Paths To Happiness and Omaha Beaches

There’s an old mantra repeated by the demented that drones, ‘Don’t feel down, there’s always someone worse off than you.’ Which is ridiculous. Happiness is entirely relative to the individual and concerning yourself with the deaths and suffering of others is rarely a bright road to joy. Besides, these same hypocritical bastards also claim that ‘money can’t buy you happiness’, an equally haemorrhaged sentiment that is rarely found outside of the batshit mad guilt-ridden middle class.

Money can buy you happiness. I’m writing this on my brand-spanking new MacBook, nicknamed ‘the Sex’, which I purchased after being the owner of a laptop with a big fuck-off crack right across the screen for a year finally drove me to tears. I couldn’t see half the screen, which made writing or viewing anything an interesting challenge for the imagination, and it had reached that point in its life when Windows was just too full of crap. Opening up a large programme was like watching a chemo patient pissing blood from the strain of moving. Hopefully this MacBook won’t freeze repeatedly at the worst possible moments and ‘fall down some stairs’ like the last laptop did. Apparently Macs are more reliable…

Anyway, I bought it with money and it’s made me bloody happy. As do most of the material things that I have purchased in my life. Just because some cheeky chappy who gets his kicks from sitting cross-legged on a barren mountaintop, chanting and brainwashing impressionable middle class teenagers says that a 52” HD-TV with full surround sound adds to nothing to his life doesn’t mean I have to agree. It just means that he’s a lonely man with no soul or appreciation for higher quality image and sound. Again, a slight hypocrisy I feel from one who claims to see things with such clarity.

One of the greatest material things for increasing happiness is television. It reminds you that there’s always someone worse than you. Not worse off or less happy, just worse as a person. It doesn’t matter who you are, turn on the TV and there’ll be someone who is more inept or incapable than you. Happiness often arises through tragedy and watching some poor bastard embarrass themselves without even realising what complete fucktards they are always makes me chirp up and say, ‘At least I’m not that’.

Take, f’r instance, this latest mass pile-up car crash of a show, Arrange Me A Marriage. In the episode I was lucky enough to get drunk in front of, 42-year old musician Trevor Stewart was being pimped out with a wife. By his mum, who was arranging the marriage according to traditional Indian methods. Now that’s pretty fucking tragic for a start. Arranged marriages in India, agree with them or not, are a long-standing part of the culture and more importantly are not used to hook up incompetent middle-aged loners with fat, barren harpies. A point BBC Two (yes, BBC Two is televising this horseshit) seems to have missed.

What really made the whole thing tragic though, and therefore curiously uplifting, was how big a cunt this Trevor was. He was one of those people who offends all the senses. Even though there was a major time/space barrier between me and him I could smell his arsehole nature through the screen. The thought of still being alone at the age of 42 with no meaningful relationship lasting more than 14 months is quite a worrying thought. But as long as you’re not as big a tool as Trevor you’ll probably be alright. He had the tact, wit, charm and social awareness of rancid foetus vomit. Dear old Trevor, four weeks after being introduced to his hopeless wife-to-be at a classically awful engagement party, had seen her twice. He blamed work commitments and ‘taking a week to recover from his stag weekend in a foreign country’ for his marked absence. Unsurprisingly she told him where to stuff it and walked off, proving that beggars can and will be choosers.

This concept of laughing at freaks on TV is now the main staple of reality television. It’s a sick Victorian freakshow but it does squeeze a chuckle from my ribs and gives these bizarre individuals a chance to be on t’tele. Not all tragic losers are funny though, as yet another nutjob proved in America when, in what will no doubt be remembered as one of the more violent comments on Christmas consumerism, he opened fire on a shopping mall, killing eight people.

Sometime these losers get it so wrong. The gunman Robert Hawkins, 19, sought fame through violence and a gun culture that is clearly designed to encourage murder. If only he had instead, like Trevor and all the other countless reality-tv losers, used his butt-end of the social ladder talents to appear on some Where Shall I Cut Myself? VOTE NOW! TXT 278373 show where millions could have laughed and basked in the joy of not being him. That way we could feel good about social awkwardness and borderline psychotics instead of feeling genuine nausea, shock and disgust with the way the world works.