Considering the day this is more a Public Service Announcement as much as one of the lessons I’ve learned in my life.
I’ve never been a big drinker so when at parties with people all around slowly (and sometimes very quickly) losing their sense of right and wrong, up and down, hot v not, I had the opportunity to listen to some very smart people saying some very, very dumb things before they’d pass out.
Upon arriving at one party hosted by a girl from school a group of blokes from another school who had started drinking much earlier, started asking me en mass if my name was ‘Norm’? This is the ’80’s. There was a health campaign called ‘Life, Be In It’ promoting exercise and delivered by a fat cartoon character called ‘Norm’. In these kids’ bleary-eyed world, as I was fat, I must be Norm. When I tried to rationally explain that I was not, in fact, a fat cartoon character from TV but a real-life human from another school christened Craig, they seemed to be very disappointed. So disappointed that they felt it necessary to surround me and began the man-dance. Hitting drunks for being drunk is not a sport in which I choose to participate so I patiently stood there trying to convince them I was not Norm. I think it would have been easier to convince them I wasn’t Mickey Mouse. A not-as-drunk friend suggested that the mob would be appeased if I did admit to being Norm for the night. I agreed and thus became Norm for that moment to great cheers from this bunch of fucking imbeciles. I did take some revenge two weeks later when our schools met on the rugby field. None of them walked off.
Fools are more of a challenge. Mostly because there are so many more of them. Lots of agreeing and ‘oh, is that the time? I really must get home to feed the cat’. I have no cat but fools seem to be understanding that for some reasons cats can’t live unless fed at the same time every day.
Anyways, the cat is calling. Happy New Year.