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carmella chihuahua · people's princess lol Joined: 18 Dec 2005 Posts: 1158

I was bored and tangerine told me to write a story beginning with ';how many onions does one man need?'
So I did.Whilst drinking gin.

How many onions does one man need? He thought ,resignedly shaking his head whilst watching the man in front of him filling up his polystyrene (polystyrene!!) bag. ‘Excuse me Sir?
‘What?’
‘I know the sign states twenty onions for a pound but do you really need that many? Are you aware that twenty onions could feed a family of twenty in Mozambique for a week and for the onions to be such a ‘bargain’ price, maybe the onion farmer has been left out of pocket? Are you a member of a co-op and plan to distribute these onions amongst the needy poor of this parish?
Yer what? Fuck off or I’ll…. I’ll…. Onion you!’
Simon sighed and carried on walking. Was Jesus ever threatened with being Onioned? Did onions exist in Jerusalem at that time? And what was to Onion somebody? It didn’t seem like a compliment or promise of an onion based meal judging by the man’s beetroot face. At least he hadn’t been hit this time.
And he would persevere.

‘ Big Macs-Buy One-Get One Free’-the sign screamed-a paean to gluttony and waste, disease, greed and death. A woman came out holding two.
‘Excuse me. Do you really think you need TWO big Macs when you are so very clearly not starving?

Later, when the swelling had subsided, Simon contemplated the blood covered McDonalds serviette and guilt gnawed at him. There was no need to have taken that from the dispenser, no matter how much his nose gushed. He was soiled, a consumerist, a capitalist, despicable, part of a disposable society. Yellow birds wings flapped mockingly in front of him as he slid to the ground, pink liquid oozing out of the crushed serviette.

It hadn’t always been like this. It was because of Sarah .Fucking Sarah. Sarah with her bags of ‘bargains’ rotting and stinking in the cupboards, her piles of happy cheap shiny nylon clothing, cupboards groaning with unwanted but reduced novelty foodstuffs. But he was happy then-dining on egg and bacon pop tarts and fizzy reduced yoghurt in an unpopular flavour, he was happy.
Until she left. Left for another bargain, a slightly shop-soiled lawyer who had managed to get out of alimony-can’t get a better deal than that. When she left, the luridly happy contents of the house disgusted him-he threw everything away, everything. And for a minute in the blankness of his home, he felt at peace.

It was his revenge. Revenge to someone who didn’t know or care but the spite kept him going. It started off with buy one get one free. He would only put one of the offers in his basket and feel a perverse sense of satisfaction at the ‘waste’, how Sarah would be horrified. Then it got worse. He got a caution for splitting apart a pack of lasagne with 50% extra free and was led dripping down the aisle of Asda, and the béchamel sauce dripping down his hands made him think of the stigmata. He thought of Jesus turning over the tables in the temple but when he did the same to a church jumble sale, he was scorned. Like Jesus was scorned. The fairy cakes flung at his head from outraged pensioners, the rocks thrown at martyrs, the rock buns, undoubtedly more painful. But now he had a cause, a reason to live. And someday she would find him again.

Money and clothing became a problem. How could he have such an ideology and work for a capitalist wasteful boss? He resigned from his telesales job and went to the Jobcentre. His needs were few now. Everyone’s needs should be few. The staff became used to him and gave up trying to find him a job. They forsook their bonus as they all agreed hearing his reasons for not working for a particular job brightened up their week far more. Especially when he started coming in dressed in flowery sheets to show people that they did not need to be slaves to fashion and clothes. Jesus was happy to wear a sheet.

He wrote a lot. He wrote to evil wasteful newspapers berating them on their dead tree pages, their obsession with coveting the new, the expensive, the irreparable and novelty. They never got published. He lost weight on his diet of home-grown fruit and veg supplemented with food found in skips and bins, became brown from his travails around town exhorting people to lead a less wasteful life, showing them the empty mockery of their lives at the rest of the words expense and grew a beard when his Gillett Mac Threes grew blunt.

‘Excuse me Sir?’
Simon looked up from the doorway, still clutching his serviette.
‘I am Jeremy Templeton from The Guardian. We have heard reports of your battle to save the world and seen you in action- Hugo’s got a smashing pic of that woman thumping you. We would be interested in doing a feature on you to help you spread your goal. Do you need another serviette?

‘But..the trees…’
Jeremy smiled. With the money we pay you, you can plant more trees and all the people reading will think of their own wasteful attitudes. Do you want to save the world or just carry on being beaten up in Nuneaton?

What would Jesus do?

‘I accept’ Simon said.

It created a furore. The article showing Simon spread out on a cross made out of Turkey Twizzlers was the most emailed in history.
‘What would Simon do?’ became a common phrase when looking at what clothes and food to purchase. Simon became a celebrity. At first it was ironic. But in an age where everything is ironic, nobody knew what was ironic and what wasn’t, so to be on the safe side, they laughed whilst saying what a saviour ‘our Simon’ is. And people agreed to be on the safe side. So the joke wasn’t on them. And thus Simon became serious.

He started off in the Guardian’s satirical piece on ‘Saving the world-Simon Style opposite a full-page advert for a 12 slice toaster. He was delighted by the interest people had in him and by the way they had managed to find so many delightful rocquorte and salmon canapés in a skip for him and by the way they had managed to drive him to London in a car powered by orange peel. He was initially suspicious when he received piping hot coffee ‘from a skip’ but his fears were allayed when hearing about how people nowadays only ever drank one sip of coffee and threw the rest away. This made him determined to carry on his quest. And he wondered if Sarah still read the Guardian.

He went on Richard and Judy and Richard even got on his knees and asked for forgiveness. Judy was cross at Richard ‘for being silly’ but ‘Judy will learn’ he thought. Judy learnt. It’s still hard to tell when Simon became ‘for real’. People still argue about whether it was Newsnight or Celebrity Big Brother that did it but within two months, the cult of Simon was born.

It became de rigour for dinner parties in Islington to consist out of rotten fruit from markets. An M.P was forced to resign after his wife offered kiwi fruit from a punnet with no signs of rot and a Waitrose price tag still attached.
People competed to have a Simon lifestyle-flowery sheets were sold for exorbitant amounts of money if they were ‘endorsed by Simon’ with 75% of proceeds going to Simon’s charitable fund. People fought over skips and there was a lot of food going in the skips as to be seen going into a supermarket meant a social kiss of death.
Simon was happy.
Others were not.
Every week another company that wasn’t affiliated with Simon and could not afford to donate a hefty percentage of their income to ‘Simon’s charitable fund’ went under as nobody was buying mass produced food. Thousands were left out of work but they consoled themselves with the fact they didn’t need money to be happy’ one of Simon’s twelve epistles to lead a happy life. But food from skips was now
getting sparse.

A woman from Hampstead died when hit over the head with a Hermes bag filled with mung beans by a woman from Crouch End. Allotments and gardens filled with Simon sanctioned foodstuffs were raided by masked gangs to sell on the black market. There was no other market. Due to Simon’s seventh epistle, ‘no man or woman should buy more than they need’, people were reduced to buying onions singly or with a special family dispensation voucher endorsed by Simon, were allowed two. Onions rotted. Fruit rotted. Some cunning farmers threw their produce in skips and then charged a pound a bin liner but then Simon found out and made them pay him 75% ‘waste allowance’.

The meat industry declined. Simon said ‘eating meat was wrong unless free’ (third epistle) and thus animals were stolen and slaughtered with kitchen knives and scissors in backyards (mass produced killing of vegetables and animals is forsaken by the lord-epistle 7) and cats, dogs and rabbits disappeared in a flurry of blood, claws and haste. Children cried.

Certain farms were allowed to contribute meat to the few shops left if they gave 75% to Simons charitable fund. All farms competed to be allowed to as they had no other option and thus paid a hefty lottery fee to be donated to the fund. But few could afford to buy the winners produce. Jobs were few now.
There were dissenters. Farmers, anarchists who now hated their ideal, hungry people. But it was too late.
Too late.
Everything had gone.

Simon smiled. He had reached his goal. In his Channel Four penthouse, he was happy. A bit. But there was no Sarah. No Sarah at all. And no canapés.

And then she came.

She looked thinner somehow.

‘I did it all for you’ Simon said.

She beamed at him. ‘I knew you would and I love you for it-the lawyer was a mistake. I’m so so sorry.’

‘I have a fund for you. I did this all for you. I am now the richest man alive’

‘And I love you for it, like I have always loved you. But now to be free of all earthly constraints like you say in your twelfth epistle ‘though that has everything must die to live again’, we need to die together to live again’

‘I will do anything to be with you again, my darling Sarah’

What would Jesus do?

She found a cave. ‘You need to be reborn-free of all earthy desires and riches-only then can we be happy again’

Simon smiled. I always knew you understood me. I love you Sarah.

And I love you. Like Jesus, you will be reborn and the world will be as one. We will be together. Forever.

Simon smiled as he walked into the cave.

The new cult of Sarah took a while. At first they scared, they were petrified, couldn’t live without the thought of Simon by their side.
But the glitter and waste was so so appealing after so much austerity. Buy one, get six free. It was decadent and beautiful. And everyone was happy.
But huge piles of unneeded uncool food rotted-onions were fashionable one week and déclassé the next- stunning pretty but slightly unfashionable clothes rotted-but sequins don’t rot and landfills abounded above gleaming shiny unrecylable cities.
The rats came.
And people worked. They worked themselves in the mills until blood spewed from lacerated fingers to keep up with the demand for ‘fashion’. Ultra quick designer fashion at two for the price of one but you couldn’t wear both outfits before it became unfashionable again and was tossed in the bin. Animals were hardly born before they had to die to in the nastiest quickest and cheapest of ways. To create clothes and meat and at six for the price of one, a big supply was needed. Growth hormones weren’t enough. Fashionable clothes were fashionable for a day. People could not afford to keep being fashionable without resorting to desperate means. That’s how kid gloves came into being.
They weren’t from goats. How do you think they were so soft?
The land became desperate-every inch of soil was utilised to try to keep up with current demand whilst landfills stank and the rats kept coming.
Sarah smiled.

People talked about Simon still, about how things were different then. When people did not refuse to eat an unfashionable vegetable. Occasionally his epiststles were shared between small subterfuge groups but when caught they became on queen Sarah’s orders, part of an all you can eat buffet.
Still people talked well rather whispered about the epistle of Simon whilst growing too fat to argue, too fat to complain. And eating and consuming and whispering.

A desperate farmer searched for a bit of land to grow sequins on. He came across a cave. There was a rock in front of it. He rolled it back. And lo! He came across a longhaired desperate man gnawing an onion.
I am King Simon and I have lived on raw cave onions these last twelve months-now let me free under the sixth epistle!
The farmer gawped then bowed. Hail the reborn Simon. King of all kings. Please save us from our hell of all hells.
I will. I am Simon, king of all kings.

Teach us how to live an unwasteful life s stipulated in your epistles
Ay, ~I will. I am reborn, the king of kings. Cast down that evilly glitter bedecked
sword. I am now your master. Care for an onion?

In the distance, huge genetically modified Persian cats draw a carriage closer and closer.