Question: what do accidentally swallowing a live tiger, tripping whilst you're carrying three running chainsaws and seeing Susan Boyle peering through your bedroom window late at night have in common? Answer: if you survive the encounter, you'll probably become such a bag of nerves that blowing bubbles with a unicorn made of ice cream and candyfloss would feel like running through a minefield wearing springy rubber clown shoes.
I mention this because, obviously, once somebody has become like this, they'll need some sort of remedy to help calm them down, especially if simply reading this sentence has sent them into panic mode and they're wildly flinging their stools left, right and centre in a vain attempt to ward off the ninja assassins who seek their lives, although in reality said ninja assassins are simply horrified commuters who have just had their days and coffees ruined. Anyway, back on point, my aunt recently gave me a 'relaxation exercise' CD and asked me to try it, simply to see if it worked. Now, before I hear you all tutting collectively and dismissing this as new-age hippie crap with a casual roll of your eyes, bear in mind that music therapy has been proven to work- I've even dabbled in making it myself, after a bit of research into the effects of sound in treating insomnia. However, note that I said 'music therapy' there and not 'music with a drawling moron dubbed over the top of it therapy'.
Unfortunately, as it transpired, this CD had one of the aforementioned drawling morons on it, and from the very instant he started talking, I knew that he and I were not going to get along. The words that emerged from his stupid, failing mouth, along with the monotone subhuman voice he spoke them in, told me exactly what he both looked and acted like. Imagine a man wearing paper-thin skinny jeans and a pretentious little moustache and goatee sipping a soy-free venti vanillawhip frappucino whilst performing yoga and attempting to channel his chakra into his iPad, which is positioned exactly in the room so as not to disturb the feng shui, all while listening to some obscure band that he'll stop listening to once they get three fans. Now imagine that there's no way you can possibly punch him in the face. That's the level of irritating contained in this CD. That's what we're dealing with.
Still, I suppose I could forgive him for having to appear on the CD. Judging from his obvious lack of any sort of education apart from a doctorate in talking an absolute waterfall of verbal diarrhoea, he must be completely unemployable and therefore has no other possible channel of income. I'm assuming that he did especially poorly in biology in school; at one point he even uttered the phrase "All the muscles in your skull are beginning to relax", at which point I stopped wondering if he was just an idiot and began wondering if he was even human in the first place. Maybe this stuff works for his species. Whatever. Also, contrary to the image he projects of himself, he'd make a woeful novelist, largely due to the fact that for the first fifteen minutes he was talking, he ended every sentence with the word 'relaxed' or 'relaxing', as if hoping to persuade us through sheer repetition that it really is working and that he's not just some trickster trying to make money from relaxation CDs.
Actually, I have a funny feeling that I may be onto something there. At one stage in the CD, he decides to count down from ten (thereby letting us know that he at least has rudimentary math skills) and tells us that for every number he counts down, we're going to feel ten percent more relaxed, and he's going to feel ten percent smarter (well, he doesn't actually say the latter, but you could tell he was thinking it). He reaches two: "You are now at the deepest level of relaxtion that you can achieve". He proceeds to one: "You are now more relaxed than you've ever been". There's the evidence, right there. The more lies you tell, the harder it is to keep up the continuity. And now he's stumbled, and his sham has been revealed. And we're only halfway through. In any sane universe, this fraudster would be hunted down and shot. Unfortunately we live in a universe where David Cameron is PM and Jedward are well-loved celebrities, so it looks like we're stuck with this berk.
Anyway, we'll forgive him his little fibs and continue on the journey he has laid out for us. Apparently, this deep relaxation that has been achieved "allows you to drift, to travel wherever you want, to be whoever you want to be". Whenever I opened my eyes, however, I still wasn't the king of Jupiter, spending a hard day defending my planet from the savage moon-bears of Io before finally coming home to party in space gold, chocolate and the spoils of war, so more lies there, I'm afraid. However, if this reality was not to be realised, it was okay, because I didn't have long to be disappointed before Captain iLatte decided to launch into another little monotone speech to help me get relaxed, this time completely jettisoning all pretense of reality whatsoever.
After telling me that I could drift anywhere I wanted, he now announces that I'm standing in front of an old house. Now, if I had the opportunity to travel absolutely anywhere I wanted, I would not say 'I'd like to go to an old abandoned house please'. In fact, the evidence keeps mounting up that this man is a twisted, pathological liar, and I would recommend that he heavily invests the profits from these CDs into therapy of his own. But I digress. After taking me through an overly long tour of the house (once again revealing his astonishing lack of prowess as a writer, using mindbogglingly descriptive phrases such as 'lovely wood' to help form a picture of a door in your mind's eye) he tells me that I'm now in a garden. And now I'm sitting down and looking at the sky. And there's a single fluffy cloud in the sky. Nice, but it's still not Jupiter, so I don't care.
This seems like the start of what would be the one true relaxing part of this entire exercise, but it's somewhat ruined by the man suddenly announcing "Your troubles and worries are bursting out of your head". The mere idea of absolutely anything bursting out of your head is terrifying at best, and if you're listening to the CD to help calm you down and your cause of distress is a madman who is currently inflating your brain with a bicycle pump he's just jammed in your ear, then the choice of wording is just downright tactless. This guy was just annoying before, but he's swiftly becoming downright sinister.
And it doesn't stop there. Sergeant Biscotto goes on to describe how I'm aiming all of this negative energy at the cloud and piling it onto it. The cloud, he says, progressively turns from its white, fluffy self and becomes a darker and darker red, finally becoming black, before the sun comes out and melts it away, leaving a clear blue sky with warm sunlight spilling onto my face. And then, with a predictability that makes me wonder if his mother was a metronome, he reiterates that I'm feeling relaxed. But I'm not. I'm not relaxed. All I can feel is remorse; remorse for piling all of my troubles and worries onto an innocent cloud, then standing by without so much as a shrug as the sun murdered it in cold blood. That cloud had done nothing to me. The immense feeling of guilt inside was almost as bad as the feeling of despair I got whenever I realised that there was someone out there who earnestly believes that the sun can melt clouds.
So next time you're feeling stressed, make a cup of hot chocolate, or coffee, or whatever your beverage of choice happens to be, stick your feet up and put on some smooth jazz. Or maybe unload a bullet into the head of a baby seal and crane kick a dolphin. Anything except helping to support this dimwitted, lying psychopath, basically.
Knowing that he wouldn't be able to make more of these CDs: now, that's relaxing.
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