This week's Gift To You is information about a Daftsplosion, and how you can learn
from my mistakes to make yourself a better person.
First of all I should let you know that a Daftsplosion is an explosion of
glass and disco lights, and that while this may sound enjoyable it is not.
Let me explain.
I was getting ready to write the next installment of 'my gift to you' when I
heard a loud crack like thunder. I rushed downstairs, with an already sick
feeling in my stomach. A feeling of knowing, of dread. "My daft punk coffee
table is dead," I thought.
Let me go back even further, and start at the very beginning. The Daft Punk
coffee table was designed by two men in robot hats who call themselves Daft Punk.
Hence the name. It was for sale at Habitat, which is a yuppie home accessories
store in England which makes boring people feel interesting for buying a wacky
lampshade and a seven hundredth generation silk screen Andy Warhol print.
DARREN'S HISTORY LESSON
A yuppie was someone in the late 1980s who dressed like Mike Skinner but didn't
rap and was interested in the stock market and the saxophone. I think. In today's
terms it would be someone who looked like Prince Harry with streaks and who danced
like Tony Blair. And wore pink or lemon coloured polo shirts with the collar turned
up and occasionally a striped sweater around their neck. In the 80s, no one ever
needed to wear sweaters due to the absence of awful global warming, and as such
warm attire was only used as an accessory. Draped almost certainly always around
the neck.
Anyway, my Daft Punk table cost one thousand pounds.
Yes, I know. But, as I explained to my friend at the time: "It has disco lights".
After it eventually arrived at my house I found myself inserting the phrase 'Daft
Punk Coffee Table' into as many sentences as I could.
Daft Punk made me feel edgy. Hip! Cool, even. It didn't matter that they had
refused to answer my fax begging them to work with me (Robots don't have mobile
phones or secretaries, it turned out - only a fax machine). It didn't matter that
their last record was kinda average. None of that mattered because I owned a piece
of them in my living room. I put my feet on it. I put my cup of tea on it. And
constantly bragged about it.
And it is in the last sentence of the above paragraph that the jewel of this
Gift To You is hidden. Thou shalt not brag about Daft Punk. Or anything, really.
Like, I had a friend who was always dating. He liked to always go on dates, and
to then brag about them. Sometimes he'd describe his incredible ability to juggle
more than one love interest with this silly mime that used pots boiling on the
cooker as a metaphor. "Look at me!" he'd cry in glee, as he tried to demonstrate
how many pots he had on the boil. What he didn't realize was that one day the pots
would all boil over at exactly the same time and our little 'friend' would get burnt
hands.
The moral of the story? Well, firstly, that whenever anyone says "I've got this
friend", they're really talking about themselves. Secondly, that if you are smug
and if you are constantly shooting your mouth off for the whole world to hear about
how lucky you are to have something, eventually the world will get sick of you and
the universe will conspire to rip the carpet out from underneath you.
There's a third moral as well, and that is, never to use cooking analogies.
But I digress.
I was not only bragging about how much I loved my Daft Punk Coffee Table too much.
I was also constantly photographing it and other parts of my new house to prove to
the world that I was edgy, hip and happening. One day I was walking backwards in my
house to take a picture of my new purple paisley wallpaper, and I fell over and
landed on the Daft Punk table. At first it was fine - but then I noticed a tiny
fracture in one of the joins. A hairline fracture in the cola coloured veneer which
seperated my cup of tea from the throbbing liquid lava of red disco heaven beneath
the surface of the table.
I wondered if I should replace the damned thing.
"It will be fine!" I convinced myself, and then I continued photographing my house.
About three hours later I heard this awful smashing, crashing, diabolical
end-of-the-world type thunder sound. Now here we are back at the beginning of
my story. The Daftsplosion.
So the coffee table is dead. Perhaps it's for the best. Now I can always remember
it as it was, and not as what it would have eventually become: the furniture world's
answer to James Blunt.
But I am deadly serious in this Gift To You. This advice of smashing down your ego
lest your ego smasheth down on your Daft Punk table is vital. Don't be a smug little
shit about stuff or it will break and you'll have to buy another one. Another ego or
something.
You get the general idea.
This week's Gift To You is information about a Daftsplosion, and how you can learn
from my mistakes to make yourself a better person.