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Wednesday 11 July 2018

Day 74: Sun

Whaaaaat is up hombreros, it's ya boy Robbie P here with all the juiciest word treats for your ear tongues, word treats such as: "textual", "crumbly", "diaphanous", and "fishfinger". So sit up, strap in, and let's get gobbling those linguistic goodies!

I hope you're enjoying that introduction, which I do at the beginning of every post now. It's just my thing. I'm really enjoying it. I think it's great.

So what's going on? It's sunny again today. The sun has got his hat on and he's coming out to play. No, incorrect. The sun doesn't wear a hat, because he's an inanimate collection of plasma held in place by the force of his own gravity, and also because no hats will fit him. He does, however, wear a visor. All the astronauts from all the countries got together and built the sun a big visor out of old car windscreens that they glued together, enabling the sun to still get heat on his spheroid head while avoiding the glare from the other stars, because... well, because he's so self-conscious these days after a nasty scientist told him he was only a medium-sized and relatively uninteresting star out of the billions of stars in but one of the many billions of galaxies in our universe, and after hearing that he lost all confidence in himself, our sun did. And he stopped shining and we were all bereft.

So we sent our top therapist, Brian McCoolidge, up to have a chat with him. Brian McCoolidge told the sun that he, Brian McCoolidge, didn't know what he, the sun, was worried about, that the sun was a great sun, that McCoolidge had read that the sun was the most massive object in the entire solar system, which system, by the way, was named after the sun, if the sun hadn't noticed, and that that was pretty good going, McCoolidge reckoned, seeing as he, McCoolidge, was ostensibly the Earth's very best therapist, yet didn't have a system named after him. But the sun did. So chin up, basically, is what McCoolidge told the sun.

The sun replied that, yes, he guessed that was true. But... but... this system, the one named after him, was nothing special. Look at Alpha Centauri, the sun said. The very next system along. That system had not one but three suns, and the largest was already larger than he was. What good was it calling yourself the sun if you look to your side and your next-door neighbour is already a better sun than you are? Really. He might as well just supernova and get it over with.

And McCoolidge said that, look, it isn't about where you stand in relation to all the other suns. It's about where you stand in relation to yourself. That if you're looking for validation from the external you will never find it. There will always be someone better, some sun brighter. So what you have to do is find something worth doing for its own sake and just bloody do it, and let it consume you.

And the sun cheered up a little, enough to give Brian McCoolidge horrendous skin cancer, but then he went out again. He just couldn't get past the brightness of all those other stars hanging out there in the endless firmament, each one bigger, probably, and better, probably, than he was. It made his spheroid head swim.

So back down on Earth the people all held a summit to try to solve the crisis, to which each country sent a representative, because no one could cope any more in the miserable ceaseless gloom. And the delegate for England was like, Right? Why do you think we drink cheap lager and smash each other's faces in all day? And everyone chuckled. And the delegate for England necked the rest of his can of Kronenbourg and nutted the delegate for France.

Then the delegate for the US said that he was going to veto any suggestions that negatively impacted the winter coat and central heating industries, under pressure from winter coat and central heating industry lobbyists, which industries had seen profits soar in the dark times since the sun had gone out.

The Ecuadorian delegate coughed and said but what about the, well, just as an example, the sandcastle bucket and beach towel industries, which surely had suffered unprecedented financial downturns of late? Shouldn't the delegate for the US be worried about them? And shouldn't policy-making be entirely removed from the concerns of big business? Shouldn't it be the role of business to fit around policy, not the role of policy to fit around business? Like, ooh, as another example that she, the Ecuadorian delegate, was picking completely at random, why not instead of bullying a World goddamned Health Assembly into abandoning legislation that would have promoted breast-feeding in developing countries, just because you smoke cigars on Tuesdays with the CEO of an infant-formula manufacturer, why not instead of that you do your goddamned job and vote for what is morally right, and you let your cigar buddy, if he's any good at his job, reposition his company to sell containers for freezing breastmilk, or slings for breast-feeding mothers, or, oh, she didn't know, the Ecuadorian delegate didn't, she wasn't a business-person, but she did know what was right, and kowtowing to the whims of infant-formula or winter coat or central heating industries was not right, she was damn sure of that.

And this was when the Swiss delegate, because it's always bloody Switzerland, isn't it, in an attempt to diffuse the frosty atmosphere that was rapidly descending over the meeting room, suggested the majestic and rather brilliant visor scenario, to which everyone hastily agreed before any lobbyists could get involved, and that is why our sun can be seen in the sky above us even now bobbing around in a giant visor that blocks the glint from the other stars and leaves him free to look like he's in a Californian pop-punk band circa 2002, which the sun secretly loves, being a big Lit fan (obviously), and the moral of the story is... sometimes if you're self-conscious about work being better than yours you just have to block it out and get on with having fun your own damn self. But also the moral is that if you find yourself placing the profits of infant-formula manufacturers above the lives of mothers and children in developing countries then you need to go shoot yourself in the face immediately. And then also also the moral is that if you have nothing to write about on your blog and you just start writing then what comes out might be completely insane. But you just gotta pull that visor low and get humming those sweet Orange County tunes...

Please tell meee
Please tell me whyyyyy
The car is in the frooont yaaard
And Iiiiiii'm
Sleeping with my clooooothes onnnnn
Came in through the windoooow
Last night...

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