Not to Think

     Jack was gutting the closet. He wanted her crap gone and along with it anything of his that she had given him. He was kneeling on a green plaid shirt she bought him a few years back, pulling items out and sorting them. Behind him were two piles; one by the door which was stacked with her clothes and make up and political science textbooks, all destined for the trash. The second pile he would keep; his albums, business journals, manila envelopes stuffed with papers. He hadn't been through the closet for years and he was increasingly angry at what he found. A broken air conditioner. A way-overdue library book. An uncashed check. Old pairs of her fucking shoes. He was immersed in this when he came across a box stuffed at the back beneath a permanently bent foldaway ironing board. He reached to the back of the closet and opened it. He had not seen the spikes in nearly fifteen years. They were folded double and looked like they had been forced into the box, crumpled and torn to shit. He turned and threw them carelessly into the trash pile. He was picking up an abysmal print of a pokey sail boat in a squall she had bought for the apartment from a charity shop in North Berwick when he realized that the old man must be dead now. The thought came to him naturally and with no emotion, like a cold fact.

     The old man had trained him to sprint when he was young. He was a retired sprinter and lived a few doors down from Jack’s house. In the fall when the ground was hard and the cold wind blew he would drive Jack and two other boys out to the field by the barely-funded community centre and teach them how to run. He had them circle the flat topped hill with the oak trees and the steep sides to warm their skinny knee-knocking legs and they ran hundreds on the uneven dry ground by the rugby posts kicking up dust that blew across the field in the wind. To cool down they ran up the hill and through the quiet open clearing that passed through the trees and came out on the other side by the field, then rounded the field and came back through the clearing. They must have been around fourteen years old.

     Jack was small and weaker than the other two. He was teased by them because he always did what his parents and teachers expected of him. On one of the first days when the man had them line up and run the hundred he had called them back in a circle and had shown them one by one what it meant to run with their arms. Jack walked the hundred swinging his arms like a soldier and the other two laughed at him, and the old man told them that if they were not interested in learning they could wait in the goddamn car. But once they understood that the man knew the sport inside and out, and that he had more or less made his living by it and had paid for his knowledge of it with effort and perseverance, they began to listen to him more carefully when he talked. He paid particular attention to Jack.

     Jack’s mother lived alone. She was reluctant to talk to the man. He was a catholic and he had his own community at the church. It was a working class neighborhood and the man was truly the last of the old stock; it had turned into a modern sprawl of grey block houses, like filing cabinets cheaply built by the state to drop lower income families into. Nobody was really close to him and his wife had died years back of bowel cancer, which, in Jack's mother's mind, would make talking to him insensitive and tactless. He had long ago adjusted to what had happened, but it required less effort on her part to assume the contrary was true. She also told herself that it was Jack’s business and she should stay out of it.

     The old man had been a great runner in his day. For five months when he was at his peak, long before any of the boys were born and perhaps before their fathers were born too, he held the national record for the hundred and for the hundred and twenty. He had travelled in those days and he competed against many good runners and a few who were great. He did not make much money but each morning when he woke up he was able to commit himself honestly and fully to what he did and he lived with purpose because of it. He was forty years into his retirement from running and twenty from carpentry. He spent most of his time back then training talent passed to him by an old friend who was a scout of sorts, and training boys from the neighborhood who were not talents but who, filed in their grey block cabinets, would never realize any talent that they had. On Sunday he went to church and in the evenings he drank.

     When Jack and the boys had settled into the regime and were training regularly he gave them each an old pair of spikes, sad tattered things so worn the boys could wrap them around their wrists or twist them entirely so that the heel touched the toe. Some were from runners he’d once trained. One pair he had once worn. These were brown and faded leather shoes, with thin leather laces and cross stitched with emerald green thread on the front. He gave this pair to Jack.

     Jack remembered that the first time they wore the spikes one of the boys stepped on the other’s hand while he was tying his laces and the third boy nicked open the skin on his calf while he ran. After a few weeks as they got used to wearing the spikes there was less blood and they felt queer without them.

In winter it rained and bitter winds from the mountains to the north turned the days icy and fierce and the nights dangerous. On most nights the tiled roofs that capped the houses were slashed and drummed hard with sleet which could shift in the wind like a swarm. On such nights while the boys slept Jack would picture the old man sitting listening to the irregular tinny patter of the rain on the corrugated roof of the hut in the yard, sipping whisky and soda with the television on with the sound turned down. He was an avid reader once; he told Jack that his own father had pushed Carlyle and Connolly and Lansbury on him when he was young, and he read London and Sinclair and Orwell when he grew up.

     During the winter it was too wet and cold to train outdoors, so they used the Church where the old man had a back room full of equipment. He was well liked by the priest.

     The church was a modern thing set in a concrete yard on a second housing estate nearby. It was grey and always looked wet, with an asymmetrical roof that sloped and did not drain and let the damp in. A dented metal cross was perched beneath the eave on the front just above the entrance. The first time the used the church they pulled up by the side door they followed the old man along the path by the side of the church where a high metal fence ran and stopped where a gate must have once stood. They passed through the gate into an alley, where broken glass covered the ground. He opened the door with the key and they stepped into the hall. It was cramped and smelled of dampness, with a low ceiling, and the hall was lit by a bright bulb and led to the back room. The back room was large and had high ceilings, and near the ceiling were small wide windows. The floorboards were mahogany, and black dirt and wax filled the gaps between them and clogged the lines and scrapes that ran along their surface. The walls were breeze blocks painted white and the ceiling was plaster-boarded over and sank in the spots where the water had seeped through. In the corner there was a treadmill and jack recalled that the oldest boy went straight to it and said that it didn’t have no power cord. The man told him it was manual.

     In the middle of the floor where the light was good there was a bench and a set of dumbells and a rack for barbells. There were no barbells. On the wall on the opposite side there was a black and white poster of a sprinter crossing the line with his head ducked down. The man told them that this was a station and that in this station they would skip. There were five stations; push-ups, squats, sit-ups, and a metal bar wedged in the door-frame for pull-ups.

     In a closet by the rear door there was a speed bag hanging from a flat circular cut of timber. He taught them how to hit it without skinning their hands, and to time each hit with the bag so that it thudded three times on the wood.

     Always while they trained the old man would smoke in the hall with the door open listening to the rain slap on the concrete path in the alley. In between cigarettes he’d pull on his rain cape and sweep up the glass. There was always broken glass.

     Jack was a sickly boy and shorter than the others. When he trained they made fun of him because he had to use the light set of weights and they derided him for running distance. They were proud that they were stronger and they focused more on him because they were acutely aware of how the old man favored him. They joked that if he tried too hard and managed to force the heavy bag a few feet from where it hanged with a flurry of taps he had better run before it falls and knocks him to the floor. He took it well though and concentrated on his sets. The old man would stand with the two while they worked but he was often watching the shadow on the wall outside the closet where the boy was working the speedbag and listening to the irregular drumming of it on the wood. He was struck at how the boy would lose the rhythm often and yet never get frustrated. He felt there was something in that. The old man told him early that he couldn’t compete in the hundred with the other two because they were stronger, but that he could be a decent distance man if he put his heart into it. Of course the old man said this as a kindness as the boy would never be a decent runner. And at some level the boy knew it.

     Often the old man would wander over to the closet where the boy worked and he would lean on the frame of the door looking at the two in the larger room, and without looking at Jack he would talk to him. And a few times if the two were busy he would walk into the room and tell him, ‘stop, before you break your hand,’ and he would work the bag himself for a minute or so, almost lazily with short, deft jabs with the back of his closed old hands, going three left to two right then two for two then one on each, mixing it up to show off to the boy and ending it with a hook or a straight. He dragged in a bench one day and had the boy hit the bag while standing on it and in time he had a steady rhythm going. Jack remembered how after the heavy bag, hitting the speed bag was like drumming a weightless balloon. And even now when he has a chance to hit one it comes back effortlessly like a skill loyal to him because of the time he spent earning it, as though the regular bur-a-boom bur-a-boom, bur-a-boom is etched in the memory of his muscles and mind. It was the one thing he could do that the other two could not and they pretended to be unimpressed with it.


                         ***

                                                                    

     Jack had stopped taking things from the closet. His memory of the days spent training was followed by the memory of when it started to end. For a year the boys met the old man at his front door and he’d have them in for a minute before they went to the park or the Church. Jack would stand in the house bashful and awkward looking at the trophy cabinet reading the inscriptions, each a recognition of the man’s past greatness. He went there sometimes without the others to watch football or to talk about track, and years later to talk about books, and when there was gout, to bring the old man his medication and his pension. He always felt that he needed an excuse to be there and the man was conscious of this.

     The following summer something changed. One day they were sitting in the old man’s house talking about an upcoming race. When the old man walked out to the hut to dig out some tape to strap up an ankle, the other two boys started talking about how the place smelled of piss and they’d laugh at the picture of the old man and his wife who had died the year before. Jack laughed too and he could not meet the old man’s eyes when he came in from the hut. He went along with the talk about the old man behind his back and unlike the others he paid for it dearly because he was a kind, sensitive boy.

     It went like this for a while. The old man noticed and was often brusque with the boys. With two weeks before the winter sprint the oldest boy’s hamstring went. He had been training hard and the old man knew that he had a good shot of making the first three and losing his handicap for the New Year hundred. The boy was determined that he was going to run and the man told him that he would rub the leg down and knead the hamstring during their next session, and see how it went from there.

     On the day of the race Jack woke early. His room was cold and he could see snow had settled on the window ledge. He looked out the window and the tops of the rows of houses were capped with snow and only the hollow frame of the pylon stood out black against the white sky. He ate a quick breakfast of porridge and dressed warmly, and shouldered the sports bag with his spikes and his water bottle. He left the house and walked crunching through the snow, thinking about the race. He stopped at the house of the oldest boy and rang the doorbell. Both of them were there. They set off together.

     ‘Ready for that rub down?’ he said to the oldest.

     ‘I aint doin’ it.’ He said it without looking at Jack.

     ‘How come?’

     ‘I’m done with it.’

     They walked, he remembered, without talking, and the only sound was of the snow packing and tightening under their feet. Jack was acutely aware of a change in the older boy who was limping, flattening the snow with one boot and brushing through it with the other. His jaw was set and he scowled, and every response was curt. The other boy was aware of it too and he was quiet.

     When they rounded the corner the old man was scraping snow off the windshield. The trunk was still open and he had been loading up the car. In the front garden the branches of the maple tree were coated with frost and a robin sat in its midst. The old man turned when he heard the crunch of the snow and he waved. He pulled a towel out of the bag and raised it. The oldest boy stopped and looked straight at him.

     ‘I aint going.’ There was vitriol is his voice.

     ‘Hell you mean you aint?’ said the other boy.

     The old man was watching them and he whistled once sharply and the robin broke from the tree and disappeared into the conifers in the garden next door. The sound pierced the crisp silent morning. He cupped his mouth and said to them, ‘get movin’.’

     They did not move.

     The other two looked at him. His face was hard and he was scowling.

     ‘Christ hurry up,’ said the old man.

     ‘Fuck you I aint comin’, the boy shouted.

     And he slung his backpack off his shoulder and opened it and threw the spikes to the ground and they hit the concrete sidewalk and rested by the curb. He turned and limped off and his breath rose in the air in clouds as he dragged his lame leg through the powdery snow.

     The old man watched him.

     Jack and the other boy stood in silence, watching the boy limp away.

     ‘Comin’ or not?’ he asked them flatly. He was not looking at the oldest boy.

     Jack remembered walking up to the spikes and picking them up, and handing them to the old man. He never forgot the look on his face. He could tell he was deeply hurt.

     They got in the car silently and he drove them to the track. They never mentioned what had happened.


                         ***

                                                                                

     Jack made it a third of the way around the three thousand race, running through the snow on the horse track that they used for the distance races. When he gave up he turned to the right and marched with his head down straight through the middle of the course to the club house, where the old man was waiting for him with a hot drink and an overcoat. The other boy came in third in his race. It was his last.

     The two older boys never went to the old man’s house again. It was a phase, or something, they told Jack later. Jack still saw the old man regularly back then but what they said about the thing being just a phase moiled in his mind. He had always wanted to be like the old man. He was well educated and content to be a runner and a carpenter. He once found something simple and dignified in this, but he grew unsure.

     He got into the local college. He was the first in his family to do it, and he got a scholarship because of his ‘economic status.’ He told the old man he was thinking about studying literature and the old man was eager know the syllabus so he could tell him that was he studied was tripe and that he would give him some real literature. And though the old man no longer took pleasure in reading, he talked about what he had once read when he was a boy until he became embarrassed at how much he had talked.

     And Jack grew weary of him. When he visited he was no longer awed by the medals and trophies and he began to see the old man’s house as squalid, and he decided that he could smell piss after all. Whatever it was about the old man that was once romantic to him had died, not in stages or gradually, but suddenly. The old man was the same of course, though a little slower to get up, and drunk a little earlier each day. In time he saw the old man, without sympathy, as not worth the effort.

                         ***                                                                  

     Jack was deep in the corner of the closet still but sifting through the clutter with less fervor. Something was nagging at him. He gave up for the time being and turned on his knees hoping to rip the damned shirt and he stood up and walked over to the pile by the door. He picked up the spikes. They were heavier than the spikes the other two got, he thought. No wonder I was slower. He held one of them up in front of the light to look more closely at the sole. The heel was loose on one and a few of the spikes were missing. He turned it over and noticed that the laces were missing but the leather was still in good condition and the emerald green stitching across the front of both shoes was still intact. He tested one of the spikes with his thumb, long since worn down to a blunt nub. He undid the laces and loosened the tongue. On the back of it his initials were etched in faded blue ink in the old man’s hand. He ran his thumb over the letters. He placed the spikes carefully back into the shoebox and put the lid on. He stooped and, still standing next to the pile by the door, slid the box across the floor to the other pile. The spikes bumped gently against the coffee table and came to a halt, and he continued looking through the closet.

The Seawall

    Hailstones struck the plastic window pane intermittently like handfuls of buck shot being thrown at a tarpaulin, and gathered on the sill and on the gravel path which passed beneath the window. She lay there propped up in a cold steel bed swathed in white sheets with only her pallid arms and her head ­exposed. He sat by her side in the small wooden chair, wrapped in his coat. It was a tiny room with a broken heater which he had already complained about. Dust layered the inside ledge of the window and the rim of the huge ceramic pot which was empty. The doctor, with that matter-of-fact air that only doctors can pull off, walked in through the open door and spoke quietly to them while rubbing his eyelids with the palms of his hands. He told them that they would do what they could. There was a chance, he said, and that they should be hopeful but not over hopeful. 

     ‘I’m working through the night and I’ll personally look in on him,’ he said. He also said that he had done all he could do for the moment. They should get some rest. He would be down the hall. When he left them a nurse came and the boy was taken to an even smaller room where the blinds were partly drawn.
     ‘You should rest’, said the man.
     ‘I can’t.’
     ‘But you should. You’ll get sick.’
     She tried to sidle up the bed but could not.
     ‘You don’t understand. I can’t.’
     She did not say that she was afraid to fall asleep because she believed that if she slept the boy would die. She felt this but did not allow herself to think of it.

     The man's eyes stung. He wiped his hands on his jeans and rubbed his face, making a noise like sandpaper on a breeze block. He had been driving home after a ten hour shift when he got the call and he had driven straight to the hospital. It had been a long day and a long drive and he had not eaten since morning.
     ‘Hell I’ll watch him,' he said.
     She said nothing. She was always beautiful and in the places where he had aged and weathered she had done alright. Her eyes were deep and grey and when she was angry all that was serene in them disappeared and looking at her was like looking into a storm.
     She did not reply.
     ‘I said I’ll watch him,’ he said again.
     He held her hand in his. Her stare was cold. She was tired.
     And she gave in. She made him swear to watch the boy through the night, then they called on the doctor for something to help her sleep, and ten minutes later she was out.

****

He headed to the bathroom to wash up. He was a plasterer and worked on a site outside the city and his face was powdered here and there still with dust from a drywall. He washed his face and his hands, scrubbing his jaw where the pores were clogged. What a face, he thought. His nose was bent where it had been hit back when he used to box and his eyes were small and pale blue, and more red where they should be white. And a new line on it every day it seemed. Two kids already and medical bills for a third that probably won’t make it. If she knew I got three weeks left before they lay us all off. He cupped water from the tap and drank it, letting it warm before gulping it. He had small hands which were ugly and weak from the toil and the early bouts and training that was supposed to make them strong in the first place. He wore a red plaid shirt which had been soaked with sweat first at work then again during the birth. It stuck to his back. He dried his hands and walked the corridor back to where the boy was lying.
     He bought coffee for a dollar from the vending machine outside the room, black because there was no creamer. He opened the door. Green lights on one side of the machine where the boy lay and on the other side a red light and a grey tube expanding and contracting in time with the rise and fall of his tiny chest. He looked at the boy and believed in his heart that he would not live. But he had promised his wife that he would watch over him so he would sit and he would wait. He picked the firmest chair and placed it in a well-lit spot so he would not fall asleep.
     The window in the room faced south and was not struck by the hail in the same manner as the window in the other room was. It was still on the ground floor though, and through the window he could see the car park and the flurry of hail in the yellow of the streetlights, and beyond the car park the highway. With the blinds partly drawn narrow shafts of moonlight settled in lines on the carpet and caused a metal tray on the trolley beneath the window to glimmer. It dimmed and became an outline against the wall as a cloud moved overhead, and when it passed and the moon was open and the sky clear it shined again beneath the window. This went on for a while and kept the man occupied. He wanted to stay awake but he had worked long hours and the gleam became irritating so he got up from the chair and walked to the window and closed the blinds completely.
     The room was cold and with the shirt still damp on his back he wrapped himself in his jacket. The door was open and conversation spilled into the room as doctors and nurses passed the door. He remembered reading a short story set in a hospital once, and something about rooftops and the war. And a joke about friend or enema. There were no great snatches of conversation here, only murmurs about charts and patients. He entertained himself by trying to give meaning to half-heard sentences, but as before he grew annoyed with the noise and closed the door. His back hurt like hell and the cold was now in his bones, so he moved to the couch which was against a radiator.
     Though determined to watch the boy he realized he was not well and began to feel drowsy. It got worse outside and lightening fell a few miles away, lighting for an instant the big pines which stood stolid in the wind a few hundred yards away beyond the car park. He had driven through them on the road into the hospital earlier. He listened for the clap of thunder to work out how far off it had fallen. His father had taught him that when he was a boy during a storm, to calm him. Five miles, he thought. The last one was four. Are you coming or going storm? He looked at the boy and thought it a shame that he would probably never teach him how to count between the flash and the thunderclap.

     He was dozing and thinking of his father when the door opened and the doctor walked in. He carried two cups of coffee. He drank deeply from the cup in his right hand and offered him the second cup.
     ‘Coffee?’
     ‘Thanks.’
     He accepted the offer but he made no effort to get up so the doctor put the coffee on the floor in front of him. Steam was rising from it. He looked in on the boy and took down readings from the screen. He marked his chart, the pen scribbling against the paper on the clipboard.
     ‘You gonna watch him all night?’ he said without looking at him.
     ‘Yeah.’
     ‘You should get some sleep.’
     ‘S’pose.’
     He could hear the wind outside hard against the window now and against the walls which faced the wind, with no trees to act as a breaker, and it was cold and the room was queer in the moonlight and queerer still when the lightning fell. He was warm where he lay and he thought to ask the doctor how the boy was doing, but when he spoke he realized the doctor was no longer there. He was unsure if he had been there at all but on the floor by his feet was a cup of coffee with no steam rising from it. His eyes were heavy and his mind was sapped and sank without a fight.

***

Walking by the sea alone, the sky clear and open, the tide out. The riprap like behemoth coal in a giant's furnace beneath the curving sea wall. The sun low and the clouds grey and tinged red, the cool air more fresh than biting. Climbing the metal railing set in the concrete and leaning over the riprap pretending to fall then at the last moment clutching the railing. Going forward, carelessly while the water reaches onto the sand and seeps into it. Reaching the end of the beach by the station and seeing no way forward and turning knowing that he has to go back. And the way back seeming different somehow, barren now with the sun gone. Cupping his hands into circles and glassing the distance and seeing nothing, the horizon tenebrous. Conscious of the black sea slowly rising to his right. Great clouds gathering above and the breath of the wind no longer steady but fitful as though in an asthma attack. Walking quickly between the now immense wall of water on one side and the jagged rocks on the other. And up ahead coming into view the sea like a cliff stands and as though waiting for him to see begins to fall soundlessly towards him, polishing the rip-rap slick and black and marking the granite of the sea wall like oil. Forcing him up on the rocks. The sea no longer smelling of salt but of some foul miasma. He climbs the riprap in the dark holding onto the sharp rocks not letting go as the water continues to fall.
                                                    ***

The doctor opened the door. In the room the machine droned gently and the boy lay still. He was small and pale as he had been before, but he had survived and looking at him the doctor knew that he would be okay. In the corner by the radiator wrapped in his jacket and facing the couch the man lay asleep. His shoulders were hunched and he was mumbling and the doctor decided to leave him. He opened the blinds slightly. Sunlight sheathed the floor beneath the window.

*****

An hour later when the nurse came in the room the man was still asleep on the sofa in the corner. He had his back to the incubator and his jacket had fallen on the floor.
     ‘Sir? Mr Hyatt?’
     She pressed his shoulder. He woke and turned, and as he did he kicked the polystyrene cup and spilled the cold coffee on the floor. He sat up and stared at her, his eyes red.

‘Don’t worry, someone will clean that. Mr. Hyatt your son is with your wife in the ward. We will need to keep him in for a few days, but the signs are that he will be healthy. Do you understand?’
     He had expected to be told that his son had died in the night and that there was nothing anyone could do. He was blank for a moment then he began to think about selling the car or maybe renting out one of the rooms in the house. His face was haggard and the nurse waited for him.
     ‘Mr. Hyatt?’
     ‘Thank you. I was asleep.’
     ‘Yes, you must be tired. Would you like to see him?’
     He did not seem to hear. He shook her hand and thanked her quietly. She said she would give him a minute and she left.
     He leaned forward on the sofa. The incubator was empty now and the pump was lifeless at its side. On the floor the coffee had seeped into the carpet like water into sand. He shuddered at the thought. Standing up, he rubbed his face with his palms to wake himself. They were rough and his skin was too, and he was glad to have slept because the day would be long.

Victim of an unjust society? Don't forget to say "thank you"

     It's not uncommon for corporations to spend millions on advertising during events that draw in the masses. In light of tonight's Superbowl XXIIXX2K etc, I've been motivated from apathy to diet apathy by one shameless ad that beats the lot.
     We're all used to being bombarded by advertisements. I accept that they're there after the intro to Storage Wars, then again five minutes later causing me to lose the thread of the narrative (Did Barry sell the shrunken head? Did Hester outbid someone at the last second like the bastard he is?). Whether it's Maxwell the Geico representative zip-lining all the way home or a teaser for the next episode of Finding Bigfoot (yes, it IS on the Animal Planet), I'm amazed at the lack of impact any of these promotional pigs and teasers have on me (I have nothing worth insuring, and as with God, Santa, and the Robot Devil, I already know Bigfoot exists). There is one ad, however, that has recently caused me to stop and say "hold on, this is a travesty".
     It happened while making a cuppa at half time (Newcastle 2-1 Aston Villa). The ad started with a group of scruffy unwashed tattered bairns in a work house scooping up gruel. "Twist" you're thinking. Brilliant. One of the little waifs has the audacity to walk up to the beadle. I was expecting some hilarious unexpected, dare I say it....twist; the kid is going to throw the porridge on the ground and demand a Whopper, and they'll all get a Whopper and it'll be fabulous.
http://www.values.com/inspirational-stories-tv-spots/117-Oliver-With-A-Twist
     He asks for more. More? More! The beadle is horrified; a gasp goes around the workhouse canteen and all eyes are on the boy. He says "please", and while the beadle saunters into the midst of the boys to make an example of the ungrateful little shit, the dispenser drops a second splatter of gruel into his plate. Rattled, the beadle turns and gives the dispenser a look that says "oh you bastard", and he is stopped in his tracks when the dispenser replies, "well he did say please". That got him. He looks up, perplexed. He smiles. He looks at the camera and says "and, he also said 'thank you'". The ad ends with a string quartet playing hallelujah and the words "please and thank you: pass it on" across the screen, which fades to "Values.com: the foundation for a better life".
     What is wrong with this advert? Besides the fact that it reeks of smuggery, it leaves too much wiggle room for interpretation. To the desensitized pig watching sloth, the ad is funny because it reminds us of Dickens, the Englishman what wrote books about people with letter box mouths and made the poor funny. To the more astute pig watching sloth, the ad has some darker implications. Forget the strings and the bum touching at the end. The message that I took from this was that the poor should not ask for more and they should be polite when they're not doing it. Greedy poor, I was thinking, they're lucky they get gruel in the first place, no matter how watered down. So what if Mr. Bumble the beadle enjoys wealth at the expense of the less fortunate, and who cares if he indulges in the odd "wery fortifying gin, for one's health, of course." Didn't he earn it by being born into a higher class? Course he did. In a society that is increasingly upset with the top 0.01% of the population having 120% of the total society's wealth, it shows a lack of tact on the part of www.values.com to release an advert that can be interpreted (albeit cynically, and by an idiot) as a right wing pull-your-socks-up get-on-your-bike piece of propaganda. Is this overkill on my part? Is it wrong to interpret the reinforcing of "values" and manners in the impoverished as an oh so subtle "thumbs up" to Republican values, and a not so subtle message to the poor that there's no need to be impolite just because you're the victim of an unjust society that sees you as a beggar just because you lacked the support and opportunity that a large portion of society is fortunate enough to have had.

     After looking for proof that I had overreacted, I came across a section on the values.com website titled "equality". It was a quote from Nietzsche, which ran: "The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else." Forget the fact that the odds are stacked against you and that you have little chance at paying rent when a "hard-working" few are able to own ivory yachts. You have to raise yourselves up, they say, to achieve equality and a just society. It's that simple.

     Inequality. Don't fight it. Smile, and for Bigfoot's sake, say "thank you".