A PIECE I WROTE FOR THE IDLER ISSUE 27 ON THE SUBJECT OF 'THE IDIOT'

By the way, let me start by saying this isn't one of those confessional things where a writer boasts about all the crazy things they've done and tries to get the reader to be all impressed. I don't want your admiration, I don't think I deserve it and I honestly have nowhere to put it if you gave it to me anyway (I can hardly move in here for people's admiration).
No, what this is is a bit of me thinking about what makes someone a temporary fool and how, while this is often a bad thing, it puts a lot of normalcy into perspective.
Good wrod, normalcy. It was made up by Warren Harding, a President of the US sometime in the last century. Everyone knew it wasn't a real word, but he was the President and nobody was going to say anything. Who were the real fools there, huh? If you don't know the answer to that, maybe you are a fool. In which case, this whole article isn't going to mean much to you. I should skim on if I were you, find something else to read. There is plenty.

Oh, just so you know, the fools were the other people. Not Warren Harding. He was plain, straight down the line, stupid. The fool is the person that can see sense but just goes ahead and ignores it.
Here are some examples when I have been such a fool.

1*
ACT OF FOLLY
Agreeing to drink a pint of Mindf**k.

REASON FOR IT
This was the evening of the christmas dinner at my college. I was 21. I was drunk. I had had a lot of food and drink already that evening and believed that just a little more drink would make me happier, seeing as how that previous drink had got me this happy. Mindf**k was a cocktail made by putting in a double shot of every spirit by passing a pintglass along a row of bar optics and then filling the glass up with orange juice. It could give Oliver Reed (GRHS) pause.

EFFECT
After maybe ten seconds inside my body, this well named drink returned to the outside world whence it came. I puked all over myself and the person sitting next to me in front of over two hundred people who, up to that point had quite respected me. I instantly lost their respect, lost my self respect and lost the trust of the person next to me who now consistently moves away whenever she sees me. I gained a reputation as a fool.

LESSON LEARNT
That when you are drunk already drinking more is largely wrong. The fact is though, is that I have rarely taken this lesson to heart. When I have drunk enough, I still often drink more. I remain, sadly, a fool.

2
ACT OF FOLLY
Telling my girlfriend at the time that I had once fancied her cousin

REASON FOR IT
Basically, I did it because I felt guilty about having once fancied her cousin.

EFFECT
My girlfriend said she was unhappy that I had once fancied her cousin, but after I assured her that I no longer fancied her cousin and in fact fancied her, she became less unhappy and we shared many fabulous times. Secretly, though, I think she continued to suspect that I still fancied her cousin.

LESSON LEARNT
I have never since told a girl I have been going out with that I have ever fancied her cousin.

3*
ACT OF FOLLY
Running naked through the streets of Croyde in Cornwall one New Year's Night in the early 1990s. 1992, maybe.

REASON FOR IT
I was drunk and I wanted to emulate my hero Ken Campbell who, in his excellent show 'Memoirs of a Furtive Nudist' spoke movingly of the time he took all his clothes off for a midnight streak through Croyde. Having found myself in the same town I let myself go, quite literally, and streaked.

EFFECT
Some scratches, wet feet, the pity of my friends. I saw a policeman and some other people celebrating the New Year, which, as I say was probably 1992, but it might have been 1993. I avoided them however and returned the cottage my friedns and I had rented, later to return to the beach and sing to the stars of my achievement. The song should reach them sometime after Easter in the year 3862.

LESSON LEARNT
Streaking is fun. I did it on the spur of the moment and don't really regret it. It's on this list as it was a foolish thing to do, but foolish can be fun. In this case, a whole streak of fun.

4
ACT OF FOLLY
Going to British Columbia to try and find the town of Jackson Bay.

REASON FOR IT
Ken Campbell clearly inspires a great deal of foolishness. I had heard him talk about Geographical Acupuncture at the ICA (in summary between these brackets, you are the needle, the world is the body, find the place you have to be) and when I got home I found the town of Jackson Bay circled in an old atlas. I must have circled it for some reason years previously, but couldn't remember why, so I decided to make my way there and see if that was the place I had to be.

EFFECT
I got to Vancouver and found no mention of the town on any map of the Province. I did my best to get to where it should really have been, but it would have involved a bus that ran only once a week and hiring boats and really I would rather have gone to Seattle where there were cool bands and interesting examples of Space Age architecture.

LESSON LEARNT
That setting yourself a mission, finding it is just a little bit too hard to achieve and therefore not completing it isn't failure. It just means that the mission was foolhardy to begin with.

5*
ACT OF FOLLY
Walking home after a fancy dress party to which I had come dressed as a terrorist. I was stopped by the police who asked to see my gun to make sure it was, as I claimed, plastic and I was not, as I also claimed, in any way about to blow anything up or shoot anything.

REASON FOR IT
I didn't have a lift home from the party so decided to walk the four miles from Canterbury to Whitstable. It was winter, I was cold, so I put on my balaclava and combat jacket and slung my toy gun over my shoulder. I was, incidentally, drunk.

EFFECT
The police made me feel stupid, which, along with enforcing the law, seems to be their main function in society.

LESSON LEARNT
That it doesn't matter how big a fool you think you are, the police will always make you feel a bigger one. Also: always get a lift if you can, as everywhere's further than you think.

At this point it is worth pointing out that four of the five acts of folly above have been asterisked. This asterisk serves the following purpose: it represents moments when alcohol has influenced my behaviour to such an extent that foolishness, if not inevitable, is at least more likely. This isn't an excuse. It's just a fact and one which I hardly need defend.

Now a lot of people like this effect alcohol has on them, and I guess I have to count myself as one of them. It's why alcohol remains the world's number one recreational drug of choice. Inhibitions? I free you of them, says booze. Consequences? Ignore them, it says. Social conventions? So what, it slurs - ran naked through coastal towns if you like, what does it matter.
Childhood is like drunkenness in this way. Speaking for myself now, when I was young I was just learning about consequences, bits of behaviour I now find foolish as a sober adult were socially convinced out of me by teachers and parents through negative reinforcement. Saying what I actually thought about people, believing I could eat or drink anything, wearing what I wanted, or indeed nothing at all; things I now understand to be not the done thing were things I did all the time back then. Grown-ups may have found them funny, but I was punished for them and learnt that society doesn't really accept such activity.
Hence the poularity of Kids Say the Funniest Things where people who just happen to be young are held up as entertaining idiots for their unhibited opinions and confused logic. You might just as well have a show called Drunks Make The Funniest Fools as all that show is doing is liberating its audience from how we expect non-foolish adults to speak and act.
The important thing about being a fool is that you ignore consequences. Or you acknowledge them but just wish they'd go away. Those friends of President Harding that let him invent the word normalcy didn't care what would happen once it got out and now lexicographers and sub-editors twinge when it comes up.
But what if there really were no consequences? What if what you did now didn't have any impact on the future?
And I think the church vs orgy question arises here: The world is about to end - what do you do? Do you go and pray in a church in the belief that when this world ends you will still see the consequences of your actions or do you join the nearest orgy and hope that there will be no consequneces. This isn't just a religious question, it's about how you perceive your capacity for pleasure. The fool assumes that pleasure is infinite and should never be avoided; the non-fool wonders about the cost of glee somewhere down the road.
Now I know a bit about the end of the world, as, in my foolishness, I have collected movies and programmes to do with it.
For example, I love the first hour of The Stand and Survivors from the 70s which concentrated on bad diseases. I like a couple of nuclear war ones, but I currently adore doom from space scenarios. For example, there was that episode of Sliders and recently there were the movies Deep Impact, Armageddon and Last Night and of them, Deep Impact always struck me as the one movie that explored this best. Last Night had David Cronenburg going around telling people they'd still be getting gas until the last moment which would end the world in a very Canadian manner. Armageddon made, um, armageddon, look like a Coca Cola commercial (although any movie that include Steve Buscemi delivering the line 'Embrace the horror' does have at least one good point). And the Sliders episode (though heavily featuring orgies and churches) was resolved by the Professor inventing nuclear weapons to save the planet. Hmmm.
Deep Impact suggests that if you know there's an asteroid on its way to kill us all - an Extinction Level Event, indeed - what you shouldn't do is head towards the big cave where the American government is saving its boffins and lottery winners, but go and cuddle your Dad on a beach. Survival be damned, Tea Leoni's character (who had a place in the cave all sewn up) expresses herself in a supreme act of foolishness. When faced with the infinite she ignores sense and does whatever the heck she likes. And she's not even drunk.

But, extinction level event folly aside, the other thing is that even foolish acts have benefits. See it's only by doing them that we realise what potential morons we all actually are and how deeply unsatisfying an existence moronity generally is. It's good to remind ourselves regularly that below our civilized surface, there is an idiot just waiting to get out and spoil everything. How evolution must have cheered when it started to select for sensible. And how near we totter to the edge of barmy. I have just listed five of mine. I'm sure you could do the same.
So be on your guard for nonsense. Arm yourselves against insanity.
And while you're doing that, have a drink and ask yourself, "What's the worse that could happen if I just."

This piece was going to consist of just five things, but after thinking about it and getting a few beers in I decided to do one more foolish thing and put on my video of Deep Impact (1997 Dir: Mimi Leder)

6*
ACT OF FOLLY
Watching Deep Impact again.

REASON FOR IT
To see how people behave without consequences. I remembered the scene on the beach right except for the inexplicable foreignness of Tea Leoni's father, but a lot of the other characters cried and/or killed themselves when faced with the end.

EFFECT
I wasted a couple of hours that I could more valuably have spent playing Vib Ribbon on the Playstation.

LESSON LEARNT
That meteors are bad and it doesn't matter if loads of people die so long as they die fairly spectacularly. In the last scene, Morgan Freeman, playing President Plot Exposition, speaks to a big crowd. A tidal wave has just destroyed a model of New York and killed millions, but he pledges a return to normalcy. Lots of fools cheer.

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