supperware.net » writings » you know, I'm worried about Ben …

Stange things have been happening recently. Everyone I know seems to be whispering conspiratorially behind my back. All my friends have stopped phoning me, except an ex-girlfriend who just wants to argue. A woman standing over there keeps looking at me strangely, and I don’t like what her body language is saying. And yet, people who I don’t even know are so concerned about my mental health that they’ve started sticking up posters everywhere asking me if I’m OK. And that’s got me thinking.

Are you OK? Are you OK? These posters have woken me up. I’ve mulled the question over for days, and the answer always comes out the same. No, of course I’m not OK; thanks anyway. I also know something else, though: that people who are not OK are the dark matter of our universe. They constitute an overwhelming majority, yet you’ll never see them, hear them, or know about them.

I don’t think I’m stupid. I certainly know what paranoia is, and that it closely describes what you’re reading now. But the pieces of this jigsaw are fitting together, and the picture they are forming disturbs me. I know what’s happening around me, and I know that I’m not mad.

You, me and everybody else in this university are turning into characters from an Australian teenage soap opera.

Let’s consider the facts I know. Everyone has started doing exercise. Lots of it. I feel like I’m the only person on campus without a gym pass. My friends and colleagues are swimming, cycling, running, climbing, and circuit training all over the place. It’s happening all around campus: people whom I once thought I knew are turning themselves into pert, healthy clones of the individuals they used to be, leaving me — a lonely, slightly flabby, and almost imperceptibly balding postgraduate — looking more and more like Harold from Neighbours.

You want more evidence? There are the recent and stupid misunderstandings I’d rather not have had with my ex-girlfriend. The stupider arguments I fell into with three members of my band today. These misunderstandings are becoming more frequent. I conclude that people are forsaking their erstwhile human personalities in favour of a banal, adolescent, easily-scripted alternative: ‘fly off the handle by the seat of your pants.’ Those posters asking oh-so-innocently ‘are you OK?’ are just manifestations of what we’re becoming.

I’m sure almost everybody is already familiar with this format. Cut to a domestic scene. Gaudy furniture. Bad lighting. One character says to another, ‘You know, I’m worried about Ben.’ Then there ensues about ninety seconds of inconsequential dialogue delivered with a question mark wherever a full stop ought to be? It’s accompanied by an obbligato of distracting hand movements? If a more heated crisis is anticipated, one of the characters will whimper, ‘I … I feel so helpless.’

Suddenly, in comes Ben, who has been listening in for the last ten seconds, jumping to conclusions and not bothering to listen to any subsequent explanation. Uproar. Slam. Then a slick transition to an ultra-clean temperance bar quietly playing some one-year-old R&B on a jukebox with invisible loudspeakers. Two or three young, toned people sit in a row. And here’s a strange thing: they never actually consume the food and drink in front of them. If you’ve been to Seasons recently, you’ll know why.

I have no doubt that, true to fiction, every young woman I know is soon going to ‘leave the country’, or maybe ‘get run over by a train’. You mark my words: the month after they do, they’ll have a chart hit. One day after that I’ll wander innocently into a newsagents, and find them adorning the front cover of some gentrified masturbatory aid. Going to Azerbaijan on an open-ended backpacking holiday, are you? Ha! I’m not fooled. You’re working on a solo career and flashing your bum at an FHM photographer for ten grand, that’s what you’re doing. Well, I’m not going to be deceived any more.

And here’s another thing. People around me who should know better, and have proper English language qualifications, have started voicing objective statements as if they are questions. They have begun to use ‘was like’ instead of ‘said’ in reported speech. Four months ago, I heard somebody I know — somebody intelligent — expressing some past incredulousness by exclaiming, ‘And I was like, "Hello?"’ Nobody else batted an eyelid. At the time, I was horrified, but now it all makes perfect sense.

Soon, my friends shall start to refer to their parents ‘the olds’ just as they now refer to this University as ‘uni’ — a word which has been imbued with some credibility by the recent sinister rebranding of what used to be The University of Surrey. People in Roots will drink all their beer and fruit juice from bottles. They’ll rotate these carefully so that the manufacturer’s marque always faces outwards, clearly readable between their fingers. And before I know what’s happening, Paddy Dowling will be comin’ over one arvo, with a crate of stubbies on the back of his ute.

Orwell was right: this is our destiny. The Grundy Television Company are Thought Police, monitoring, bowdlerising, bastardising, twisting, and regurgitating our conversations. They dictate our thoughts and our words. They oversee the desecration of our beautiful language with their ugly Newspeak.

Perhaps I’m too old to understand this revolution, and I must admit that the evidence is still fairly pretty circumstantial. Nevertheless, if you’re female and you’re not intending to leave the country soon, I suggest that you steer clear of railway lines, just in case. Take a look at the world around you. You still think I’m crazy? Well you obviously don’t understand me. You’ll never understand me. You’re a drongo. So just rack off, mate.

Published in barefacts 1050 • 13 February 2003