Heads up their arses

One of my Dad’s most frequently employed derisive metaphors is that most poetic of contemptuous epithets, ‘He’s got his head up his arse.’ Now, I’m quite a visual learner, so as a child I was highly receptive to such an illustrative phrase.  But after several sore and failed attempts at contortionism, I worked out that he wasn’t being literal.  Because of course it is a biological impossibility, isn’t it?  You can’t push a 10 inch parcel through a 1 inch letterbox.  But the older I get, the more I find my eyes attuned to the figurative. Apparently there is a school of modern philosophy which attests that ‘metaphor and symbol act as the primary interpreters of reality’.  Which leads me to conclude that some people do actually walk around with their heads properly up their arses.

The evidence is stark and you have to spend most days trying to avoid it, because quite simply it either gets in the way or it threatens to bump into you.

Example number one is that person in front of you on route to a train platform. As he reaches the ticket barrier, he stops dead, causing you to brake sharply in your commuting trainers, and he puts his head RIGHT up his arsehole, for this appears to be the place that he has chosen to store his ticket. It takes a few seconds to find it, for it is dark up there and on a bad day also quite slippery. And a few seconds is all that is needed to cause a commuting pile-up.  Obviously, you’re caught in a sandwich now, because, although the person behind you had the organisational common sense to have ticket in hand on approach to the barrier, she had opted to casually insert her head up her own rectal orifice in order to stare obliviously at her phone screen.  (Example two).  You have to crowbar your way out of this shithead centipede, head through an alternative barrier and stand no closer than your own height from the edge of the platform just in case one of those two dozy fuckers walks into you and knocks you in front of a train (something you ironically start to wish for by the end of your commute to work.)

Given the fact that most people have a fair amount of time sat bored and listless on a train, time for which you can forgive them the need to shove their heads up their arses in an undistractable phone-induced trance, you’d think that there could be absolutely NO FUCKING NEED AT ALL to continue staring at their phone as they get off the train and walk among humans.  Out of a crowded station, through a crowd forced to move at the same pace as the slowest common denominators as they stare at their phones, and into the street, where there are further hazards, wheeled, fast moving ones at that.  I wonder if there is an app that warns you of someone approaching, in order to save a person the trouble of pulling their head out of their arse and looking up. If such an app exists then its range is pretty poor, because most of these dopey cunts only swerve to avoid others once they are inches away from collision, like some shit early prototype of a driverless car.

If the trauma of avoiding injury on the pavement is enough to tempt you into walking blindly into the road and running the more calculable risks associated with fast moving over-sized cars, then you are forgetting example three, cyclists.  Despite the tautness of the Lycra across their arses, they still manage to find a way to stick their heads up there.  This skill is a wonder of modern idiocy, because they are able to do it and still cycle 10mph over the limit whilst paying sharp attention to the vehicles around which they weave, under-take and dart in front of.  But this skill has its limits, because the view from inside their commodious colonic canals does not afford them any awareness of pedestrians or traffic lights.  But no matter to them, because they have right on their own side, with their ecological sanctimony and self-righteous desire to reclaim the roads. Arrogant zealots.

If you have the misfortune to travel by the locomotive train’s younger and dirtier sibling, the London tube train, then you will surely find yourself the elbow target of my fourth and final selected example from the Head-up-arse School of Numbskull.  People who run for tube trains at busy times can be accused of wearing their own scphincta as a neck-tie for two reasons: one, they slalom through non-existent gaps in the crowd like coke-fuelled stock car racers; and two, they display an  undignified desperation that is made all the more risible by the fact that missing one train incurs a forfeit of a WHOLE FUCKING 2 MINUTE wait until the next one arrives.

I’ve just realised that I could go on.  By this point it’s not yet a quarter to eight in the morning and depending on your job and the head:rectum width ratio of those you encounter, the subsequent ten hours could well continue to require nifty footwork and extreme patience.  I won’t go on, though, in case I bore you even longer.

And if you’re reading this on your phone whilst walking along, then Get your head out of your fucking arse!