What’s Your Favourite Colour?

Posted: September 7, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: What and Why So?, writing | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What and Why So? Simple Questions; My Answers (1).

What’s Your Favourite Colour?

Good questions are the simplest.

I’ve always found that when in need of a conversation starter; go back to the old favourites. The classics of “What’s Your Name?”, “How Old Are You?” and “Can You Smell That? GOOD!” are reliable to see you through any introduction and can indeed let blossom a real keeper of a conversation.

In these simple proddings; the complex revelations come forth, and I hope that throughout this series they shall come forth mightily.

What is your favourite colour?

Who, me?

Beige.

Beige.

What?

Now I’m a fan of Billy Connolly and I’m aware of and enthralled by his near-disregard-but-more-like-“I’m-going-to-Scottish-you”-contempt for the colour. I am aware of the focus upon beige as being the sort of colour you’d feel comfortable leaving your children with whilst you went out for a night on the town; painting it Red with Blue language, uploading something Green and Orange by the end of it.

The issue I have with this is that being dependable is not necessarily a bad thing; it merely suffers connotations of dullness.

Not that I’m the hero you can count on; suffering myself as I do with plentiful heaps of flakiness. I’m so flaky you can stick me in an ice-cream; not that I’d keep to that for long before changing my mind.

Beige is also my natural colour; my tint upon this Earth. I was born beige and shall die so; tattoos permitting. I’ve been referred to by every racial slur under the sun; with accusations of Arab ancestry being my most frequent asundering. The unfortunately ill-educated folk of the town in which I was raised found my darker skin colour baffling; though delighted in the chance to call me nigger and (once) tell me to go back to Swaziland.

They weren’t even good at being racist; the colours were too much for them.

I was picked on for being a colour I wasn’t. I dazzled them with beige.

Not that I hold any grudge against beige; only a hope that it should come to succeed its history of dull association and instead reveal itself to be the dependably brave and weird colour you’ve been looking for.

I’d like to go a’peacocking in beige; save only for the problem that the clothing Beige comes in less than flattering cuts.

All those other folk out there yell around about red. The colour of passion and danger, love and blood. Rubies and lips. Not really, guys. Not really. Only firemen live up to this classification; being as they are folk who spend their working hours on fire, kicking down doors, saving dangling damsels, retrieving cats from trees and holding axes.

I have ambition of doing all that, 9 to 5 and as a hobby too, all whilst doused in Beige.

Blue tries to suggest it is the colour of cool and cold. No way funny face. Blue is a damning attempt in ordering the populace to calm down and enjoy your journey through the system. Blue tries to tell me what to do, whilst I’m waiting in a waiting room (that’s what you’re supposed to do in them) and Blue says: “Wait longer; and be more subjugate.”

Someday I shall make red upon them all. I’ll do what I want in waiting rooms. Beige things.

Black. Oooh dear me; Black. Poor little old Black. Nothing wrong with Black in and of itself; but for the pesky Lord of the Rings consistency of making “dark Lord” and “Black lands” the epitome of evil.

Whatever did Black do to you, J.R.R? Aside from that whole spooky night-time-can’t-see-stubbed-toe-can-I-hear-a-growl issue you really should have gotten over by now by now (being deceased and all).

Poor old Black.

In the same vibrant vein, White isn’t so grand a thing either.

A White dress doesn’t make the woman a keeper and a White horse doesn’t make the rider moral.

The White be noteth thee goodeth.

Yellow is like the Plan B of the rainbow.

Only things that are currently Yellow are meant to be Yellow. Naturally I’d prefer my lemons to be Yellow and for my blondes to remain so, but I want nothing else to be Yellow.

Green is a liar. Nuclear-aliens or Mother Nature’s ivy….crikey Green; make up your mind. Just be yourself. Don’t do what the rest of the rainbow tells you to be.

I just come back to Beige, once again.

Beige is a colour one can rely on; I just hope to wear it in adventure enough that people might rely on it for things less dull in the future.

I want to paint the town Beige; the colour of cool and dangerous love you can rely on.

So in what I hope was a more complex answer to the simple question, my colour is Beige.

Next time; how old am I?

Sam

The Metaphors Are Rusty.

Posted: November 17, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’ve been up a mountain.

It didn’t help.

No change to my personality or outlook occurred, nor do people sense a degree of empowerment about the way I walk now.

I meet challenges in the exact same manner as I did before.

And so it was that I came to realise- these metaphors…they are bollocks.

A mountain is the literal poster-boy of determination; the metaphor used by those to say: “you should probably respect me because I went up that, you know”.

Climbing a mountain is one thing that takes determination for some. It is only relative.

This was one of those metaphors that one simply encounters in life, and it has no bearing on the way you perceive your events and course. Climbing a mountain- something that for some is the establishment of ‘Let’s do something tricky’, is for many others a challenge that is not apparent as such.

For many others, a greater challenge would be what consumes their interest. Like a woman that sits down one morning and decides that the only way to continue is to eat only things that are alive and really rather wriggly when encountering a fork.

That is tricky.

Now, I’m not saying that for me climbing a mountain is easy, though it is one ‘helluva’ (that’s right- ‘helluva’) lot easier to walk up one than to climb up one. It’s just…what’s the pay-off?

Well, in this you have two main aspects.

To begin with, finally you have the view from the top. That’s a big one, though interestingly enough you need to be atop a mountain with the view a bit further than the end of your nose. Fog, mist and cloud cover might get in the way of what there is to see, although as well, perhaps the fog is what there is to see. I suppose it’s a little weird, so I suppose it’s a little enjoyable.

And this leads me onto the second point. The interesting things that might occur to your person as you make you way up and down.

I was nearly blown off a mountainside in a torrent of rain and punch of wind. A tempest you might say, only punchier.

Here, the acquisition of the summit mattered not- it was the danger and activity at all other points that made me smile. The pay-off was the wandering, not the arrival.

And so it might go as truth to say that all the pleasure of the journey could have been achieved by avoiding the top. Should anything of value to you occur at the top- then that is due to luck rather than likelihood.

Yet, for so many the summit seems to be the entire point, whereas one might argue that, aside from what I have already, the point is in striving through the climb and having a really bad time. If you don’t do that, then the reason for the climb is lost for so many.

“I hope you nearly fall off the mountain. That’s why you’re going isn’t it?”

And what other metaphors and sayings amount to a severe need to be reconsidered?

‘Sheep’?

The question: ‘Sheep?’ is a good one.

Yes, sheep are like the people they are aligned to in metaphor. Running to and with the crowd. Gnawing upon crud, doing little else. Being fairly thick.

But you’d better believe that for some reason, out of nowhere, out of some-hellish-blue those woolly fuckers will head-butt you and any part of you.

The average man in the street is not of this ilk. He will not head-butt you here, there or anywhere, whereas I prefer to assume that a sheep is going to head-butt some portion of my person. This is from valued, ugly and- yes- regrettably woolly experience.

As for a next step from here, now that we all know what’s really going on, it is apparent that we should establish a whole bunch of new metaphors and, as such, sayings.

“Eiffel Tower It” is a saying that I hope will come into pass one day when someone does something vital at the time to someone else using the Eiffel Tower. Whatever that thing is, and it will likely involved thrusting, I hope the saying lasts.

“The Metaphors Are Rusty” is evidently an appropriate saying for when the components of the old world crumble in the face of actual experience by each new generation. “The Writing’s On The Wall” in this case, that a thorough and piercing re-evaluation of what words in a certain order were previously ours.

So “The Metaphors Are Rusty”, and I’m about to make like a banana.

You may find me making like a banana at neither the top nor bottom of a mountain, but everywhere in-between.

Sam.