Free Dave The Penguin by Nick Sambrook

as it were,
trying at the same time to work out the context of what it was
trying to get across, what the hell it was on about, and work out
what needed to happen.
    All at the same time.
    Yet more importantly -
WHY HIM?? It didn’t seem to have his interests and needs at heart -
only its own. It didn’t seem to care much for him either, only so
far as his mind was working, a bit like a slave.
    He put his cleaned shades on,
and his headphones, and waddled off towards the sea - in the right
direction this time.
    He was going to tsunami
and jet-spray out his mental attic, sun
bleach his brain, clear his head, empty his mind, and do a bit of
surfing and fishing to get himself fit at the same time.

    It was a bloke thing.

 
     
6 Dave Down the Rabbit
Hole
     
     
    Dave wasn’t a religious
penguin.
    In fact he didn’t believe in
the penguin ‘god’ at all, or at least in any penguin ‘god’ that
religions seem to try to describe or define.
    To Dave they all just didn’t
make sense, add up, or equate and stand up to any form of logic at
all.
    Of course not having any
evidence or a detailed explanation of what ‘god’ actually was came
as a bit of a stumbling block for penguin religions as well.
    As did all the bad and unjust
things that went on in the real world that ‘god’ was supposed to be
in charge of, or looking after; things that all appeared to be
getting worse, not better.
    There weren’t any logical
explanations from religions as to why it was all going so badly
wrong, and why it was all frankly a bit rubbish, compared to how it
used to be.
    Dave had done quite a bit of
reading on the subject of religion, in books, and on the Internet,
and like most intellectually structured created thinking forms,
they always seemed to end up with the problem of the ‘elephant in
the room’ again.
    That elephant of course, as in
physics, was that uncomfortably large awkward problem that wouldn’t
go away.
    One that required some sort of
faith, a leap of logic, or a mental bridge, for the large gap in
the plausibility to work, when you clearly couldn’t join up all the
dots, as half the numbers you had been given were missing.
    Dave had also studied
philosophy, psychology, physics, and a couple of other things
beginning with ‘p’, and they all ended up not being able to come up
with a big answer, the final solution, the ultimate picture. That
of what was really there, what it all meant, who was in charge,
what was for, and why we existed.
    Which should all be fairly
simple really, and probably not 42.
    Even music, which had a set
language and had evolved over time, seemed to be inspired from
somewhere else, but music didn’t have the answers either. But it
was nice.
    The same was true with a
lot of art. Even though the best art was unstructured, untethered
and inspired by ‘something higher’ - it still seemed to just end up
with not saying anything, evolving into something more and more
surreal, using virtual concepts, and non-located expressions over
time.
    Even the artists themselves
were turning into faceless hermits, ending up producing vapourware
placed in remote empty spaces. They were all desperately trying to
‘articulate’ something that they had experienced, something ‘not
real’ that they wanted to describe somehow; put the formless into
form, which in itself was also evolving.
    The same could also be said
about architecture, or fashion in general, which was mostly driven
by the mind of the consumer, and in turn was influenced by the
changing collective taste.
    Fashion wasn’t really Dave’s
thing, it just seemed a bit, well, ‘girlie’, but he did like things
to look nice, whatever that was.
    Dave had read in various
penguin religious literature, and on the Internet, that long, long
ago, the Penguin God had been a great giant seal. He was
vindictive, frightening, and ate bad penguins.
    In other later articles the god
was a polar bear, which had lots of different interpretations and
forms, as