Hell To Pay T-Shirt

July 10, 2008

Hell To Pay T-Shirt by Paul Baines

‘There will be hell to pay’ - nothing seems to be free these days, or nothing of value. It seems that everything is going cheap now the recession has started to bite the four corners of the world (someone tell me, was this planet once a cube?). Life is cheap (depending which country you live in on a scale of 1 to 10), so are promises (and that includes all political ones), the earth is running out of every conceivable raw material out there, and yet I can go to Morrisson’s Supermarket (I hate all supermarkets equally btw), and buy enough for a barbecue for four for only a fiver. What’s that all about? This isn’t an ad for a supermarket, honest! Don’t worry I’m not tied into any secret sponsorship deals, but do buy a Lexus, change your long distance provider, let me do an insurance comparison quote for you and drink more alcopops. The point is everything of value is paling into comparison to the all encompassing economic might for crude. Oil is the be all and end all right now, and unlike a few energy crises we’ve had over the past half century, this one is permanent.

Do you ever have the feeling that this might just be the quiet before the storm? In the 1920’s stockbrokers were jumping from their windows rather than face the crash. These days they make money from it, whatever does make money, bet that it will make more soon and you’ll get a slice. If a barrel of oil eventually tips $200 or $400 or even $1000, will we call it quits? Could we? If this situation continues, at this rate we’ll be burning anything in an attempt to hold on to some semblance of civilisation and someone will be betting on it. Old tyres are a great investment for the future, they burn for quite a while.

Oil is a little like money, everyone needs it but the bulk of it is owned by a select few, and the rest of us have to bid to get a piece of the action. Our governments, corporations, everyone in power has to beg, borrow or steal to keep this show on the road. Oil and money makes people lazy, I’m not including commodities brokers, but all the suckers who pay through the nose at the end of the money game, the consumer. If you trade you make a percentage of everyone else’s deals, if everyone’s broke you bet on some futures, or rather failed futures, currencies, corporations, even whole industries. I you don’t bet you’re at the mercy of those who do. The whole systems’ going to hell, more people are making money from money than any other product in the world. If you want to save the world shut down all the stock markets. Business will stagnate but eventually local economies will boom, they’ll only be able to generate enough financing to serve a local community, and well, the earth will be saved!

Hell To Pay is a strange old saying, I was in two minds about including ‘Admission - One Soul’ but to be honest I didn’t want to get into any Christian arguments, I’m a devout agnostic, I have no idea what comes after this life and neither do you or anyone else, and that includes the highly devout. You can believe what you like, whatever helps you is probably good but imagine this. You’re a bible basher, you know every word of it, you turn up at The Pearly Gates, Pete waves you on, you walk up the steps, and there’s God. White hair, beard, the lot. Next thing you know he’s asking you what you’ve learned down here, you start to recite The Bible and he rolls his eyes and shakes his head. He asks you to be creative, tell a story, recite a poem off the top of your head, sing a song, something, anything, as long as it’s original. You’re devout, you know The Bible off by heart but you’re stumped.

That’s my problem with belief, you have to save some for yourself, without it you’re the product of programming, religious or otherwise. Putting it simply ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. Maybe everything I’ve just said is claptrap, or maybe not, that’s the beauty of life, it might all be true, then again it could all be fiction. Unlike death, death is definitively as final as finality can get, there’s a road you travel, and that’s your life, but then it stops and that’s death. Hell would just be rubbing it in, besides if I was religious I’d this that we’re living in hell already. The world leaders don’t need horns and pitchforks to convince me they’re working on a completely different level to me. They see me and everyone I know as a statistic, an individual who exists merely to form the mass, the population that speaks, yet what do we say? More oil. Screw the environment. More war. Screw humanity. More Money. Screw everyone else.

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