IV: Attack of the Drones.

How stupid do you think Charles H Duell feels now? As Commissioner of the US Patent Office in the year of our Lord 1899 he made the pronouncement that “everything that can be invented, has been invented”. Yeah, okay Chuck. What about the electric toothbrush, the hula-hoop and the waffle iron? Never mind nuclear fusion, space travel and cruise control! All invented after 1899. (Actually, I’m not too sure about cruise control. I think stagecoaches sort of cruised along at the same speed. Let me know if I’m wrong.)

Shit, that Chuck was a wanker. I think his problem was he watched too much television and too many movies. Going by the plots to be found on both these entertainment mediums there isn’t much in the way of new things happening—everything’s a rehash of something else. So he just assumed that not much was happening in the real world either. Okay, I know Charles H Duell has been a dead guy for seventy years or something, and probably hasn’t had a chance to see Charlie’s Angels circa 2000, or catch Angelina Jolie’s lusciously-lipped Lara Croft, the former a regurgitated mediocre television show and the latter a movie made from a computer game originally designed for teenage boys with masturbatory tendencies. Chuck’s also missed out on all these goddamn Star Wars movies… “Attack of the Clones”. More like “Attack of the Drones”.

Hey, I’ve got an idea! How would you like a sequel of your life? Or maybe a prequel? You could see what your past lives got up to. Or, you could set yourself up with a lotto win in the prequel and then reap the benefits in “Your Life: The Original Story”! If you died you could write yourself back to life in the sequel, maybe as your long lost twin sibling, separated at birth by an evil nurse who went on to bring you up on an Hopi Indian reservation in southern Arizona. That could be titled “Your Life: The Return of the Twin”.

Okay, I’m being a bit silly. Plus I am not sure how that time traveling thing would really work. I know it used to messed Dr Who up to meet himself. Anyway, I guess there are physicists, philosophers and other bozos spending their waking hours contemplating such cosmic subjects. What I am really trying to say is sometimes you really wish you could have another go at life. You know, you make this really big cock-up of something and it would be damn fine if you could rewind the Life Tape and try again.

How’s this for an example. You look at that complete fuckwit you are currently with and wonder what it was that caused your momentary lapse of reason. Maybe it was the big dick/boobs, or the case of Jim Beam & Coke consumed on that dark and stormy night when you first decided trousers down was a good idea! Why not rewind until just after the first meeting?

Then you can say, “Fuck the Hell off, you loser. I know you are going to cause me serious grief in the future, so hit the road Jack/Jill!!”

All in all though, I guess we humans are doomed to make really stupid mistakes, say really stupid things, and make total morons out of ourselves, and then have to live with the consequences. Nonetheless, rewinding the Life Tape would have been handy for Charles H Duell. He could just wipe that stupid comment and say something intelligent, like, “Mmm, I’m sure there are many nifty things yet to be invented…”.

I would have found it useful the day I said to my girlfriend “My God your friend Jenny has a curvaceous butt!” That proved to be an unwise comment and resulted in the demise of quite a cosy relationship. I also once unwisely mentioned to a female police officer who’d pulled me over that she was the first cute female police officer I’d ever seen. “In my experience, female police officers usually resemble Latvian shot-putters,” I noted. I followed up by saying, “Don’t you find all that hardware dangling off your belt a hassle when you want a piss?”
Anyway, I copped a fine for bald registration and driving while wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day. However, we did meet up in a pub a few days later and ended up sharing one of those trousers down experiences I mentioned earlier, some fun with a rubber truncheon as I recall. Now that is an event I would like to replay in slow motion… again and again and again.