STREET DOGS

WHY do I need to learn arithmetic when I can buy time on Arithmetic-Modules Inc whenever I need to do a sum? Why do I need to be good with language when I can hire a professional language module to articulate my thoughts? Why do I need to bother making decisions about my personal life when there will be executive modules that can scan my goal structure and manage my assets so as to best fulfil my goals?”

“Because those things just don’t work in the real world,” is what most folks will tell you. You hear it all the time when you ask them stuff like that.

Which is what makes the “real world” such an awfully depressing place. As Jason Fried says: “It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches and foreign concepts always lose. The only things that win are what people already know and do, despite these things being flawed and inefficient.”

Surely better therefore to dwell in the dreamy world of target marketing; to be what Dave Eggers described as a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, “roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!”

Oscar Wilde wrote: “Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating … [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write.”

For those of us who are poor poets, why not hand over to Modules Inc? So as to become fascinating, living the life we can’t otherwise hope to live.

Michel Pireu — e-mail: pireum@streetdogs.co.za