Friday, September 01, 2006

What's in your shopping basket?


Cocaine. Or as I like to call it: methyl 3-benzoyloxy-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo [3.2.1]octane-4-carboxylate

A purloined topic for the day today. Yes it’s shocking, I know. Even more outrageous is that this particular pontification is stolen from the ex. But it’s a goodish topic to rant on and given I entirely failed to come out of the relationship having appropriated a cashmere jumper or two from his wardrobe, I feel I do at least have the right to nick his point of view.

And here it is.. cocaine is bad and people are hypocrites.

So first up – cocaine is bad. Now I’m not talking about those well known symptoms of ‘Oops, where did my septum go?’, ‘Who took my bank balance away?’, ‘Why can’t I have a normal relationship?’ Or even my personal favourite of ‘Why are people looking so very bored when I’m talking about something that’s really really interesting?’.

I’m actually talking about cocaine as a trade… whole villages in South America addicted to the side products of cocaine manufacture. Unable to work at anything else and stuck in that poverty/addiction trap that those rather charming drug barons so kindly introduced them to at the tender age of 7 when they really should have been whining over their maths homework. If only the village had a school. Those same drug barons that hang out in the south of France on yacht number 3.

And then second up - people are hypocrites. This is the bit that really gets to me. I work in an industry where, as people would assume, cocaine usage is pretty prevalent. Where clients turn round on car shoots in Budapest and demand that the creative team go out and get them a gram (Yes – I know someone it happened to. Yes the client was a cock. No, he never did get his coke) and I’ve come to notice that these same people - who disappear off to the toilets with monotonous regularity on an agency night out - also buy organic foods because they think they are good for them, because they don’t contain nasty chemicals, because it’s natural. So, how come they happily pollute their bodies with methyl 3-benz.. (oh bollocks to it, I can’t be arsed to type it out again)?

Adding insult to injury, these are the same people who buy free trade coffee and dolphin friendly tuna – they happily pay that extra premium for happy chickens, frolicksome lambs and a longer living Flipper. But bollocks to that 10 year old who’s working 19 hour shifts in a cocaine factory in order to get his next fix.

It’s just wrong, damn it.

And now that the rant is out of my system I’ll get back to pondering whether the gallon of white wine I consumed last night really was the devil’s urine because it certainly feels that way today. At least I know only a few New Zealand grape pickers suffered to make me feel this bad. And thinking about it, while my head may hurt, I’ve still got a firm grip on my nose cartilage…

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