Dave The Penguin (13 page)

Dave raised his wing, and
gestured with it to ask the obvious question, but the figure just
ignored him and carried on with his script.

“If you carry on the way you
are, in the future, you will be alone, cold, on your own on a
beach, just you, with nothing to do, with nobody wanting to talk to
you, is that what you want…… is that what you really, truly
want….?”

Dave didn`t know what he
wanted, of course he didn’t want to be alone but he did like peace
and quiet.

“Ummm…” said Dave “Well
actually…” but the ghost interrupted him again.

“You must change Dave, you must
become a better penguin, not be such a grouch, go forth and help
others, work hard, share and give all your fish away. You must
become a better penguin, and then you will find happiness.”

Dave still looked very confused
- it didn’t make a lot of sense. Then a cloud appeared, transparent
and misty, which lifted them both up into the air and carried them
to the penguin graveyard at the bottom of the mountain.

The ghost then gestured
towards a small pile of loose rocks. “This ….. Dave, is what you
will become if you do not change, just a forgotten pile of rocks
that nobody cares for.”

It made Dave feel very sad,
very lost and alone. He wanted to change, be more, be a better,
harder working, caring penguin, it made him very sad indeed, and
guilty.

It was then that he looked
sideways to a large marble obelisk just to the left of the
rocks.

Dave the
Saviour Penguin
was written on it in big
carved letters, and there were many brightly coloured stones at its
base, and bits of fine seaweed laid carefully in front of
it.

The ghost looked at Dave.
“Ignore that - it belongs to another Dave, not you.”

Dave looked a bit further up
the obelisk and there was a big picture of Dave in a frame higher
up on one side; he was wearing a medal and holding a Nobel Prize,
and there were lots of girls names scrawled in lipstick next to the
picture.

Standing on the top was a large
statue of Dave, it was unmistakably him, but they clearly hadn’t
quite got his side profile quite right - some of the features were
clearly a little ‘overdone’, and clearly ‘six-packs’ were very
tricky to do in marble.

“
So now you have seen,
now you understand” said the ghost gesturing towards the pile of
rocks. Then he began ushering the confused Dave back onto the cloud
before he could say anything.

He was clearly pleased that the
point had been made. The cloud lifted up and they returned to the
rocky hillside, and back to the present day.

“So you see” said the ghost,
“Unless you change your ways you will become nothing more than a
lonely pile of rocks that nobody remembers, and nobody visits or
cares about. You will be forgotten. You must change, feel guilty
and do something.”

Why was
everything always trying to get me to change
, thought Dave,
do
things, be something else?

There was a great
expansive
whooshing
noise, and the ghost vanished, but just before
he did, there was an expression on his face that indicated that
there may have been the slightest of chances that he may have
received the wrong memo, or picked up the wrong file on the way out
of the office, and delivered the wrong speech to the wrong penguin
?

Which of course never
happens.

Dave felt worse after the visit
from the three ghosts; he hadn’t done anything wrong, he didn’t
want to change, and as far as he could see it was everyone else
that was the problem.

He walked back to the colony
and was greeted by all his friends, and then his wife, who seemed
very excited.

“I have a surprise for you” she
said. She took out a piece of mistletoe from behind her back. “I
found it washed up on the beach a few days ago.”

She raised it up and kissed him
– he was very surprised, and he smiled. The mistletoe must have
been carried a long way by the sea, and from a land very far off,
it was a miracle how it had arrived here.

Then he understood what it was
all about, he understood the message that had been carried a long
way from distant shores. Or at least how it was interpreted and
transferred.

The love - that was what it was
all about - that was what was important. Just penguins coming
together to remember to love each other, that was what mattered
nothing else really.

Despite everything, it was love
that mattered, and what could be more important than that?

Except that obviously
Dave drew the line at his mother-in law, after all there had to be
rules and limits...

…
even at
Christmas.

It was a complicated system,
this evolutionary business, on many levels - and not just the
physical world but also within the spiritual quantum consciousness
field thingy – or wherever it was that all the penguin programming
information came from.

‘
The Messiah
Penguin’
… thought Dave
…
there was always a clue in
the job title, in this case the first bit. Sort of like ‘crash test
dummy’, as with most of these sort of jobs you don’t just have to
read the small print, to get a clue of what was
involved.

The problem was that he
wasn’t really the Messiah ‘saviour’ Penguin, as in the
Life of Brian
film he was ‘just a naughty little penguin’, just as his
mother had always told him he was. It was merely a case of mistaken
identity, and the collective penguin consciousness had obviously
got it wrong.

More likely it had come up with
the idea of what he should be subconsciously from all those films,
books, and needy thoughts and wishes everyone had. It was just
waiting for some fool to come along and sign up to the ‘Saviour’
Job Description; some idiot, some gullible muggins to fall into the
usual ‘Saving the Penguin World’ hero trap.

Besides the role sort of
required a selfless nature, putting yourself last, losing your ego,
and sacrificing everything for ‘the cause’. Which Dave wasn’t very
good at.

For starters he was rather
attached to his ‘self’, and if he had an ego somewhere, then he was
sure it would be a large one and subsequently, one worth
keeping.

It was all very well
experiencing all of those synchronistic events, having knowledge,
events pointing to him, all those people writing about him and
prophesising about him, but it was more likely that it was all part
of trying to convince him to take the bait, trying to make him
think he was ‘the one’, getting him to somehow believe he was ‘the
chosen ‘Saviour’ penguin’.

Which of course he wasn’t.

He wasn’t falling for that one,
not even if the bait was a large barrel of fish. He wasn’t signing
on the dotted line of any virtual contract, and then just end up
becoming another religious cliché.

Oh no, not him,
not
ever
.

No, it was just a whole range
of ideas and thoughts that other people had had over history that
it was trying to manifest into form, trying to make happen, trying
to get someone to live the dream, be the hero.

If he was the ‘Messiah’ penguin
he would have been told, shown what to do, or, at the very least
asked, but he hadn’t, so he wasn’t, and that was that.

The trouble was though that he
knew everything; he knew what had to be done, he could see things
that others couldn’t, he saw everyone in a different way, and it
all made him feel responsible, awake to the problems and what was
going on.

This was a problem, or a kind
of dilemma, but only if he knew what that actually meant.

But from Dave’s point of view,
he was just a penguin, what difference could he make? He wasn’t
going to stand up on some hill or rock, and tell everyone what to
do, with a glowing aura about his head.

With everyone expecting him to
be saying all the right things, flashing his white teeth, his
electrifying charisma and personality, inspiring everyone, and
somehow making everything OK.

It just wasn’t going to happen,
his mind couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the collective penguin
mind had to come to terms with that. Just to make it clear, he
folded his wings in front of him and shook his head.

The trouble with that again
though, was that being a Messiah Penguin or Prophet Penguin, a
‘Saviour for a time’, or whatever he was supposed to have been was
a bit of a dying breed and concept really.

It was now all about thinking,
influencing the collective mind, doing all the work, getting all
that knowledge, coming up with new stuff, and getting everyone to
do things.

Which made it was more than a
bit tough going these days, intense, and somewhat life
threatening.

Also it sort of made you,
well, a bit boring frankly, and poor, and not very exciting, not to
mention difficult to understand. Also if you were to say or do the
wrong thing at the wrong time, everyone would just have a go at
you, even though you knew you were right, after all, you could only
do so much. The whole thing was a bit like a penguin trying to tow
the
Titanic
.

So naturally, girls too thought
you were a bit weird, boring, and not very exciting, which of
course made having more messiahs and prophets tricky. In fact it
made the whole process kind of difficult to reproduce – as it were
- a sort of reverse feedback problem, brought on by lack of
external planetary evolutionary pressure or guidance.

You were much more likely to
get more penguins that were the opposite, you know - exciting,
flamboyant, charismatic, rich, entertaining, but all in a useless
sort of way, but still popular with the penguin girls. The girls,
after all were the ones that held the evolutionary ropes, and knew
what they wanted, or at least thought they did. So not surprisingly
everything was given somewhat of a bias towards the ‘what was
wanted’, rather than ‘what was needed’, which in both cases lacked
any form of overall strategy or plan.

As a result getting the
collective penguin mind to change, evolve, be something more, was
kind of tricky, especially when it didn’t want to, and made it hard
for you to even try; reacting against you with its own perspective
and subconscious objectives, when it didn’t even know what it was
itself.

It was like trying to get some
giant mindless bureaucratic organisation to change, which would
make life very difficult for you and react against you, attacking
you, unconsciously like a machine. So any time you tried to get it
to do something it didn’t like, even it was wrong in itself, and in
trouble, it would resist you.

It would avoid doing anything,
go round in circles, anything rather than what it was supposed to
do and becoming very devious and clever at doing it. But of course
individual penguins never behaved like that.

So the possibility of there
being other penguins being able to do what he did, and see what he
saw and did, was less and less likely, and the circumstances for
them to be able to do what he did, and to have someone like his
wife with him, helping him and taking care of him along with
others, well that was almost impossible.

Almost, but not quite –
especially if there was a big fundamental problem, and Dave thought
about the
Titanic
again in the film of it he had seen.

But Dave wasn’t a Messiah
Penguin or a Prophet Penguin, or the Saviour. He didn’t glow in the
dark or hear voices from a penguin god in his head, he was just an
ordinary penguin who had accidentally seen too much, and worked too
much out.

It was unfortunate, but that’s
the way it was.

In fact the whole thing and
experiences had more than ruffled a few of his feathers, which took
quite a lot these days, for a ‘rufty tufty’ bloke penguin, that he
knew he was.

If anything, he saw himself as
a sort of manager or director penguin, yes ‘manager’, that was a
good definition as it didn’t mean that he had a label that someone
else had created. It didn’t have great expectations attached to it,
but it also meant it sounded as though he was qualified (which of
course he wasn’t).

The trouble with the Messiah or
Saviour role was that it didn’t really have a Job Description;
everyone wanted there to be one, but nobody could define what they
would have to do, how or what it was that was meant to be done, or
by when. Let alone what they should look like - all the skills, the
capabilities, and charisma.

The role and objectives for the
task weren’t that very well defined either, i.e. ‘Save Everyone’ -
from what exactly? ‘Describe how everything was all a mess and what
it needed to be instead’, ‘What was causing all the problems?’ -
Those sort of clear and well defined objectives. Or was there some
sort of plan that had to be followed or delivered? Or were you
supposed to come up with your own plans?

It just wasn’t clear at
all.

Having a ‘glow in the dark’
head, being popular, and able to do miracles wasn’t really a very
good CV requirement, and could be fulfilled by most glow-worms. But
the ‘manager’ title sounded much better.

It did though make him sound a
bit boring, so other penguins would be more likely to leave him
alone, and he could get on with his job, rather than being strung
up or stoned.

He could also use one of
those black folders and go to meetings, whatever they were. He
would also have a
Plan
, and he would just have to
think of things, get ideas, put them into the Plan and they would
miraculously get done, somehow, as they always did.