Inner North London, top floor flat,
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
Rice paper partitions,
modern art and am bition
The host's a physician,
Bright bloke,
has his own practice
His girlfriend's an actress,
an old mate of ours from home
And they're always great fun,
so to dinner we've come.
As we make introductions I'm
struck by her beauty
She's irrefutably fair with dark
eyes and dark hair
But as she sits,
I admit I'm a little bit wary
'Cause I notice the tip of
the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area just
above the derrière
And when she says "I'm
Sagittarian,"
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon
when she says her name is Storm.
Conversation is initially bright
and light hearted
But it's not long before Storm
gets started:
"You can't know anything,
knowledge is merely opinion!"
She opines,
over her Cabernet Sauvignon,
Vis- à- vis some un
hippily empirical comment by me.
"Not a good start" I think,
We're only on pre- dinner drinks,
And across the room,
my wife widens her eyes,
Silently begs me: "Be nice!"
A matrimonial warning,
not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm
Whether knowledge is so loose-
weave of a morning when
Deciding whether to leave her
apartment by the front door
Or the window on her second floor.
The food is delicious and Storm,
My hostess throws me a glance.
She, like my wife,
knows there's a chance
I'll be off on one of my rare
but fun rants but I shan't
My lips are sealed,
I just wanna enjoy the meal
And al though Storm
is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking
the boat
Although it's becoming a bit of a wrestle
Because like her meteorolo
gical namesake,
Storm has no such concerns
for our vessel:
"Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy,
They promote drug dependency
at the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are im moral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs when herbs
can solve it?
Why use chemicals when homeopathic
solvents can resolve it?
I think it's time we all
Return- to- live with natural
medical alternatives."
And try as I like,
a small crack appears in
my diplomacy- dike.
"By definition," I begin,
"Alternative medicine," I continue,
"Has either not been proved to work,
or been proved not to work.
Do you know what they call
Alternative medicine that's been
proved to work?
Medicine."
to tea,
I took a natural remedy derived
from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller that's virtually
side- ef fect free
It's got a weird name, darling,
what was it again?
M- masprin? Basprin? Oh
yeah! Asprin!
Which I paid about a buck for down
at the local drugstore.
The debate briefly abates
as my hosts collect plates
But as they return with desserts
Storm pertly asserts:
"Shakespeare said it first:
There are more things in heaven and
Earth than ex ist in your philosophy.
Science is just how we're
trained to look at reality,
It doesn't explain love
or spirituality.
How does science explain psychic
s? Auras?
The afterlife? The power of prayer?"
I'm becoming aware that I'm
staring,
I'm like a rabbit
Suddenly trapped in the blinding
headlights of vacuous crap.
Maybe it's the Hamlet she just
misquothed
Or the sixth glass of wine I just quaffed
But my dip lomacy dike groans
And the arsehole held back by its stone
s can be held back no more:
"Look, Storm, Sorry I don't mean
to bore you
but there's no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds or
Tea- leaves or star- signs
or meridian lines
These people aren't applying a skill,
They're either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for people who claim they
hear God's demands
And spiritual healers who
think they've magic hands.
By the way, why
do we think it's okay for
People to pretend they
can talk to the dead?
Isn't that totally fucked in the head?
Lying to some crying
woman whose child has died
And telling her you're in touch
with the other side?
I think that's fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify here that there's
no such thing as a psychic?
What are we, fucking two?
Do we actually think that
Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still believe that Santa
brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson didn't
have facelifts?
Are we still so stunned by
circus tricks that we think
That the dead would wanna talk
to pricks like John Edwards?
Storm to her credit
point,
let me think for a bit.
Oh wait, my mistake,
that's absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it's views
based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation
so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me that, say, homeopathy works,
then I will change my mind
I'll spin on a fucking dime
I'll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
'It's a miracle! Take
physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it's memory of a long
Lost drop of onion juice
seems Infinite
It somehow for gets all the poo
it's had in it!'
teries,
yeah
But there are an swers out there
And they won't be found by
people sitting around
Looking serious and saying 'Isn't
life mysterious?'
'Let's sit here and hope.
Let's call up the fucking Pope.
Let's go watch Oprah interview
Deepak Chopra.'
If you wanna watch tele, you should
watch Scooby Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there
Was a church with a ghoul or a
ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask
and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude
who ran the waterslide.
Because throughout history every
Mystery ever solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.
Does the idea that there might
be knowledge frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon on
Wiki- fucking- pedia might
enlighten you frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be
a supernatural so blow your
Hippy noodle that you'd rather just
Stand in the fog of your in
ability to Google?
Isn't
Just this beautiful, complex,
wonderfully unfathomable, natural world?
How does it so fail to hold
our attention that we have to
Diminish it with the invention of cheap,
man- made myths and monsters?
If you're so into your Shakespeare,
lend me your ear:
"To gild re fined gold,
to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet...
is just fucking silly"
Or something like that.
Or what about Satchmo?!
"I see trees of Green,
Red roses too,"
And fine, if you wish to glorify
Krishna and Vishnu in a
Post- colonial,
Condescending bottled-
up and labeled
Kind of way then whatever, that's ok.
But here's what gives me a hard- on:
I am a tiny, insignificant,
ignorant bit of carbon.
I have one life,
and it is short and unimportant...
But thanks to recent scientific
advances I get to live
Twice as long as my great great great
great uncleses and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting
shitty at good- looking hippies
With fairies on their spines
and butterflies on their titties.
And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is
mended:
We'd as well be 10 minutes back in time,