Mess Neutral

There’s this game, you might have heard of it, it is really popular!

It involves racing round and round in circles over the same ground, chasing after your pals. Every time it looks like one of them is getting ahead, you all chuck loads of crap at them to drag them back, not forgetting to drop plenty of obstacles behind you to try and hinder those still biting at your heels.

Yes! I’m talking about the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidate Race!

Wait! Did you think for a second I was talking about Mario Kart?

Politics in America always seems so much funner than at home. Such drama! Such insistence on letting crazy people run! Such bloody long campaigns! Do you know how far in advance Gordon Brown called for the general election last year? One month. One month! How many alleged affairs with flip-flopping grizzly bears that you can see from your back yard in Russia from whom you have been taking backhanders can you really expose in that length of time? Hmm?

Fortunately, the cycle in America takes a very, very long time, which affords the rest of the world a great deal of entertainment, especially with such a field of all-star nutjobs they’ve assembled this time. As I grew increasingly absorbed by the tit-for-tat debates, flat-tax wars and bigotry one-upmanship, I could not help but notice how similar the merry-go-round of frontrunners was to the world’s favourite virtual karting franchise.

What happens as soon as you’re out front? You fall under intense scrutiny and attacks from every quarter- you get bombarded with everyone else’s homing shells and are given only shitty banana skins to defend yourself with. If only the candidates would pay attention to their karting counterparts they might pick up a few tips.

But who’s who in the ultimate Mario Kart GOP race? I will tell you who! Because I’m determined to make this analogy last all the way to the Rainbow Road, where all those gay-fearing plonkers will duly drive over the edge.

Newt Gingrich is… Wario!

At first, all the evidence was pointing to Gingrich being Mario: the pot belly, the affairs with a succession of damsels. Ultimately though, Mario is a good, down-to-earth guy; there’s just no way to reconcile this courageous working-class hero with perhaps the most grasping of all the candidates. Wario, on the other hand, is the only character with enough delusions of grandeur/evil to stand a chance of keeping up with Newt, and is probably pocketing a gold coin or two being “consulted” by the failing Mushroom Kingdom mortage lenders.

 

Rick Perry is…Donkey Kong!

Well, this was the easiest match up by far. They don’t look too bright, huh? But we shouldn’t judge people on how they look! No, we should judge them by their ability to string an intelligent sentence together, which is something these poor chimps struggle with. While most of the fleeting front-runners crumbled under increased media scrutiny, Perry merely slipped on a succession of his own banana skins.

 

Michele Bachmann is…Yoshi!

What? She’s not Princess Peach?! I will not fall prey to such lazy gender-based comparisons! No, I think you’ll find many more parallels between she-of-the-faraway-eyes and a dinosaur, that go beyond their prehistoric outlooks.

The amount of eggs that Yoshi spews out, he must have a similar level of fostering experience to Bachmann, but the deal-clincher here is in their personal lives. Michele’s hubby Marcus Bachmann is so into his gay conversion camps, and we all know that means he must secretly be very gay and very repressed. Romancing someone with a repressed sexual identity is something Yoshi knows all about, thanks to his dinoromantic partner, Birdo. I wonder if Michele has a lesbian tongue like Yoshi too.

 

Rick Santorum is…Bowser!

Just because a friend of mine said Santorum is pure evil. Santorum’s been bumping around in relative obscurity, but is starting to make a late surge in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. Everyone knows though that Bowser takes aaaages to accelerate, so it’s gonna be too late for him. Hurrah!

 

Mitt Romney is…Princess Peach!

United in their 1%-ness (Princess Peach is apparently worth $1.3 billion) are the only character with any real political power in the Mushroom Kingdom and the only character in the Republican race with any real chance of winning. It’s hard to pair up Mitt with anyone, because even virtual people have more personality than he does.

Honourable Mentions

Hermain Cain - It was a shame for entertainment’s sake when Herman Cain dropped out. If I had to pair him with anybody, it’d probably be Luigi for the Italian food connection. Although Cain may physically resemble Mario a little more, Luigi still has a ‘tache, and looks more like an alleged sexual harrasser.

Ron Paul – Excluded yet again! But my reasons are valid: just like in the GOP, Ron Paul doesn’t quite fit in with the Mario Kart drivers. Of the two main characters left, there’s no way he’d pander to aristocracy like Toad, and Koopa Troopa is definitely a communist.

I love resolutions!

I love list-making in general, because while you are making lists, you are not yet involved in the arduous effort of doing what is on the list. Unless you made a list which said KEEP WRITING THIS LIST FOREVER!! in which case you would be caught in meta-list hell for all eternity!

New Year’s resolutions are a special kind of super-fun because they come only once a year which must make them more important I think. Also, sometimes it is fun to think ahead for a whole year, instead of never planning beyond the next cup of tea. I wouldn’t suggest using your NY resolutions to plan every cup of tea you’re going to drink that year though, that would boggle the mind! It’s like thinking about how big the universe is, or how we evolved from primordial ooze into The Cheeky Girls!

Last year I did exactly as I predicted on my resolutions, so this year I’m going to keep things simple again. I may further supplement these with some Advanced Level resolutions, which perhaps I can use in the future to rate myself on some sort of resolutionary league table!

Resolution #1: Work on “projects”

For a long time I said I was going to write a Mills & Boon. Guess what I have been secretly doing while I was away? No! Not writing a Mills & Boon! Almost had you there.

For reasons fascinating to me but probably to no-one else, instead of heterosexual romance I started writing a story about teenage girl-bands in space. Only a small genre-shift! Already this switch is paying amusing dividends: after my Mum telling my Dad that I was writing some “young adult” fiction, he started questioning me about this “adult” fiction I was supposedly writing and outright asked me if I was writing porn. Proof that you only need one pensioner to start a game of Chinese Whispers.

However, coming home has forced something of a hiatus upon me, and I am not sure how I am going to fire myself up to finish this cosmic adventure. It’s all about finding that perfect place to work, and I am struggling to create a peaceful environment here. I have scuppered myself with my own desires; in dreaming of a paradise where I would be supplied endless cups of tea, I failed to anticipate this would mean being disturbed every ten minutes by someone asking me if I want another cuppa. Sometimes twice, because they forgot what I said by the time the kettle boiled.

Such existential revelations are my bread-and-butter, now that I am an Aspiring Novelist!

I am plotting other projects too, but they are far too secret to talk about.

Resolution #2: Develop effective anti-distraction strategy

I confess, generous and frequent offers of tea are the least of my worries; when it comes to distractions, I am my own worst enabler. I do recognise the brittleness of my concentration and make regular, feeble attempts to shield it from the many enticing and perilous diversions that exist, winking at me from the internet.

Usually this means burying all my RSS feeds ever so slightly deeper, hoping each forced click stokes my guilt so much that when I finally reach that red-link district, I will be so overwhelmed by my lust for those brazen bookmarks that I shut the browser completely.

That never happens.

I cut out computer games, refuse to get a smartphone, got bored by most TV and gave away all my books. I am truly trying to steel myself against this world of modern distractions we have created, but I don’t seem to be able to convince myself to give up reading articles about cyborg beetles or cul-de-sacs or Mormons.

And I don’t think I ever will entirely, because then I’d have to completely overhaul my personal belief system and topple knowing random shit from being the noblest of all human goals. I just need to work out how to not want to know it right now. How to procrastinate my procrastination.

This will be my most difficult task for 2012, but when I have come up with a solution, I will call it my DISTRATEGY, which sounds like a kind of military tactic used by a robot army poised to overthrow the world, which makes it really cool, which means I will try very hard to do it.

Resolution #3: Not waste first five months of year

I have exactly five months before I must return to reality. Whereas I had a clear idea about what I wanted to do when I left last year (i.e. go quite far away for quite a long time), I’m a bit more uncertain now. I guess what I want to do is pretty location-independent. As long as I can be somewhere mildly interesting, with enough space and time to pursue my “projects” and a connection to the real world, I will be happy. So, building villages in Africa would be out, but part-time goat-herding in the Swiss Alps would be in. I bet the Matterhorn’s got killer wifi.

Any suggestions/requests for how I spend the next five months will be entertained. Just remember I am rubbish at most things involving physical effort.