Head Games

I just nearly signed off an email with an exclamation mark after my name.

Thanks,
Paul!

That would have been embarrassing.

I also nearly added a stick-man drawing of myself triumphantly shouting my own name.

Luckily, I check all emails seventy times before hitting the "sned" button. I've very thorough.

It's Red Nose Day today. In honour of this, I wrote the preceding sentence, and will put some change in a collection box, provided I pass one on the way home.

Oh great. Now that I've made the content of this post current (or "up-to-and-including-the-minute"), I have to finish this today. I can't just leave it for a few days and then just finish it when I have nothing else to do. If there's a power cut, for example.

I just read what I had so far. Fun fact: typing "sned" was an intentional error; writing "I've very thorough" was not. Sometimes I inhabit my comedy so much that I'm not sure where I end, and the big fake plastic nose, glasses and moustache begin.

Funfact: the fifth German act.

Ha! I might have tweeted that before. Or maybe I intended to, but thought that it needed more work. And an umlaut.

I have very high standards.

I dreamt a funny thing the other night. I thought it would be hilarious if I was a boxer, and my nickname was "The Most Sane Man in the World".

The humour comes from the fact that anyone with that nickname would seem insane. Anyone so insane as to have that nickname would be feared as a fighter.

It was a bit snappier in my dream, though. In my dream, I invented an adjective. It was something like "The World's Sanest Man".

Oh. Hang on.

Hang on just a minute.

"Sanest" is a real word?! Spell check says that it is!

That's really put the cat amongst the pigeons. It means that my unconscious mind has a better vocabulary than I do.

What about "saney"? No. That one's not real. "Sanest" it is.

I really can't believe it. Sanest.

Anyway, I think people would find it an intimidating name. Paul "The World's Sanest Man" Fung.

It would mean I was either insane (according to my initial inverted interpretation), or I actually am more sane than my opponent.

It raises interesting questions about the nature of sanity. The nickname suggests that there are degrees of sanity. All people lie somewhere on a sanity spectrum, ranging from Jack Nicholson's Shining character (John, I think his name was) at one end, to me at the other.

I'd be saner than people who considered themselves quite sane. I'd be on the top of the sanity tree. It's not a tree, it's a spectrum. It's just an analogy.

Would people's sanity fluctuate between more and less sanity, or would it be genetically predetermined? I'm not a doctor.

The alternative is that sane and insane are absolute values. One is either sane or insane. Linguistically, this seems to be the case. Insane is the opposite of sane. Just as invisible is the opposite of visible. Or intellectual is the opposite of tellectual.

It could be black and white. But not in a racist way. It could be the whites who are insane, Mr Presumption. Who's racist now? Or the Chinese. Let's not have any preconceptions.

Or maybe it's a combination of the spectrum and the absolute. After all, there are degrees of visibility. If one is invisible, she cannot be seen. But she might also be more or less visible, depending on whether or not her bathroom has frosted glass for example.

(I initially congratulated myself on using a female pronoun there, but those suggestions of voyeurism have made political correctness come back and bite me on my penis, which - and I can't stress this enough - is flaccid, confirming the nobility of my intentions.)

So some people might be more sane than others. But the insane people may be lacking in sanity altogether.

In any event, I'd be a great boxer.

I'd need to train and buy gloves, but success is 90% nickname.

***

I was asleep just now. It's later in the day. I just thought I'd relay a bit of dialogue I dreamed. My sleep-self's creativity isn't all nicknames.

Here it is. I think the first person is on holiday somewhere.

"This country is weird. Did you know that towels are at both number one and number two in the charts? Towels."

"What charts?"

*pause*
"I don't know. But they really seem to like towels here."

THAT COULD BE IN A PLAY.