinctual desire to be out of the ocean, and to keep things that aren’t humans in the ocean, with the notable exception of anyone trying to immigrate to northern parts of Australia.

Australian authorities take aim at the infidels, under the motto "We grew here, you... got a boat here".

As happens in any particularly tense diplomatic relationship, hostilities have often broken out between humans and the ocean (or as it likes to be called by its friends, Natures Toilet), leading to widespread destruction and huge casualties on both sides. Both the humans and the ocean have been known to employ guerrilla warfare in their never ending struggles, with the humans attempting to fill the ocean with garbage and the ocean retaliating with slowly raising its level in an effort to drown the human race, both of which are extremely long-term strategies but it has been acknowledged by both sides that eventually, someone will have to give in. SportsBet has placed better odds on the ocean, citing that “it’s a lot of water” and that the humans simply can’t produce an equivalent amount of shopping trolleys for rambunctious teens to dump in the ocean in time to save themselves.

In the endless struggle between land and sea, there have been countless devastating attacks against both sides, and every day the battle claims more and more lives. Just recently, the humans launched a massive offensive resulting in the “BP oil disaster”, but militarily this was known as “Operation Ocean Dispatch”, killing thousands of the ocean’s troops with biological consequences which may last for decades. In retaliation, the ocean drove a colossal movement, co-ordinating with its close ally the Rain, resulting in the catastrophic flooding of Pakistan, leaving an estimated one fifth of its land underwater, affecting approximately twenty million people. These attacks from both parties follow a long history of aggression which would easily have killed hundreds of millions over time and show no signs of easing any time soon.

The Brown Pelican was first discovered during an Earthling attack against the evil Ocean.

Regardless, the humans still try to ameliorate their problems with the sea at least on a personal level. Day in day out, your ordinary person puts aside the larger issues which the broader society has with the sea and boards a ferry which takes them to work, or sits on a wharf (maritime-based demilitarised zones) and wonders at the vast expanse before him or her. The humans and the sea actually have certain sanctions and agreements in place; the ocean allows humans to eat her fish and use her surface for transport and leisure while the humans put an effort into preserving certain parts of the ocean and teaching their children about the ocean.

These agreements are only valid thanks to silently acknowledged mutually assured destruction, leading to the worlds end if hostilities ever got to that point.
Until such a time as humans and the ocean can just “get along”, the tense relationship will continue, the death toll will mount and there will be no clear winner or loser. Not unless humans abandon their ambivalent attitude as to whether the ocean can or cannot be trusted and unite together to defeat the treacherous ocean will there ever be a definite outcome. We must hate the ocean to destroy it. It’s too hard to destroy something you even slightly like.

Coffee

Coffee is an absolute plague in today's society. You can't walk a foot in any sort of modern, even slightly developed location without being bombarded with coffee this and coffee that. If you live in a house, you probably are within a few metres of some sort of coffee-making facility, if you live in a suburb there is probably somewhere you can get a coffee made for you at anytime of the day by someone who's life it is to make coffee, and if you live on Earth, you've probably had a coffee at some stage in your life.

People love coffee! They sit and gossip over it, they open and close deals with it, they deliver good and bad news with it and they fall in love over it. All of them completely misguided and idiotic in their choice of beverage. Coffee has this bizarre mystique about it, that intelligent people sit and ponder their next novel over coffee, or that drinking coffee makes them cool, or that coffee will hopefully put off their impending old age. Coffee is certainly a cultural phenomenon, and people sure do get uptight when their coffee hasn't been brewed for exactly 29 seconds, the espresso shot hasn't been tapped three times on the counter to ensure optimum crema, and the milk hasn't  been heated to exactly 65 degrees to ensure immediate consumption.

Such petty woes. They have alot of other, more important things to worry about.

Coffee contains caffeine. And you know what caffeine does? Aside from making you marginally more alert, it does alot of other things, too. Does it really surprise you? It is, after all, classified as a PSYCHOACTIVE STIMULANT DRUG, a CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM STIMULANT, and is a crystaline XANATHINE ALKALOID. Do they sound good for you?

Some of the things that will happen to you if you go within 100 feet of Coffee.

And those are the main side-effects. Coffee is something which your body very easily becomes tolerant of. It takes just 7 days of 400mg of coffee three times a day to become completely tolerant of any caffeine-based sleep disruption. And if you try to wean off the coffee, you get withdrawals. You know what else gives you withdrawals if you try and get off it? Heroin. Does headache, irritability, an inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints for 1 to 5 days sound good? Nup. It doesn't.


There is a condition known as 'caffeinism' - where a user takes a high amount of caffeine for a long period of time - and develops symptoms such as nervousness, irritability, anxiety, tremulousness, hyperreflexia, insomnia, headaches, respiratory alkalosis and heart palpitations. Over time, if you are an unfortunate being who decided to make too many appointments over coffee, you are at a higher risk of peptic ulcers, erosive esophagitis and gastroesophagal reflux disease.  Woo.

Coffee is such an evil in society, you can even overdose on it.  Mild overdoses result in fidgeting, rambling and rapid heart beat. In more severe culminations, you can expect, from your double-mocha-freaking-triple-tall-mega-cockochino any combination of disorientation, mania, depression, delusions, hallucinations, loss of inhibition, psychosis, rhabdomyolysis and death. Awesome.

Your baby after a coffee.

 Not only is coffee bad for you, but it is bad for the world. The number one coffee producing country is Brazil. What's in Brazil? The Amazon Rainforest. Who's cutting down the rainforest? Brazillians. The second largest producer of coffee is Columbia. You know what's in columbia? Druglords. What do drug lords do? Give drugs to children. Therefore, if you drink coffee, you are cutting down the rainforest and giving drugs to children.

And coffee farmers are some of the lowest paid people in the world. They get about 14c per pound of coffee sold. And one coffee plant produces about a kilo of coffee a year. So they get around 35c per plant. That's not very much. And there you are complaining about how expensive the coffee down at Cafe Coffee Day is, wearing your cool-wool suit, paying with your fancy twenty dollar bill which you pluck out of your Armarni wallet with your manicured hands, manicured by an impoverished Vietnamese immigrant from a suburb you go out of your way to avoid. You make me sick.

Did you know that the average American coffee drinker has 3.1 cups a day? 52% of Americans over 18 drink a cup of coffee every morning. More than 80% are regular coffee drinkers. That means that 80% of Americans will get erosive esophagitis, that 80% of Americans support the destruction of the rainforest and that 80% of Americans support drugs for children. If coffee were removed from the equation, that percentage would drop only to the portion of active Republican voters.

The freshly brewed blood of the children of  the Amazon.

And the time spent waiting in line for a coffee? That adds up to 45 hours a year. Thats 45 hours that could have been spent saving the planet, helping the homeless or painting the next Mona Lisa. Clearly, coffee destroys art, kills the homeless and obliterates the planet.

But yet we persist in our love of coffee. We laugh in the face of the dying rainforest; we practically throw our money at drug lords and we love the fact that we earn so much more than the poor sod who picked the coffee for us. We love that we can drink something which causes so much pain, it's as if we can smell the pain, taste the blood of the dying children who picked the coffee and allow our senses to feast on their innocent souls.

It is clear, however, that coffee has a conscience. It knows the evil it spreads in the world, and tries to make its consumers pay with their own blood. But still we ignore it. Our misguided love of coffee will end up killing the majority of our population. Onya, western society. Surely we can spare this little green bean some of our hate.

UPDATE: Recent news has stated that the price of coffee is set to rise in the next few months. Even more reason to kick the bean, you slothful sleep-deprived slack-jawed office-bound buffoons.

Sunshine

Sunshine is one of those things that people try really hard not to hate. It's very discouraging really.

Did you know that the weather is the single most talked about topic in the world today? So you can imagine how infuriating it is to be someone who has to make small talk (i.e - cashier, salesman, barista) with people on a nice day. Just take a moment to sit back and appreciate the struggles which these people endure thanks to the sunshine, with a bit of role play:

Customer: "Lovely weather, isn't it?"
Cashier: "Yes, it's very lovely."
Customer: "Guess you'd rather be out at the beach, wouldn't you?"
Cashier: "Yes, I guess. Have a nice day."

Then the next customer comes along:

Customer 2: "Turned out the be a beautiful day!"
Cashier: "Yes, it did."
Customer 2: "Not a cloud in the sky!"
Cashier: "Yes, it's nice. See you later."

And so on. Until it gets to this stage:

Customer 3: "What great weather we have today, isn't it?"
Cashier: "Don't make me cut off your hands."
Customer 3: "Sorry?"
Cashier: "Lovely day."

But this is a relatively small portion of the population that has been represented here. What about the broader, non-cashier segment of the public? How does the sunshine drown their happiness and cause such paramount pain and suffering?

Just go to your local chemist. Have a look. There is bound to be a whole aisle dedicated to fighting the vast evil of the sun and it's terrifically more terrible shine, and the accompanying nefarious UV rays. Because, for as much people claim to love the sunshine, the warmth and the good times it brings, people try to fight the sunshine with a vast array of weapons. The government even went as far as to issue propaganda regarding the combative engagement of the sun and its evil shine, with the infamous and controversial "Slip, Slop, Slap" campaign, perhaps more notorious for its use of words with extremely suggestive onomatopoeia than the declaration of all out war on one of the greatest forces in the universe.

In case you didn't know, every time you step foot outside during the day (and even during the night to some extent), you are subjecting yourself to the incredible power of the sun's doomsday device: Ultra-violet radiation, or UV rays. In their slighter forms they cause mere production of vitamin D in the human body, but in their fully-grown and developed  UV-A manifestation, they can mutate and destroy you on a cellular level; they can cause you to age more quickly and, as everyone knows, can lead to erythema, or sunburn, causing redness and irritation because the sun has attempted to shoot you to death with radiation.  The sun can and will cause you pain and grief, from a friend slapping you on the back after a day's sunbathing to the development of cataracts causing your blindness later in life. Hence, a hard-line stance must be adopted if we are to successfully defeat the sun and all the evil it brings.

Old-style weapons such as the t-shirt, the hat (often broad-brimmed or "flap" style), the shade and staying indoors were employed, as well as the new, hi-tech armory including sunscreen, lip balm, sunglasses and giant sun-blocking devices, all of which proved highly effective in the war against sunshine. Treatments to prevent injuries received while combating the sun were also developed, with the widespread implementation of the aloe-vera plant and the invention of lotions and oils which enhance the effectiveness of soothing injuries of the sun. Surgeries were introduced to remove the sun's bullets for those who dedicated their lives to the fight and often paid the price with cancer. Others weren't so lucky.

One of many drastic measures taken against the evil Sun.

As well as the direct effects of the sun, it also has many more social and conventional implications. Systems have been developed to help monitor the sun and it's time spent attacking the earth; the most notable of these being the calendar and 24 hour time systems, both of which help people plan when to and when not to face the danger of the sun, as often they have never been wise enough to take the many signs to stay out of the sun seriously.

It is true; the sun does try to warn you to stay out of its way. What is the absolute worst thing in the world? That first blinding, shimmering, utterly destructive ray of sunshine that glides between the gaps in your Venetian blind in the morning. It disturbs you from your slumber; it hurts your eyes; it signals morning - and morning signals getting out of bed. No-one wants that.

For those brave enough to venture out in the sunlight hours, you are faced with debilitating warmth and blinding light. Your body responds violently with a deluge of sweat and attempts to save itself but putting you in a coma with a wave of lethargy and somnolence. If you do not respond to these indicators, you will probably end up getting one of many heat-related illnesses, like heat exhaustion, heat edema and heat syncope, all of which will probably lead to your death. If they fail to kill you, the malignant melanoma will.

In a futile attempt to understand why and how the Sun does what it does, scientists the world over have attempted to recreate the conditions seen on the surface of the Sun, largely through the use of Sun-Simulation devices. These attempts have been largely unsuccessful, nay, catastrophic, as these highly risky simulators deal with copious amounts of radiation and energy the rate of failure is high. One of the best known incidents of such a kind was the explosion which occured at the Hiroshima Heavy Industrial Concern Sun Simulator facilities on August 6, 1945. The devastation was massive; the blast caused the immediate deaths of 70,000 people as they were incinerated in the face of immense heat and fire, with the explosion reaching over 3,900 degrees celsius, and the remaining fallout has since caused the deaths of thousands due to mutation and radiation poisoning. It was estimated that 200,000 people had lost their lives by 1950 due to the explosion. Notwithstanding this, and many other incidents including Chernobyl, Nagasaki and Three Mile Island, scientists still insist upon the similation of the sun in order to better combat it.

The toll of the Chernobyl Sun-Simulation Laboratory Incident is still being calculated.

Despite the high-cost of these disasters, science still pushes on in what is an increasingly pathetic attempt to understand the sun and defeat its omnipotent evil. The public has been implored to submit itself to testing and scrutiny by the scientific community, with the widespread adoption of solarium and sun-tanning salons which allow the ordinary layperson to give back to the sciences which have given them so much. These people, who readily submit themselves to pain and suffering, and often hideous mutation, have become known as martyrs of science, with many developing the symptoms of prolonged sun-seigeing in a mere fraction of the time regularly observed.

Dedicated to the cause: Two women speaking at a conference on how to deal with the hideous mutations caused by contributing their lives to science.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against the sun, there is still an apparently unswayed faction which insist upon the worship of the sun. Day in a day out, they throw themselves to Its insane cause, laying down their bodies in a sacrifice to keep the almighty Sun pleased. The sun readily takes these fresh victims, staining their skin a hideous brown and causing their hair to turn the color of ripe bananas. They often smell of the polluted sea, they often speak in a slurred and colloquial manner, being uneducated and unemployed, and they often spend hours surfing the earth's oceans, regardless of weather, season or hurricane, all to impress their almighty God, the Sun. Society has largely forsaken these militant factions, leaving them to wills and whims of their Sun. They can be observed lounging around the beach, drinking heavily and mooching off their endlessly disappointed parents.

A colony of sun worshippers. Note the abundant brownness of skin, indicating that the Sun is close to digesting them, as well as the tokenistic use of umbrellas as slight camouflage against the society that has shunned them.

It is clearly apparent that the sun should be hated. I haven't even touched on bush fires, drought, the melting of the polar icecaps, the fading of your car's paintwork and the melting of your favourite ice cream, and yet it is still so abundantly clear that the sun should be widely abhorred and shunned. But people still allow it to give them happiness, allow it to make their day better and improve their mood, albeit under delusion as the risks of sunshine are well known. We let our children play in the sun, we even let them enjoy it. We are as good as murderers for this lapse in our generally good judgement. Our kids are out there, mutating, burning, and yet we watch them and say "Good on you, Billy!"

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. The sun, for its innumerable crimes against humanity, nature and the university, its crimes against your family, friends and fellow man, and its crimes against your health, appearance and body, must be hated, not only now, not only in the minutes after this realisation of your misguided love, but forever.

Sunshine. It has to be stopped.