Into Your Head dot IE - podcast and Matchstick Cats comics. Stream of consciousness humour by Neal O'Carroll

Month: January 2005

Bowsy’s Good god how are we going to tell our sheep apart?

File photo of Bowsy - a brown and white bear seated at a table beside a laptop.
by Bowsy the Bear

The one thing I miss about that week when there was a dog temporarily residing in this house, is the many minutes I whiled away talking to it.

You know – things like “Hello dog. You’re a dog, you are. That’s right. A dog. Aren’t you?” It’s always nice to be so certain about a fact, to the point that you are virtually infallible. That’s why you humans, despite all of your sophisticated modern knowledge and technologies, still resort to comfortable old phrases like “Let’s call a spade a spade”. Y

You take great comfort in the fact that no matter what, there is always a garden implement tucked away in your garden shed with which you can relax and converse in the comfort of one hundred percent certainty as to it’s true identity.

How often does that happen in your day to day life? Can you be sure that the person who stands behind the supermarket checkout and takes your money is a genuine employee of the store, and not a confidence trickster who’s spotted an empty checkout and is chancing his arm?

Can you really be confident that those people in your house – allegedly your spouse and children – are the people they claim to be? Don’t forget, just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get you.

On the other hand, why would they be out to get you, of all people? It’s not as if you’re a precious commodity. There’s six god dam billion of you now, and humans are three a penny. Frankly if I had the whole of Earth’s human populatoion to choose from, I’d avoid the two dozen who were mentally deficient to the point of paranoia and instead cherry pick the best.

Not that a cherry is much of an analogy for a top quality human. The only humans who are red are the ones who choose to sit under a tanning bed for longer than the recommended time. You don’t want those.

That reminds me. Why does the tanning bed never get burnt?

Not that I require a reply, you understand. I merely ask the question in order to showcase my unique observational talents. Or rather, not quite unique, sense several thousand other bears are equally equipped.

I’m sure you wouldn’t quite see it that way if it was you though. Being a human, your survival instincts cause you to believe that you are so unique and important to the world that it must have you. In my case of course, it’s true. In yours however, it is not. Don’t take it personally, it’s just that you’re an ordinary, two legged snotty human being, one of six billion of same, and I’m a talking teddy bear. There’s just no competition.

And to think, you people have spent the last ten years trying to figure out whether it’s okay to clone yourselves.

Even better, many of you thought it was disgusting when they cloned Dolly the sheep. Oh my god – if that sort of thing is allowed to go on, we’ll have a load of sheep who all look exactly the same. Wherever will it end? We must stop these crackpots who want to create identical sheep.

Meanwhile, toy factories are gurgitating copies of me every day, faster than they can churn out five Euro picture postcards of Benedict VIV to flog in the Vatican car park.

And in conclusion, did I mention that you’re an idiot?

More Bowsy

101:

Schizophrenia’s part in my Imaginary Friend’s Downfall

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.