This week I have been mostly thinking: like an Elk

The picture above is of an Elk if you didn’t know. But what kind of Elk is it? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s a drunken Elk, it’s a heavily inebriated Elk, in short, it’s a pissed up Elk that has gorged itself on fermented apples and fallen into a tree.

I laughed the first time I saw that picture and read the story about that Elk. There I was, on Friday morning 8.40am, slumped in my swivel chair in the office, staring down the barrel of another 8 tedious hours  of unstimulating ‘work’, giggling like a village idiot at a picture of a drunken Elk who had fallen into a tree in someone’s front garden in Gothenburg.

This would be the highlight of my day without a doubt. 8.40am and my day had already peaked; it was all downhill from here.

Then I started to think about that Elk. What could have possibly motivated him to seek the oblivion of drunkenness?

Maybe he was wandering through the suburban gardens of Gothenburg and happened to gaze into someone’s living room window. Maybe what he saw there made him despair at his existence; made him think that fermented apples were the only answer to his problems.

But fermented apples are never the answer are they? Unless the question is; what is Cider made from?

So what did he see when he looked through the living room window of that suburban house? We can only hypothesise but I would guess it was something like this:

He saw a Family, huddled around the warmth of a plasma screen TV, slack jawed and drooling into their dinners of processed dead cow innards encased in floury baps, staring at scenes of stupefying horror played out on the TV screen(or Jersey shore as its otherwise known) without a flicker of emotion or brain activity.

He saw a hunting trophy on the wall, an Elk head, and as he saw that Elk head looking down with its cold dead eyes on the whole sorry spectacle of the family, with mounting distress he realised that that Elk head, the hunting trophy, formerly belonged to the body of one of his closest friends.

So what were his thoughts when he saw this? We can only theorise but I would guess they were something like this:

‘Colin! No! Why have they done this to you? Murdered you and kept your head as a trophy? These unsightly, slovenly, grotesque, morally bankrupt barbarians are the pinnacle of evolution are they? They hold the fate of every creature on this planet in their hands? We’re doomed, completely doomed. I can’t take it anymore; I’m going to eat some fermented apples’

That’s what I assume the Elk thought, and let’s face it I’m probably right.

The great philosopher and alleged sex offender Michael Jackson once sang ‘What have we done to the world? Look what we’ve done’.

And when we do look at what we’ve done, when we really look, it’s hard not to be disgusted with ourselves. So we don’t bother looking.

I never wanted to look, I never want to look at the bad things I’ve done never mind taking a gander at the crimes of the entire human race, but when I realised we made an Elk so depressed that he wanted to get drunk enough to fall into a tree, that for me was the final straw.

So I decided to make a difference, to campaign for animal rights, to raise awareness about climate change, to poor every ounce of my being into making things right, I’m only one man, but I can make a difference, I can, I can….and then I had satellite TV installed at my house….. and I realised I could never be angry at the human race again…..I mean how could you despair at the tyranny of humanity when there’s quality programming like ‘Cake Boss’ on TV?