An inventory of my BS traps - part 1

I’ve reached that age in my development (or deterioration, as the case may be) when I’m starting to look back at my past with a fair degree of nostalgia. Because hindsight is like looking through one’s past through a pair of rose-tinted glasses, there is a certain age we all reach when everything from twenty years ago just seems so much better than the crap we have to go through in the here and now. Human beings are just wired that way.

I’ve recently started hearing people glorifying the good ole apartheid days (‘you know; at least we didn’t have crooks running the country’). You’d best believe that in two decades we’ll be yearning for the days when we had a World Wide Web master guru with a fetish for virology websites at the Union Buildings (‘you know; at least we had an intellectual president’).

Because I’m human myself, despite the rumours, I am no different. I remember a time when I used to know certain truths about life without any ambiguity whatsoever. Life used to be uncomplicated and beautiful back then. That was before I developed excellent bullshit traps in the synaptic connections between the neurones of my brain.

Now and then I go to my brain to inspect the loot that my traps have ensnared and look at it with longing in my heart. With the aid of some putrid wine last night, I made a list of what I found. Here’s a short list of some of the cow dung I found:

All people are created equal
What a load of croc.

I still remember a time when I used to believe this as an idealistic young man, fresh out of high school, full of aspirations and ambitions. I truly believed that I could be anything I wanted to be.

It took me about ten years to truly understand the normal distribution curve I’d learned during Stats, and the fact that human beings are not an exception to the curve.

People are different. It is very difficult to find anyone who disagrees with this universal truth. This is because most of us accept the fact that Vernon Koekemoer is different to Stephen Hawkins. Hawkins described the space phenomenon called black holes. The other guy probably landed on planet earth after spinning out of a black hole’s orbit accompanied by Steve Hofmeyr. Subtle difference I know, but a difference nonetheless. This seems to me as obvious as the fact that Osama Bin Laden has probably harboured impure thoughts about his trusty camel up in the Afghan Mountains at some point in the last six and a half years.

What I was taught is that ‘different’ does not necessarily mean ‘not equal’. Ignore the fact that ‘different but equal’ has no practical application. Hell, ignore the fact this sounds like saying one gram of bird dropping is different but equal to a metric tonne of platinum. Without too much brain BS trap application, this ‘truth’ has a funny stench to it. It’s the same smell I get a whiff of each time I drive past a herd of cattle with an open air-vent.

The safest place to leave one’s kids is with grandparents because of all that wisdom
A few years ago we locked up some guy at Pollsmoor because we had prima faciae evidence that he was the Cape Town Station Strangler. Some interesting ‘facts’ have recently come to light. Smells like deposits from a bull’s colon to me too.

But you have to consider the minuscule possibility that he is telling the truth and that the true Station Strangler is still out there. And he/she probably has procreated. Depending on how old the strangler is, some hapless parents are probably thinking that the safest place to leave their kids is with granny and grandpa.

I had this thought after my three-year old — who’s been sleeping in his own bedroom since he was about eleven months old — came back from a week-long visit with the folks. Like most three-year olds, getting him to go to bed before 11pm is a task as arduous as the Bay of Pigs invasion. Since he’s been back he hasn’t opened a single cupboard in the house and refuses to sleep in his room.

I suspect that he’s been subjected to the ‘The monsters will get you if you don’t go to bed and cover your head’ wisdom they have collected over the years.

Being knowledgeable and smart is better than being ignorant and dumb
In a word; faecal matter.

Who is with me here? Who would swap places with David Beckham any hour of any day? And he just seems to me the opposite of whatever knowledgeable and smart is.

I’ve gone to school with people who used to pass their exams by the foreskin of a porn star. By the time they were twenty-five they had already made their first million using the Stumble-Upon-It-Law.

Look around you. Look at the icons in our world and all the people splashed on the first pages of newspapers and covers of magazines. How many times have you been watching TV and seen an illiterate, slow-witted, double-chinned nitwit with a multi-million dollar contract to remove sanitary bins from all the malls in the Southern Hemisphere? How many time have you switched channels in disgust and thought, ‘Why didn’t I ever make a connection between used tampons and millions of dollars?’

I’ll tell you why. You were too busy reading the Harvard Business Journal because they lied to you and told you knowledge is power. This is the same reason there aren’t any PhDs in the top 1,736,032 richest individuals in the world, the same reason only two of the top 10 wealthiest people in the world have university degrees.

Democracy is always the best way to run a country
Yeah. Look what democracy dragged into the White House twice in a row. The correctness of democracy is based on the myth of the collective wisdom of the populace.

What no one ever seems to consider is that this is the same populace that believes that a kid playing outside in the rain will get pneumonia. The same populace that believes (literally) that the only reason that the pubic louse did not go extinct is because a virtuous, bearded man called Noah allowed Mr. Big Itch and Mrs Big Itch into his huge, big boat when the windows in the sky opened up and drowned everything.

Deep down in places most of us don’t talk about, we all wish that a smart, benevolent dictator of our choosing ran South Africa. I have personally gone on record as saying that I think that if Ma Agnes from Isidingo had been running this country for the past ten years instead of the lot running things now, we’d have none of this nonsense. Do you think we’d have had an arms deal under Ma Agnes’s dictatorship?

Thint representative: So how about it Mrs President?

Ma Agnes: Please Mr. Whatever with a fancy briefcase, don’t irritate me. We don’t need guns in this country. What we need is just a sensible approach to keep our kids in school and away from drugs and such nonsense.

And you know I’m right. As a matter of fact, everybody can think of a dictator they’d like to see running this country for ten uninterrupted years. [For fun, insert your own favourite dictator of choice here.]

Size does not matter
Yes it does.

The only people who believe this are inexperienced women who have been lied to by women’s magazines. And the ticklers themselves, of course. Just trust me on this; there is a certain critical size needed to … how does one say this delicately?… perform one’s manly duties to the satisfaction of one’s partner. I wish I could say different. But physics is physics.

Not to be graphic or anything but there is no imaginative use of angles that can give you that lovely nose-picking sensation when the equipment is a beret string. If we start believing this myth we might as well believe the ‘sex is overrated’ myth. To quote Ludacris the rapper; ‘Some people say that sex is overrated but they’re just not doing it right’.

There’s more. However; as much as I’d like to stay and chat, I can’t. To paraphrase The Sumo:

I rest for now.