Published as Neal’s Belch or Neal’s Issues circa 2005
3x/4 ^72+ (3y-7) = 4. Although of course that’s just my personal opinion. I’ve always, from an early age, held strong convictions on certain elements of mathematics. In my first year of school I held the class up for half a day while I explained to the teacher why I felt that two plus two is equal to five. I patiently brought her through my arguments about encouraging positivity and aiming higher than the rather easy and defeatist objective of “four”. I simply felt that she was not pushing us enough, and I was not prepared to stand idly by while my future was sold to the gods of complacency and underachievement.
Nowadays of course we’ve all realised that there is no need to educate our children. I certainly won’t be sending my children to any sort of a school. The risks of catching nits are far too high. My local private school breeds them in the chemistry lab and throws them at cats to scare them and make them think they’ve got fleas. It’s all in the interests of science, of course. They are carrying out admirable research into whether a nit can be used as some sort of a flea placebo. The theory is that animals can be tricked into thinking they have fleas, and that therefore they will scratch themselves a lot more, and the static electricity produced can be harnessed and used to power inflatable emergency rafts and toasters.
I myself have two emergency toasters, and of course I make sure that they are never both in the same building at any one time. I don’t like to take risks with anything. I’ve been stung too many times. Just yesterday a wasp leapt out at me from behind a window ledge and attacked me in broad daylight, apparently for no other purpose than to exert mindless violence on an innocent member of the public.
Which itself is rather stupid, because I am not a member of the “public”, and to the best of my knowledge never have been. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to join such a stupid and pointless organisation, other than to mock and ridicule the other members secretly from the inside, without their knowing. Just like I used to do in the Beavers.
I must say though, I think people are rather lazy in their negativity about getting stung. It’s not always bad. Spiderman got stung, and ended up being able to jump over things in space, and star in movies. I’d love to be able to do that. And I live in hope, although so far the only thing that has happened to me as a result of an insect bite is that I’ve developed three extra personalities.
That reminds me, I’m starting to think that one of my personalities, Brian, is a schizophrenic. He seems to spend an awful lot of time apparently talking to himself in two alternating voices. One of my other personalities, Zebadee, is a psychiatry student, and he disagrees strongly with me. He argues that that fact that I am conscious of Philip talking to himself, means that I must be psychic, and that what I’m actually hearing are Brian’s memories of a conversation that he heard earlier, between myself and Zebadee.
I’m inclined to agree with Zebedee. Not least because he has spent several years in University studying all this stuff. I must say, that was a wasted time of my life. I deeply regret that I didn’t pay attention during the lectures that Zebedee attended. I wouldn’t even have had to pay any fees for the course, since of course we shared a body. That aside, I’ll tell you one thing. Sharing a personage with another personality is not a pastime for the claustrophobic.
I never had any privacy in those days, except at night when we would hang a blackout curtain between our inner ears. It didn’t work of course, but we would convince ourselves that we couldn’t hear each other’s thoughts when the curtain was up.
It was the only way we had of keeping sane.