Plans or Sweet Revenge

Plans are something that we all make, from the lowliest prole struggling to put bread on his table, to the king in the high castle trying to sort out how to conquer the chambermaid or the country over the mountain range on the southern border.  Hopefully, for the prole, maybe for the chambermaid and not so much for the king these plans, so painstakingly made, and (also hopefully) based on sound judgment, and a fair amount of common sense, succeed. It is the success of those plans, if they succeed, that allows each of the people in the above example to continue to plan. If plans fail regularly then, sometimes people just throw over the whole idea of planning anything. A failure to plan generally leads just to failure.

In many respects to live is to plan. You plan your day from the (too fucking early in the morning) time that your alarm jolts you out of dreaming of Nicole Kidman (or some fairly close model thereof), until the time that the copious amount of alcohol you've had to consume to get to sleep, finally overcomes you final vestiges of consciousness, and you fall into that black hole know to the rest of the world as sleep. The awful, awake time that comes between those two events, that time that is know as 'your day' (the thing people are always asking how it was), is the part that it is necessary to plan. If, and it is a big IF, you are allowed to plan the majority of your day by yourself, then you are one lucky bastard.

Most of us (proles at least) have a large chunk of the majority of our day(s) planned for us. This is done by the thing that we generally call work, or if we feel fancy, we call it a career. Either way work or career is just another way of saying that (generally) someone or something else is planning our day for us. However, they, those bastards planning our days, do allow us some time to ourselves to plan however we choose, and it is that, ever so precious, time that is the really important part. How you plan your 'free' time is entirely (you hope) up to you. Certainly if you are burdened/blessed with either a significant other, or a group of friends you might have to, on occasion, alter your plans, or go along with their plans. But, that is just part of being the social animal known as humans right?

All of this non-sense is to say that I, personally, have made a lot of plans, most of them were shit. Lots of them were absolute shit plans, and their (eventual) failure should have come as a surprise to no-one, least of all me. However, in my 40 plus years on the planet, I have on the rare occasion had some absolutely brilliant plans, some real corker of plans that left even me shaking my head at my (ever so brief) genius. I am far from brilliant, and the only type of genius that I might (just might) be is the evil type, so when one of my plans comes out the idea oven as brilliant, it is a cause for general rejoicing.  However, that rejoicing usually did not last for too long, because as I said the vast majority of my plans have been shit. Long-term, short-term, or life-term, I am a man that is very good at making really, really bad plans. I guess it is a gift, but a negative type of gift that, unlike your usual awkward xmas gifts, take more than they give.

The good news is that I have, finally after many years of angst, realized that my plans are usually foiled, and not by some secret agent like James Bond, but by the simple passage of time. It seems that my plans are, in many respects, like me, easily foiled, and not overly well thought out. Either way the knowledge that, as a planner goes, I am shit, while costly, and painful, has lead to some good consequences. I am now able to, with remarkable ease, recognize a shit plan when I see one, especially if someone else is making it. Which is a lot more fun than one would think. 

This is the good part, being able to recognize eventual failure can entertain you for days on end. If you really don't like the person, and let's be honest, I don't like a lot of people, then when you see the failure of their plan before they do, it can lead to a chuckle or even a guffaw. The misery of others can be almost as much fun as your own misery, and the if some ship of fools crashes upon your shore, you would be remiss not to get a few laughs out of their plight.  Things fall apart, and sometimes the centre cannot hold, you can only hope that you have braced yourself for the eventual moment when it all goes pear shaped, and you are able to survive.  The real joy of watching another person's plan fall to shit is not being the person who caused it, but playing no part in it, but then reaping some, quite unexpected, reward from the disaster you just watched. There is no rule that says you have to be 'nice', and sometimes being cruel is actually the right thing to do. Sure you look like a bastard, but only if you aren't clever, if you are clever the person who's plan just collapsed like a house of cards around them, has no idea that you are the person benefiting. That is a rare as a virgin in a Venezuelan whorehouse, but it is as sweet of a revenge as you are ever going to find. The trick is to enjoy it because tomorrow, way too early for your own good, your alarm is going to shock you out of your sleep, and you are going to have to start planning your day, some of those plans, as plans are wont to do, will fail in spectacular fashion, and somewhere, someone will get their sweet revenge upon you. Thus the circle of life and failure is complete (at least until we break on through to the other side).



This post is dedicated to (at the very least) 3 people, maybe more, but 3 for certain, who's ever so brilliant (and they are ever so smart at planning) plans have fallen to shit about 24 hours after making them. They were plans that took a lot longer to make, and the fact that they collapsed so very quickly, has become a source of everlasting joy for me. Enjoy the taste of failure, you lot deserve no less than that.