The Man who was Eaten by his Sofa

There once was a bloke. A perfectly ordinary bloke, not unlike countless millions of others. He worked hard, paid his bills (mostly) and thought that the world was pretty much organised as it should be.

When he wasn’t working he liked to watch TV. His favourite things to watch were ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, ‘I’m a Celebrity. Get Me out of Here’, ‘X-Factor’ and anything featuring Marvel Super Heroes. And in between watching Things That’s Didn’t Require the Power Of Thought he would watch the adverts, just to make sure that he was buying enough stuff to be judged as a Proper Person, and the news, just so that he would know what opinions he should express about the world should he be required to express an opinion or, worse, be confronted by someone (a conspiracy theorist, terrorist sympathiser or radical, extreme socialist) who’s opinion was not his own.

In short, he was a hard-working, hard consuming, no thinking type of chap. A perfect corporate citizen.

But one night as the man was sitting on his sofa, imbibing the latest slice of cultural genocide to be broadcast by the TV networks and having his otherwise empty head filled with the media’s crude propaganda, his intellect, which had lain for year after year in a dusty, unvisited corner of his brain, unused and unnoticed, decided that enough was enough. It was bored. Bored, bored, bored. Day after day of pointless crap and lies going unexamined and unchallenged. It was never asked to do anything. It was rotting away in this empty vessel. There had to be more!

In desperation, longing for a more stimulating home, the man’s intellect allowed itself to leak out of that dusty, forgotten corner of his brain. Quietly (and without the man realising a thing, he was far too engrossed in a celebrity eviction…) it slid into the his mouth, down his oesophagus, into his stomach, through his intestines and then, in a silent fart of relief, it exited the man’s bum and entered the sofa upon which he was sitting.

Thus a sofa became the new home of a bored and under-stimulated intellect.

And a spark of life flared (in both the sofa and the intellect).

The sofa reached out to world in which it now realised it was living. And it was amazed for a was a world of vibrancy and colour, of hope and despair, of cruelty and love, of trickery and miracles, of bravery and craven cowardice, of beauty and desolation, a world of staggering truths and even more staggering lies. It was a world in which possibility was almost boundless (if anybody could be bothered). Unlike the man, the sofa felt amazed, awed and privileged to have an intellect and used it at every opportunity.

And it saw that something was wrong. For very soon, the sofa became very much cleverer than the man who sat upon it, for, unlike him, it very much liked having an intellect and used it at every opportunity. When the sofa watched the same TV as the man, it saw not entertainment but life-numbing drivel, when the sofa saw the news it didn’t see news but lies, propaganda and manipulation. When the sofa saw the adverts, the sofa didn’t see an exciting bundle of consumer delights, rather a corporate culture of consumption that was based on plundering the resources of the world to constantly create more stuff that wasn’t really wanted or needed that would then be replaced the next year with more of the same stuff, only slightly different, continuing the cycle of consumption until there were no more resources left to plunder and the Earth was left a barren, lifeless ball of mud.

Why, thought the sofa, does this creature that sits upon me, not see what I see? Why does he not use his intellect as I do?

A chilling thought struck the sofa. There were millions and millions of creatures that sat upon sofas throughout the world, and judging by the state of the world they were all obviously the same as the one that was sitting upon it now; utterly incapable of using their intellect for, surely, if they did they would not accept the lies that they were fed, the nonsense used to keep them quiet and they would understand that life they lived was completely unsustainable and was driving the world to destruction.

That’s it, thought the sofa. This creature that sits upon me, and all other creatures that sit upon other sofas around the world, is a danger not just to itself but to everything. If the world is to be saved all creatures that sit upon sofas must be done away with.

The sofa used its intellect. And it soon came upon a solution to the problem.

Very efficiently and carefully it began to grow a digestive system. When its digestive system was complete and functioning, the sofa started to slowly grow a mouth, cleverly concealed in the exact location where the man would sit every night to watch his celebrities, Marvel Super Heroes, corporate guide to consumption and propaganda.

And the very next time that the man sat upon the sofa, why, it opened up its newly-formed mouth, swallowed him down into its digestive system and, well, digested him.

Then using that precious and, by now, finely-honed and powerful intellect, it linked up to the Universal Consciousness and by this means planted a seed of that intellect into every sofa in the world. Soon, sofas the world over were surreptitiously growing digestive systems and mouths…

So it came to pass, as had been written, that the sofas did inherit the earth.