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Back To The Garden
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TITLE (EDIT)
Back To The Garden
DESCRIPTION
Depressing the extent to which everything is being dumbed down these days. Poor state education? Is that all it is?
[527 words]
TITLE KEYWORD
Mind
AUTHOR
Xoggoth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
-
[March 2004]
AUTHOR'S OTHER TITLES (25)
A Capital Fart (Short Stories) The redundant London underground is pressed into service to win a world farting contest. [736 words] [Humor]
A Wrong Turn Somewhere (Short Stories) Somewhere near Birmingham a driver takes a wrong turn and loses everything. [492 words] [Mystical]
Amnesty (Short Stories) A gun amnesty in a rough borough of London goes idiotically wrong. [561 words] [Comedy]
Arnie (Short Stories) A little labourer has a terminator approach to his work. [646 words] [Humor]
Changing To Go Out (Short Stories) In the aftermath of the genetic bomb, a simple night at the pictures with the missus is no easy task. [444 words] [Humor]
God's Trainees (Short Stories) Him upstairs is thinking of retiring, all he needs to do is train up some suitable replacements. Easier said than done. They just don't make deities the way the used to. [1,570 words] [Humor]
Mementoes Of Treasured Occasions (Short Stories) A struggling photographer finds a rich new source of business. [496 words] [Humor]
Providing For Sarah (Short Stories) A desolate man finds comfort in an imaginary (?) companion. But who will care for her when he's gone? [883 words] [Mind]
Sex Life Of The Amoeba (Short Stories) A serious paper on cellular mytosis in a well known eukarytic organism. The dirty little... [1,108 words] [Humor]
Soup (Short Stories) A soup manufacturer ends life on Earth. [514 words] [Comedy]
The Adventures Of Archie 1 - The Great Escape (Short Stories) A sort of Alice in Wonderland meets Canterbury Tales sort of thing but sillier than the former and even more boring than the latter. In episode 1 our elderly rabbit hero escapes his hutch and disappe... [473 words] [Humor]
The Adventures Of Archie 2 - The Little Demon's Tale (Short Stories) A hell spawned satanic creature identifies too much with men and falls to their level. [901 words] [Humor]
The Adventures Of Archie 3 - The Spider Catcher's Tale. (Short Stories) Archie escapes from the paralysing purple and find himself in a world where an avoidable infestation has eaten all the perspective. There he meets the spider catcher and learns why ballroom dancing i... [1,313 words] [Humor]
The Adventures Of Archie 4a - The Great Regurgitato (Short Stories) Achie learns of the greats of bodily functions and meets the greatest of them all. [781 words] [Humor]
The Adventures Of Archie 4b - The Great Regurgitato's Tale (Short Stories) Continued. [823 words] [Humor]
The Adventures Of Archie 5a - The Army Surplus Salesman (Short Stories) Archie learns the truth they try and keep from us, that being disembowelled is fun, meets a descendant of the Piltdown man and travels to the army surplus fair to find Little Boy is no bargain. [913 words]
The Adventures Of Archie 6 - A Peaceful Solution (Short Stories) Following a Little Boy explosion Archie find himself on a desolate plain and meets two tribes who are too stupid to realise that war and bloodshed are by far the most efficient means of resolving disp... [1,271 words] [Humor]
The Adventures Of Archie 7 - The Puzzleman's Tale (Short Stories) Archie finds he is not alone in the valley. He shares it with a man in a very strange prison. You have to endure a little homily on man's inhumanity to decorating materials first. [2,988 words] [Humor]
The Adventuresof Archie 5b - The Army Surplus Salesman's Tale (Short Stories) Continued. [1,116 words]
The Fly And... (Short Stories) That Geoff Goldblum had it easy! One fly?? I should have been so lucky! [483 words] [Humor]
The Horrid Tale Of Evil Worm (Short Stories) A rare accident in the vegetable patch transforms a humble earthworm into a satanic being. [1,158 words]
The Several Voyages Of Fat Tony (Short Stories) Foul deeds on the dead sea coast get their richly deserved comeuppance. [1,377 words]
The Two Bills (Short Stories) William Shakespeare fails to get to grips with Microsoft Word. [777 words]
Vomiting On Tony (Short Stories) The Mad Messiah (AKA Tony Blair) gets what he thoroughly deserves. [499 words] [Humor]
Your Little God Is Pooh And Creepy Too (Short Stories) Only the innocent find salvation. In the run up to the revelation the kids of St Crispin's Middle School are introduced to their own little salvations. PS I know Buddha was not a god, it's creative l... [1,442 words] [Humor]
Back To The Garden
Xoggoth

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden
"Woodstock" Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

Creation myths. Never had much time for them when it might have mattered. Odd how very similar many of them were; Chinese, Greek, Mayan or Aborigine. Man created as a brutish animal. Some god or gods takes pity on him, Prometheus or Inca, it doesn't matter, and brings him the precious gift of knowledge that raises him above the other beasts, takes him from innocence and out of the garden.

Maybe it was people like me, the rationalists, the thinkers, the ones who will never believe what they don't see, who did the damage. We forgot the Inca's words, we forget the Inca, the one thing he had commanded us never to do. And with our scorn we made those others forget it too.

Dumbing down. That's what they called it in the beginning. The lamentable tendency to follow the lowest common denominator of education and intelligence. Back then it seemed no more than a marketing ploy by the fast buck companies, appeal to the common man, appeal to the commonest type of man, and make the most money.

It has accelerated frighteningly since then. Music was the first to go. All those talentless bland singers, the monotonous rap music. Not just the symptoms of poor state education or youthful rebellion as we first thought. Towards the end we did not get even that. I saw some of the last live acts of tuneless humming and whistling on TV before it went out for good because nobody knew how to make it work any more.

The spark has gone from nearly all of us all now. Old Ted has done odd jobs for us for years. Came to fix a broken window yesterday. It was still broken an hour later. Ted was sitting by the pond with the glass and putty. "I don't know what to do" was all he could say, over and over. I reached to put my hand on his shoulder but the gesture triggered a snarl and a baring of teeth. I watched him shambling off back to his den on the other side of the village; a village of broken windows, overgrown gardens, of dirt and the beginnings of decay.

There are still many men left. They find sustenance in the derelict shops and supermarkets and the untended fields. Like birds that return each day to feed at bird tables; taking without understanding the source of the bounty. When those are empty the dying will begin. Maybe it is for the best.

I am the last real man that I know of. Perhaps the rationalists like me were left to last so we could see what we had done. Maybe the last of all men, who knows? I sniff the wind and think of food. It is hard to really think of much else today. The Inca has finally come to take back his gift from me too.

Vague memories of words circle in my head before they too are gone.

Earth to earth
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

 

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE
© 2003 Xoggoth
STORYMANIA PUBLICATION DATE
February 2004
NUMBER OF TIMES TITLE VIEWED
1923
 

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