An Experiment in Stretching It

It is with not just a little trepidation that I begin this assault on my keyboard and by all accounts other than my own - and the list of those accounts is undoubtedly led by the device in question - any attempt I make to generate an electronic record of those feeble electrical impulses that I euphemistically choose to call thoughts, can only be called a brutal assault…and that is not just on the sensibilities – if there are any – of the unfortunate souls, who being devoid of any better and publicly acceptable activity to entertain and pleasure themselves with, choose to actually attempt to wade through my wild ramblings…

Now, in case you have not noticed it already and have still managed to get this far, or of course, if you have been sensible and just decided to skip that rambling introduction, let me point out to you an ability of mine of which I am immensely proud – specially as by virtue of the sheer confusion it causes, it is the one skill that saw me clear B-school at first attempt without ever flunking a paper – and that is that this sentence that you are currently skimming over and pretending to read happens to be just the second in this post of mine that already seems to have assumed epic proportions judging by its sheer volume. Oh yes, I am reasonably adept at continuing to add meaningless words to rambling sentences that lead nowhere. It’s an art that I have found to be completely ineffective in Mathematics papers (leading to my flunking one of those confounded monstrosities while in Engineering college), but a skill that takes near-scientific proportions in B-school.

Getting to what prompted me to write this however, I wonder if you have ever remarked at the remarkable irony of the situations that life seems to present one in a seemingly endless stream. Take for example this person I happened to chance upon a few days back who assured me that he represented the Society of Free Thinkers. Now, before I begin my narration, let me assure you that I bear these Free Thinkers no grudge and would willingly let them be as free as they like as long as they let me enjoy the same freedom and of course, as long as specific appendages of their male members (pun fully intended) are deprived of that very same freedom. After all, while not quite a member of their free society, one does always endeavour to be looked upon kindly by those that one sees as wishing to believe themselves to be above one.

Well, getting down to the incident then, this particular specimen of the society was attempting, as I remember the scene, to persuade me to part with some of my employer-given (and Tax department spared) gravy for a cause that he assured me was imperative for me to champion if I wanted to retain control over the free nature of my blog. I was, not unnaturally a bit concerned, given that I am quite often accused of being quite a miser (I have actually ventured as far as to install pedals inside the chassis of my Esteem to save on the petrol costs and I kid you not on this), but ventured to enquire from him why he believed that this was necessarily so, to which he responded that this was quite necessarily true as the Elders of the Society of Free Thinkers had decreed this to be necessarily true which necessarily necessitated the belief that this was necessarily true and also necessitated the fact that people must believe it to be so!

Now, as you can well imagine, I was quite astounded at the depth of his arguments for a moment, but thereafter it began to dawn on me that there was perhaps no real free thinking involved in this process…or well…not at least, on the part of any person or persons other than the ones he so reverently referred to as the Elders, unless of course, one is to look upon his decision to believe their decree as an expression of free thought in itself, which in my opinion would be stretching the thought a bit thin and stretching, to me at least, is something that is best left to appendages best left unmentioned and not to points that tend to get thin from the stretching, much in contrast to the afore-mentioned appendages. (Another one sentence paragraph! Damn! I’m good at these ;-) )

Well, to cut a long story short, I decided to conclude that while there may be a lot to be said for free thought, the idea of a society of those that follow it’s philosophy seems a tad ironic. Something like a governing body for the Anarchists almost, you might say ;-). To top it all of course, he revealed to me that the Society of Free Thinkers apparently had an admission fee if one wished to join it, which in itself seemed ironic given that I viewed it as him telling me that I needed to pay something in order to declare myself a member of a society that essentially proclaims itself as pioneering something that, for all practical purposes at least, is ostensibly free!

Yes indeed, irony is something that seems all-pervasive. Just like a certain professor who, in an Innovation class, happened to say, “This is the solution to this case and no, your point of view is not relevant to the school of thought that needs to be followed to arrive at the solution for this case…”. Hmm…or of course, if I were to draw on the paltry time I have spent in my workplace, I’d refer to the time I was told that the ‘Employee Satisfaction and Retention Workshop’ that I was scheduled to attend had been postponed as the Human Resources manager who was conducting it had quit his job…

Yes, life is quite entertaining in its vagaries and of course the ironies that accompany them. Take if you will the fact that I, despite my protestations to the contrary am taken by most to be quite a hard man to please! I do, of course, take that as quite a compliment given that hardness when pleased is something that any bloke would be content to display, but hard to please?

Oh and lest you are still searching for the point that I was trying to make in this post, as apparently a particular commenter was in one of my previous posts, hey, quit while you’re ahead! I’m a GUY!!! There is no point to this one… I did try to make one, but found the entire job a bit too hard to finish on my own… Ah! Now that’s a nice one, eh? ;-)