Calculating Kitchen Hand at the Beach

Why did I think that I could write? What made me think that I could possibly come up with any sort of interesting story that didn’t sound pretentious and lofty? I was sitting in the basement, staring at the blank page on my laptop, and that’s when I realised that being a janitor at the local shopping centre was as far as I was going to get.

You see, for a while there, I thought I had something. Something to say, something to offer…sorry…you know what shits me to tears? This freaking laptop, fucking Microsoft Word, underlining this sentence green, that word red, like it’s fucking smarter than me and it knows I’m just a dumb ass janitor. Man, it drives me crazy. They’ve made these things too smart; they’ve condescended to us completely now. We are becoming dumber every day. Fair dinkum.



I’m hating technology nowadays. I used to enjoy it, find it intriguing, but now it just causes me to bubble with a silent rage. Mobile phones, computers, laptops, flat screen TV’s, more computers, computerised washing machines, computerised microwaves, digital cameras, computerised cars that beep at you constantly like a nagging mother – “Beep, beep! Put your seat belt on, Heath! Beep! That’s dangerous driving without a seatbelt at freaking ten kilometres an hour! Beep fucking beep!” I’ll tell you, it drives me up the wall, all of this stuff. With all this shit we don’t need our brains anymore, we are just becoming passive receptacles. No wonder I can’t write anything, my mind is a complete blank, a vacuum, there’s nothing there!



I’ve even tried using technology to help me write. I don’t just mean my annoying, patronising laptop for the actual word processing, but I actually wrote a little program that ‘helps’ you come up with story ideas by giving you a random person, place,  and event. For instance I was just trying to write a short story about a calculating kitchen hand at the beach who commits a terrorist act. That’s not as easy to do as it sounds. For starters it’s stupid, and for seconds I really don’t care about this so called sneaky dish washer who wants to blow himself up on Bondi beach. I just don’t fucking care. How can you write a story about something that never happened, to someone who doesn’t exist, especially when you don’t really care? You can’t – that’s the answer, because even if I did manage to bang out a couple of thousand words about this, no-one would want to read it. It would suck. It would be as boring to read as it was to write, and everyone who read it would feel a little duller inside from having read it.



So what do you do? Do you just shrug your shoulders and go and play on the playstation? Do you give up, and resign yourself to your fate of day in, day out, nine to five living (actually its more like six till three in my job, but that’s beside the point)? What do you fucking do? Do you bang down six beers and gear your brain down closer to the level where it’s supposed to operate in this modern society? Do you distract yourself with sport? Anyway I feel myself becoming lofty, I better calm down.



So Mohammed, the freaking dish cleaner, thought it would be grouse to strap ten tonnes of explosives to himself, and take a wander down to Bondi beach, where he might be able to kill some infidels, splashing playfully in the water. Okay now I’m done. What next? He blows himself up I guess.