No nonsense Jack is a straight sort of bloke. He walks into a room purposefully with big manly strides. He places he arms on his hips and says “Okay, let’s keep it simple all right?”
That’s his attitude to everything. His biscuits are plain and tasteless. He drinks tea black, without sugar, like a tax inspector or a depressed traffic warden. He even has the same humourless, functionalist attitude to having fun and going to parties, and so it was at the birthday party of his favourite dentist.
“Okay, where’s the booze?” he asks on his way directly to the kitchen, grabs the first bottle he sees and then drinks it all without a fuss. Six pints straight down. Drunkenness achieved. Nausea imminent, he realises he might throw up and cause an unnecessary mess in the bathroom. “It’s alright, I’ve ordered a taxi” he says to the host as he passes out and then falls down the stairs.
This is just his way of being practical. “No mess, no fuss” – that’s his motto. It’s just not appropriate to ask whether he has any fun or not. You’d only provoke some sort of argument that was “uncalled for and strictly unnecessary” and, once again, he’d be plunged into a turmoil. How could he ever defend his approach to life without descending into frivolous and indulgent philosophical discussions?
One day, however, Jack accidentally found himself considering things that he didn’t strictly have any business thinking about. “How necessary is it to think about how necessary things are?†he wondered. “When you find yourself wondering about things, is that necessary?†Indeed, how do you extract yourself from an unnecessary situation without prolonging it any longer than is strictly unavoidable when you find out that thinking about it isn’t necessary anyway? That thought alone would paralyse him with fear. “Yes, this thought is unnecessary!” he’d think and realise that he would have to cut it short. “This thought” would swiftly be truncated to “This” without a fuss, next chopping off the “i†for good measure, before finally arriving at “Th” and running off into the distance of nowhere.
As all thought ground to a halt, he still felt anxious. He couldn’t help it, standing there sweating and feeling itchy and nervous. “Is feeling a type of thinking?†he wondered, but then he realised he’d had a thought anyway without meaning to, and that the state of pure feeling itself had long since disappeared. What could he do? He decided to sit on the front step.
So far so good. He wasn’t doing anybody harm just by sitting there and having a nervous breakdown, but he wasn’t much use to anybody either. “I’m useless!” he’d shriek, “All I can do is sit here and shriek!” Yes, of course he stopped the shrieking right away but it didn’t seem to make any difference to his state of mind. Just having him sat in silence didn’t exactly help anybody else either, and the beginnings of any chain of thought just brought him back to square one.
“Who needs a thinker anyway?†he asked himself and there’s no answer to that question. This and all the other observations were true enough and full of tasty traps that would be mental stimulation for the fussy, frilly kind of person who’s inclined to be a poet. But not for Jack, who’s a straight forward sort of bloke. You can’t deny him that. He jumps right in without a care for how deep the water is or what kind of mysteries lurk beneath the surface. Bless him, what a silly, useless, no-nonsense chap he is.
