Thursday 29 August 2013

Our Certain Fate.

I heard a radio advert for Jack Daniel's last night which tries to associate the whiskey with great rock and roll. It says things like 'He was there at the 100 club in 1976' or 'He was there at Woodstock in 1969'. It finishes with something like... 'On tour since 1866. Please drink responsibly'.

Let's deal with the obvious. They don't want you to drink responsibly. None of the rock legends they invoke were drinking responsibly. A better, more honest advert would go like this...

He was there when Jimi Hendrix choked on his own vomit in 1970.

He was there when Amy Winehouse didn't wake up in 2011.

He was there when you saw that tramp taking a dump behind a bin in 2005.

Jack Daniels. Please drink excessively over a sustained period of time.

I will probably not die choking on my own vomit. I, like most of you, will die after about 30 years of painful frailty and miserable confusing dementia. Not looking forward to it if I'm honest. I sincerely hope they come up with a cure for the old Alzheimer's cos that looks like a dog shit destiny.

One of the treatments for Alzheimer's they're using now is creating small streets mocked up to be like the streets of the sufferer's 20s and 30s. The thinking is that to someone with no short term memory the modern world is frightening. Going to shops with rationing and old money, feeling like you know what's going on, is comforting. This seems like a good idea to me.

But what about us? What will our memory streets look like? Having spent most of my adult life in London mine will feature pavements littered with Chicken Cottage bones, charity muggers and legless hen nights wearing the wrong footwear.

Picture it. The year is 2070. We're all in homes two miles above the Earth's now toxic atmosphere, being cared for by nurses who look like Daft Punk in their current guise. With no understanding of what's going on, looking out of the window is terrifying. The only thing that will calm us is to sit on pretend top decks of buses and play Candy Crush on antique i-phones.

This is your future. Enjoy your present.

1 comment:

  1. Did you used to live on falmouth road, parents stuart and julia?

    ReplyDelete