THE CURSE OF "FUN"

Sometimes I think that I carry a curse. It’s very similar to the vampire’s curse that keeps them out of the daylight, although I don’t get all the “eternal youth” benefits that have made the genre so popular amongst people who have suddenly realised that they are destined to crumble to dust and don’t seem to think much of the idea. Mind you, I don’t have to drink any blood, either, so maybe it’s nothing like the vampire’s curse at all, apart from…

No nothing.

Forget it.

Stupid analogy.

My curse is that I am continuously perplexed and bewildered by “fun”. I don’t know how to do it, if I get within a hair’s breadth of having some, something will always come along and ruin it, and when I see other people having some, it confuses me and I really don’t understand what they see in it.

You see, what other people seem to regard as being “fun” generally falls into my own personal idea of hell. All of those wretched parties. All the making as ass of yourself for the amusement (or is it contempt?) of others. All the beer and the barbecues and the incessant chat. All the dancing and the laughing and the pointing at “stuff” that happens to be happening as so-called “entertainment”. All the screaming and excitement or precocious nonsense emanating from the various brats who are running about being annoying but get tolerated by the adults as if they’ve done something adorable.

Ah well, they do say “Hell is other people…”

All of those things that seem to be so terribly important to people but which are patently not. All of those days that come around in the calendar where it becomes essential to people that they have some “fun” but, more importantly to be seen to be having fun, all of which look  like no fun at all to the dispassionate observer. All the Saturday night voting competitions that have people parked on their sofas and gabbling on about inconsequential nonsense. And speaking of inconsequential nonsense, all of the bizarre “fun” associated with the football.

Once upon a time, in the days when it still mattered to me whether people “liked” me or not, I went along to see a football game in a pub somewhere. I ended up at the back of a crowded room that was far too noisy for me to chat to the people I was with, far away from the television screens I was supposed to see whatever match it was on, and drank too many beers so that the next morning I couldn’t remember a single thing about whatever game it was. That particular evening, I realised, had not been able to be thought of by any definition of “fun” that I recognised, but I imagine that a great many of my fellow pub-dwellers that night woke up thinking that they’d had a glorious night out, unless of course their team lost, I suppose…

I don’t get any of it. Sometimes I think that I never really did…

But then, I try and work out what I might consider to be “fun” and I can’t really think of anything.

Nothing at all.

Oh, I know there’s joy to be found in a great many things, and that “sad” can actually be a form of happiness for anyone who chooses to think about things a bit more, but the things that I have most enjoyed in life haven’t really involved a lot of other people and, to be brutally honest, most of my enjoyment has come from finding a way of not being amongst a great many of them.

Perhaps I’m just one of those sad souls who realised long ago that perhaps the purpose of human existence isn’t, after all, the pursuit of happiness, but simply to somehow find a way to survive in the jungle.

But we like to keep it to ourselves, generally, and not broadcast our little secret to too many people. After all, we don’t like to draw attention to ourselves lest we be accused of merely wanting to demonstrate how “different” we are, when we’re not really all that different, we merely enjoy different things, like a quiet night in, or not having hangovers, and not being one of the crowd, but none of those things are really all that different at all, when you think about it, they’re just what everyone else does only with less people around to distract you from it.

After all, “dislike for the unlike” is one of the most dangerous things any group of people together can start to think when they no longer think for themselves but start to think like the pack animals they are. Once “I think” becomes “we think” then those who think differently can very quickly find themselves in deep trouble.

Instead it’s a lot easier to lurk in the shadows, cut off from most of the human race, bewildered by their actions and totally unable to bring myself to join in.

Suddenly, that  “vampire” analogy starts to make sense again.