Wednesday, 13 June 2012

John's Psychosomatic Trousers


There was this man called John, you see. He wasn't a great deal like John the Baptist, it has to be said – unless you count the fact that he lived in the desert and waved his fists around a lot; and he also wasn't a lot like Noel Edmonds. So he wasn't out there living alone in the desert to benefit the rest of mankind, far from it. He was definitely doing it for himself.

John, you see, was a mumukshu. A mumukshu is someone with a burning desire to be free of limitation. The desert was limitless, or it seemed that way. John could stand at the edge of the universe and create worlds out of his own imagination. He'd long since finished with the armchairs and coffee tables of life; wives and children were the next thing to go. Finally he'd ditched his clothes, and now, here he was, wandering about the desert naked. The landscape would have looked on with unattached enjoyment, had there been a landscape.

John, you see, was a big fan of trousers. He was always trying to find the right pair. He had millions of pairs, all very nice. But none of them felt like the ultimate trousers, to him. So he was constantly thwarted. The desire for psychedelic trousers just got stronger and stronger. He tried renouncing trousers for a while, and then he'd find himself in a shop, buying them indiscriminately, or he'd wake up with this new and alarming pair of trousers.

But the fact is, trousers don't make you happy. The removal of the desire reveals your nature, which is happiness. And then the itch starts again.

So John ditched everything, like I said, and was out in the desert, being happiness. His wife was in the work house, where she liked it. The children, God knew where they were.

One day John woke up in the desert to discover that he had no legs; not only that, but that he'd never had any. The whole thing had been a misunderstanding. What he'd taken to be legs, weren't legs at all. So there'd never been a need for trousers, which was just aswell, because like the legs, they didn't exist.

I can go home now, thought John, but he didn't.


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