Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-bola.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uz_dehG2M8

Occasionally, you'll get a whiff of something that flashes you back to your childhood. One second you're standing in line in the work canteen, the next you're six years old, lying on the floor, and freaking out about Ebola and invisible death.

You're suddenly presented with an A-B comparison: now and then. 'Then' seems full of smells, tastes, colour. 'Now' just seems dulled and detached. An empty head atop a distant body.

I can't pinpoint the exact age when I realised my body was starting to step back from the world, but I remember quite specifically noticing that it had already begun to happen. I woke up one morning feeling duller than when I went to sleep. Perhaps whatever happened yesterday was so cataclysmic it rendered that day's events meaningless in advance.

It's a mixed blessing - you might be a numb automaton, but at least you're able to cope with the massive pileup of miserable human experience you've accumulated over the years. The more you know, the less you care, and the less you remember. Imagine being one of those people who can somehow remember their own birth. They're probably suicidal.

Anyway, back to the flashback. There you are, mid-20s and mildly serene in a foggy headspace, when some bastard puts a particular kind of bread in the toaster or turns up to work in a particular kind of aftershave and you're suddenly at your dad's house at 11am, bored out of your mind and picking at the carpet as you lie about on the living room floor. You're also terrified of death. So aware are you of sounds and smells and tastes and sights that you feel incredibly vulnerable, and thus overwhelmingly close to the possibility of dropping dead at any second. You're at the furtherest point you'll ever be from dying and yet because of your hyper-aware child brain, you're more petrified by the prospect than you (hopefully) ever will be. And even post-death. Sometime it's just the impossibility of non-existence. You pick at the carpet -- it offers no solutions. 

I was particularly terrified of death. And germs. But mostly death. Any mention of it on TV would set me off. I'd imagine a great void, like outer space, where you'd hurtle towards some death-planet, chilled to the core by the sudden realisation that you've taken every single little speck of your life for granted. You were only inches away from this, the whole time. 

I also happened to see a film entitled 'Outbreak'. I'm not the only one. A generation was scarred by Dustin Hoffman in a bio-hazard suit, striding about hopelessly as Kevin Spacey bleeds out on a gurney. Ebola! Monkeys! Rene Russo! I lost sleep over this thing. I was convinced Ebola was coming and there was nothing I could do about it except freak out -- only through sheer force of freaking could I hope to save myself.

The odd thing about all this freaking is that I'm now closer to Ebola than ever before: New Zealand is probably the last place on Earth that would have an Ebola outbreak (except Madagascar). As a 6 year old, this fact wasn't immediately clear to me, although I don't recall my dad pointing this out to me either, as I shrieked around the house.

And yet here I am, in the UK, Ebola in the news, the threat advancing by the day. Across Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, there are thousands of people dead. Borders are closing. Families see their sick relatives taken away and they never come back. Men with guns guard the medical tents, adding to the distrust and the fear. The virus has been picked up in Dallas and in Madrid. All we need now is a careless Kevin Spacey. 

And yet, thanks to age's dulling of the senses, I'm relatively calm. I'm no longer on the floor, freaking out. I'm just sitting, on the sofa, and finding out whatever happened to Rene Russo on wikipedia. Thank god for the numbness. 

Fearless

Well, at least Key's having a good time. After all, we're mostly just bits of matter for him to shift about into ever more economically viable positions. 

But surely even John Key is having a Jeff Bridges moment right now. After a wonderfully bizarre campaign season that should have ripped his nice-guy persona to shreds, he's still standing. Possibly atop the ANZ Centre in the Auckland CBD. Arms stretched wide, cheeks reddening in the crisp night air, the blustery waterfront winds whipping off the harbour and up the side of the 35-stories-tall skyscraper and across his thinning hair, as he breaks into laughter and begins to twirl and spin on the ledge while his estranged wife looks on. Fearless.

Sorry. I'd like to apologise. 

I'm being another aloof left-wing pundit, commentating from within my detached media smug-pod located in deep outer space. Like the Listener. I've never read Metro. Or North&South. They're the same thing.

This government trades on apathy. They thrive when no one's looking, and know that answering a question is to acknowledge that question -- just see John Key's shrill schoolboy cries of "Whatever! Whatever!" during the Stuff debate. 

The political conversation never gets off the ground, leaving whatever scraps of left-wing print media we've got devoting their time to trying to out-wry each other, while the right-wing press (i.e. all of the press) cheerleads endlessly for Team Key. Everyone who isn't an old white fart has long given up on even noticing who's in power. It's like a Mexican-wave of shrugging from one end of the country to the other. 

I wonder when morals and human decency went from being civilised human behaviour, the base level of society, to just another ideology. These things are not a theory to be messed about with. This isn't Objectivism. These attributes are not optional. 

New Zealand didn't exist until the first Labour government. Everything that is good and proper and normal and taken for granted about post-colonial New Zealand is due to Michael Joseph Savage and its been a slow erosion since then. 

Only when that erosion reaches ground zero can the Labour movement return. Only when we start stuffing kids down chimneys again will those 1 million National voters and 1 million enrolled non-voters notice something's askew. 

Because Key's got a formula and he's not going anywhere. 

Jimmy McButt

And so I walked from the burning wreckage, reborn, as Mr Jimmy McButt.

It all started with logging into stuff. There was too much stuff. Passwords, usernames, security phrases, captchas, taste tests -- when I wasn't struggling with a long lost password I was straining to remember my own goddamn name. It was a daily struggle. One time Yahoo decided to link my Flickr account to my Yahoo account -- which I hadn't touched since 2001. Handily, they sent me a new password to my Hotmail account -- also unused since the early 00s, and now long expired. I stared into the night, a broken man.

And then they did it: the 'sign in with Facebook' option. Whoever came up with that - they're a genius. Not only because it stopped us all from punching our computers into the sky, but because it effectively let Facebook loose on the entire internet. Your Facebook account could dig its data-hungry fingers into every single site you visit, letting them (THEM) capitalise on your laziness by finding out even more about you. Right now, as we speak, they're tailoring their ad space to your specific interests, curiosities and perversions, and then charging their advertisers accordingly.

You, in return, are spared the agony of remembering and typing in a password.

It was sort of win-win, if your idea of winning is to have the websites you sign into randomly post crap on your Facebook feed and to have an enormous humming server in Salt Lake City know more about you than you do.

Personally, it was just too high a price. I enjoyed the ease of the Facebook sign-in -- but not the data-mining downside. I concluded that there must be some way to have the best of both worlds.

Which is where Jimmy McButt came in.

Mister McButt (Jim to his friends) served as a forcefield, a splatter-guard -- a fake Facebook account with which to "sign in with Facebook" to 3rd-party sites, without coming back to me. The real me.

Jimmy McButt would happily sign in to Facebook to hold forth on the comments threads of Youtube and Buzzfeed, and had no qualms whether anyone liked his opinions or not. Nor would he care if Youtube and Buzzfeed decided to pump his Facebook feed with "Jimmy McButt commented on this: 16 Facts About Marty McFly That Will Totally Blow Your Mind". McButt was cool with it. He was very chill. Relaxed. A cool guy. Calm under pressure. Good with heavy machinery. And cars.

From that day on I traversed the internet as Jimmy McButt, free from molestation of my (real) gmail account, while Jim's gmail took a pasting. I even got postage delivered to my house under Mr McButt, safe in the knowledge that Amazon had a record of only Jimmy's horrendous taste in books, and not of my own.

I continued to wear the Jimmy McButt costume, and his internet presence grew: Twitter, Flickr, the bank, this blog -- everything was easier as McButt. Life got easier. I became addicted. I couldn't go back. Not now. I clicked 'like' on another Buzzfeed post and felt a zing of excitement as it notified Mr McButt's Facebook friends without me giving the slightest of shits. Go back to my old ways? No. There was too much at stake now.

And so one evening I did it. I plucked up the courage and made it final. I drove the Skoda hard and fast to Lower's Peak, tossing myself from the driver's side just in time to see the bodywork shine briefly in the yellow moonlight, hanging in the air like a sharp intake of breath, before slamming nose-first into the rocks below.

And I walked from the burning wreckage as Jimmy McButt.

Doors began to open to me. People would call me 'sir' in the street. I'd enter 4-star restaurants and be shown to the best table in the house. Valets would pull up with my car as soon as we stepped from the lobby, our cheeks blossomed with fine wine and expensive steak.The lights shone brighter than ever before, and they shone just for me, Jimmy James McButt -- wheeler, dealer, and fearless orderer of dubious goods online. It all happened so fast, and it all felt like a wonderful dream that would last forever. But it never could. Nothing ever can.

One morning I awoke to a knock at the door. The postman had been, he'd got the wrong house. This must be yours. They handed me the parcel. I looked down at the address: a parcel for Mr McButt. For me.

"See you round, Jim", said my neighbour, as I stared after them. See you round, Jim. I closed the door.

And I knew. They'd got me. They'd finally got me. All this time, hiding behind a new identity, a new name, a new personality -- I was merely grafting it onto my old one. I ceased to be Michael Kerby and was now Jimmy McButt and it didn't make a goddamn lick of difference.

I sat down, hard, on my computer chair. I was dazed. In shock. Where to now? Where do I go? I looked up at the ceiling and imagined thousands of tiny cameras, tiny eyes, staring down at me, watching me, logging my every movement and microscopic sniffle under McButt, J. It was hopeless. Or was it?

I turned to the keyboard. Facebook. Delete profile. Yes, I'm sure. I watched Jimmy McButt vanish into the ether. See you round, Jim.

Register. I thought for a moment, staring at the empty space, at the new beginning, another one, stretching out before me.

I placed my hands on the keyboard, tapped in a new name, and was reborn.

Experienced, sophisticated, worldly. A better model.

"You Won't Believe These 11 Cats That Look Exactly Like Marty McFly"

Ass Muldoon likes this.

Baffled dads

(This was written in April. And then I forgot to click 'publish'. As a result, none of these ads are even on anymore. Good stuff, Michael!)

It must be great being an Advertising Man. You get to feel a bit creative, but also a bit business-y. You're not quite the four-square, straight-down-the-line, garden-variety corp-o-drone, but you're also not a slimy, warehouse-dwelling art student either. You have a bottomless expenses account, but you also spend time in your Inspiration Hammock. The best of both worlds.

The other great thing about being an Advertising Man (as imagined by me) as that you can blatantly copy your peers. When you're not in the mood to be a revolutionary, game-changing, up-firing creative, you can just cobble together a pitch based on that pretty effective ad you caught last night. That one about toast.

How else to explain the current bunch of adverts featuring baffled dads making hearty comfort food for their distant, unknowable offspring. There's a trio of them on TV at the moment. Let's take a look:

Colman's shepherd's pie:

A bearded, grizzled lighthouse-keeper-esque dad attempts to console his daughter's romantic troubles. With a potato topped mince dish. You can see his dilemma: he's clearly some kind of long absent sea captain, briefly returned from months of isolation on a rickety old trawler. He doesn't understand these land people troubles. What is this thing you call "love", soil-foot? Note his suspicious sideways glances as she tucks into his meal: will this placate her bizarre inland ways? Will a full belly soothe her restless soul, a bit like over-feeding a white whale? Is this my daughter? He gives up, looks back down into the sink to wash up, watches the way the bubbles swell around his hands and soon finds himself staring off into the howling darkness, the salty maelstrom of the Earth's watery guts, the endless rocking of the waves carrying him back out into land-lost oblivion. The ad cuts off just before he starts shouting uncontrollably.

Kingsmill bread:

Another dad ad, another girl, another failed relationship. This time dad is sporting a sense of humour - why, that boy you loved and lost? Let us emulate his visage on an egg and then smash his speccy fucking face in with a teaspoon, just like the flop-aired knob-drip deserves. This ad is notable for also using the jolly bell end dad as well as the wise-beyond-his-years little shithead brother. The boisterous nature of the dad-son team's approach makes things more condescending than the sea captain's ad. While the sea captain is responding in the only way he knows how (through mince) to a situation he's completely out of his depths with, the dad-son team are fully aware of the situation, but they've just chosen to ignore it. Their message is thus: shut up, and put an egg in.

Co-Op bacon: 

And then, the only one with a male teenager. Will it also be about a broken romance? Will Dan find grim consolation in a big pie, or by cracking his ex-beloved's face with a tea spoon and then dipping toast soldiers into the eggy wound? Well, no. Dan's in bed. Dan can't be arsed getting up. This ad satisfies two things - that kids are baffling monsters that sleep like the dead, and that they can only disappoint. Note how the dad responds "afternoon" to his exhausted son's "morning": there's a hatred there rivalled only by a married couple in a 1970s sitcom. Yeah, good morning, you greasy little bastard. 

a last desperate clawing at the touch-screen

I've had a vision of the computer future, and it is this: a single, interface-less screen; a touchpad, that is neither off nor on, like a Kindle. And it is powered by the human shriek.

Previously, I thought my parents' failure to operate technology invented after their birth was because they grew up without it. At about 25, your brain apparently shuts off that little valve marked "incoming" and sets itself to "shrug". You've passed the point of learning. -- you're done.

After this point, we're just juggling around the things we already know, reconfiguring past skills (such as going to bed) to deal with new situations (such as lying down to die). 

As a teenager, I learnt loads of stuff. I made levels for the crap games I played, I made shitty websites out of html and I got the world's oldest CD-R burner and did all manner of illegal CD burning activities with it. I fiddled with emulators. I designed 'skins' for WinAmp. I learned how to edit videos and music and made little clips -- I even made rudimentary animations by banging together hundreds of MSPaint images into a GIF animator and then saving it as a Quicktime file for some reason. I was constantly learning new things, discovering new things, adapting to new things. Anything I didn't understand, I'd gamely fiddle about with until I got what I wanted from it. 

So here I am, at that  threshold, about to march proudly into a world that I will refuse to understand.
25 years of learning followed by about 65 years of baffled ignorance. But it turns out it's worse than that: what I hadn't even considered was that not only do we struggle with new information after this point, but previously-held skills (like using a computer) suddenly start to drop off. 

I have here, on my lap, the tiniest laptop I've ever used. It is mostly too small for me -- to type at it I have to sit as if I'm crushed between two people on a train, legs together, shoulders hunched, elbows in. This is the only way to accurately type on the minuscule keyboard -- and even then every second backspace attempt is a + or a 0. Sometimes I bring up the Help menu. Sometimes I just stare impotently at my hands.

The other thing to contend with here is Windows 8. To ease functionality and provide an intuitive, user-friendly interface, Windows 8 helpfully does away with at least half the buttons you've become accustomed to. It's like someone's bricked up your front door. Instead of being able to click through your start menu to find things, you're now using 'search', like going to the supermarket and finding they've been taken over by Argos. Or someone dumping all your clothes out of your drawers in favour of rummaging through piles on the floor. Or having someone remove a fundamental part of an OS you've used since 1995.

It's not just the start menu -- some programs, instead of having the usual file menu, now have baffling glyphs and icons, like a tree or a little car. I just made that up -- they're even less semiotic than that. They're usually three little dots in a line, or three little dots in the shape of a triangle, or maybe just a star. Could be settings, that star. Or it could be your profile. Or it could be a newsfeed of some kind. It might even turn the whole fucking thing off. Who knows? 

Some of these programs are so user-friendly that they cease to have any buttons at all, having been rendered into 'Apps' -- there's no file, no bar along the top: most of the time you can only exit them by pushing alt+F4, which always feels like the dirty way out. Apps! It's a laptop, not a phone.

The Sega Master System II appeared in my dad's life when he was in his 30s, and was forever beyond him. I might as well have been playing a microwave. Watching Alex Kidd fall off the bottom of the screen to his death was the same to him as watching the SEGA logo seize up. He didn't care for it.

I'm only 26. I still care. I still want to learn. But I can't even see the scroll bar. Why is it light-grey against a light-grey background? Why can't I figure out how to change this without screaming? Why does every day herald another exhausting descent into Google diagnosis? Everything grinding to a halt, the mind turning to a bloody mush, a last desperate clawing at the touch-screen as Bing pops into life--

Oh. Here it is.