misanthropomorphication

It is said that when rain batters down on the city
and the wind whips cold leaves in your face,
there are beings who help if you feel a bit shitty;
that soon get you feeling quite ace!

Though they're just made of plastic and lack brain or mind
They are wise in the ways of this life.
Without larynx or mouth, they were simply designed
Yet can speak ways to minimise strife

...if the clouds of despair are unusually dense
or your forehead develops a crease...
Just pop for a chat with a Cone Who Talks Sense
and those negative thoughts will soon cease!

******

"Hello there, Horace! How on earth are you today!?"
"Well, I'm a little drained to be absolutely honest, Rupert. You?"
"I'm super-cheery-marvellous, but you, drained? DRAINED? Why on earth why?!"
"Well, it's all this.. business at the moment. There's all this shite with the economy and people failing to realise that perpetual growth is impossible in a world with finite resources which has already exceeded its sustainable carrying capacity. There's the constant warring, the failure of industry to fully commit to sustainable solutions, an extremely slow uptake regarding the reality of and potential devastation possible from human-wrought climate change and despite the shifting inconvenience of the tram-related roadworks people are still attempting to drive everywhere with the driver the only occupant of most of the cars on the roads. Frankly I'm finding everything a little hard to cope with, especially with it getting dark so early in the evenings these days."
"That's an awful lot of things to be thinking of all at once! I should slow down a little if I were you!"
"It's just that I feel I should be helping to do something; when I was younger I always imagined I'd have a job where what I did had an effect on the state of the world rather than just being a teeny weeny little part of a teeny weeny little cog in part of the giant out-of-control machine that's helping to bollocks the planet up."
"I can't imagine what you mean by 'bollocksing it up'! It looks like it might get a little bit sticky for a while but it'll soon clear up! Remember what happened back in the early nineties!? That didn't last too long and think how much better things are these days! You're being awfully hard on people, I think!"
"How much further there is to fall, you mean? I've tried to get a little perspective on everything and to convince myself that everything's alright but it's really not working. I don't know how you manage to stay so cheery about everything."
"Hoo hoo hooo! Well, if you knew what I know you'd be a lot happier too! You need to try and see the bigger picture - we wouldn't be here if little things like these were beyond our abilities to withstand! Goodness, no! A few people have lost their way and that's brought a few other people down and so on! It spreads about a bit and then gets on the news and then suddenly everyone starts worrying about nothing and frightening people and then this happens! Some of us know that we just have to stay calm and it'll all blow over like the little shower this all is!"
"I'm not convinced. I really think we might be in trouble for all our knowledge and the power we think we have. I wish I could do something... direct?"
"I'll tell you what! My youngest came home from school the other day with a very strange tale indeed! There's a rhyme been going around which suggests that some simple items of traffic furniture are the physical manifestations of magical beings which can conduct conversations with people feeling a little mentally battered by the state of the modern world and give them a jolly good talking-to and cheering-up! Apparently they excel at positive thinking and can turn around the most negative of people! Even you hahahaha!!"
"Cheerful fairies, eh? Didn't your sister's kids claim to get attacked by something like that last year? Round here somewhere, too..."
"I'm sure that was just older children playing a trick on them or something! Come on, what we have to do is close our eyes and chant a chant to summon a Cone Who Talks Sense!"
"A chant? Magical traffic cones? Surely even you don't believe such nonsense? Then again maybe you actually do. There must be about fifty cones along here, anyway. OK then: what do we have to chant?"
"Hahahaa! 'Nonsense' indeed! Come on: 'There's no sense like cone's! There's no sense like cone's! There's no sense like cone's!"
"There's no sense like cone's. There's no sense like cone's."
*xylophone-type noise as used in cartoons when something blinks*
"InDEEEED there is not. I was summoned: I have come. Wait a moment... what is that up my arse? Oh, another cone. Hopefully one of my fellows will not choose to inhabit it whilst I still inhabit this. Anyway, greetings, humans. I was summoned: WHY?"
"Bloody hell."
"Hahahaa. You're really real! How super! How are you, sir?!"
"As well as can be expected, over-exclamatory human. It rains and blows but the planet is mightier than us all and may treat us how it wishes. Are you in need of common sense? You certainly sound like you do."
"Oh no, not me, sir! It's really for my friend Horace here! Say hello, Horace!"
"Erm. Good evening..."
"Good, indeed, EVENING, yes. You require my wisdom? What ails your human mind?"
"Well, as I explained to Rupert here earlier I just don't know what to do about all this.. stuff that's going on at the moment. I'd like to help but I don't know how I can."
"Ah yes, STUFF, is it? I know the stuff of which you speak. The wars, yes? The fighting? Petty squabbles between petty people for petty privileges over land they do not truly own and are failing to steward respectfully. This human obsession with the acquisition of substances and honours beyond what they need to eat each day. The great imbalances between those living in a manner connected directly to the earth upon which they stand and those who give orders to all others yet truly understand so little the great consequences of their tiniest actions, amplified in copyment by those who would be them. This stuff is familiar to me."
"Gosh! You sound very wise indeed!"
"Quiet, Rupert. Let it speak."
"You, troubled human, fret that any action you take will be inconsequential for the planet and humanity but of dire consequence to you: by terminating your employment with the problem you lose the resources you need to live which you must do to be of aid to the solution. You do not directly act to harm the planet and the people but you feel that your inaction is more harm than aid. You know no persons of great influence or apparent power over others over whom you might effect change. Powerless, you feel, yes?"
"Haha! He sounds a bit like the little green fellow from that space film with the goblins, doesn't he!"
"Silence, excitable... foool. I was summoned to deliver sense yet am hindered by vacuousness. I addressed your colleague; I expect his answer, not yours."
"Well, Mr Cone, that's exactly it. I'm not well connected; I don't even really like speaking to people I don't already know so I'm never going to be one of these people who knows people or schmoozes and makes contacts. I just know normal people with normal lives mostly like mine. I'd just like to be able to do more than just my bit, you know?"
"Poor human, you fret. The minds of those whom everyone sees exerting their influence over others, commanding nations, offering their antics for the purposes of simple-minded amusement and entertainment in which the exchange of knowledge is kept deliberately minimal, the people you do not know; there is little can be done for them. To reach such positions they can no longer think the way people such as you think; a life exposed to others of their kind in meeting after meeting, an existence of delivering scripted nothings to an audience they can barely see or imagine removes from them the humanity which is what stirs such disquiet in you. Influence not them but those about you, like you, near you: from the moment you are born you learn by watching what others do, what others like them show them. You think you would all like to be the humans on the shimmering screens of imbecility and glossed covers of disposable periodicals of idiocy; those of you who succeed are those who seek only to incorporate behaviours of their immediates. Act towards those you interact between in the manner with behaviours that you might wish them to develop - demonstrate the ease with which small to medium distances can be foot-walked rather than driven, how a simple movement of your strange human fingers can extinguish a lighting-source or other consumer of electromagnetic empowerment which is not immediately required, how necessary office-printing can be reduced and the subsequent impacts thereof mitigated by simple means of the menu options to duplex and print two pages'worth of printingness upon the single side of a page. Some may heed, some may ignore but some will imitate and be ingrained. Each you affect may effect affect in others; more of them breed more and so change spreads - this you can see happen whilst all your dreams of challenge to the actions of those whose faces and voice you know but whose body you will never meet (nor hand ever shake) will be most unlikely ever to occur. Those people are lost to you and to all the humans of the world. There is little action more direct than demonstration to another immediately adjacent."
"I say, that's all rather cynical, isn't it!? I mean, surely no-one would even be elected if they weren't going to do some good!"
"Again, he for whom I was not summoned demonstrates a marked need for my services. I spoke not to you. Other human?"
"I can see what you're getting at. If I just persuade one colleague to cycle every now and then or put their rubbish in the right bin or even just get people to turn off their lights when they're not using them... even if they just think they're doing it for the benefit of their electricity bill it'd be the right behaviour if not quite (yet) for the right reasons..."
"In... DEEEED. Humans are like ovines... one does and another follows. Soon, all follow. There is no reason why some act in ways others would do better to not follow; human minds are powerful but inclined sometimes to odd directions. The promise of great reward for little toil tempted humans and drove some whose actions should not have been followed to be multiply copied by successive waves of the sheeplike and foolish until a large pyramid, or heap - perhaps even a CONE, yes? - of fools was formed which controlled so much and wrought such fear with that control that others who wished not to join the heap nor to further its growth and expansion had no choice but to do so or face miserable lives in which even the simple freedoms you, this Horace-human can enjoy and in which they would have even fewer options than you feel you do to give influence and suggestion to others. Minds can be foolish, the bodies are driven by the minds and so the world was stretched, beaten and shaped by commands of foolish minds to their foolish hands and the hands of those which would move in the ways commanded by the foolish lest they lost the powers of all movement."
"Oh dear! But, Cone! You're so negative! I thought you were all meant to be positive and sensible? The children's rhymes called you positive, and... and cheery, and... well, you know! Happy?!"
"I am positive and sensible, positively senseless Rupert-man. It is quite possible to be positive without being constantly cheery! and upbeat! in what I am by my honest and direct nature obliged to describe in your particular case as a particularly... IRRITATING way. What can be more positive than encouraging realism? Dressing all things up in fluffy kitten-skin and padding your life with cotton-wool blinkers can be of no benefit; accepting the situation and properly understanding why everything is how it is more beneficial to the mind troubled with the apparent hideousness of it all. Your existence is most unlikely - unlikely event predicated upon unlikely event for more lifetimes than your mind can picture. There is no plan in your presence, but you are here and must cope with the shape and colour of the here your ancestors constructed."
"He.. well, the cone would seem to be right, Rupert; don't go getting all defensive just because there's no talk of everyone being immediately happy. I've always rather thought that the way our world is supposed to work is a little strange and you must know all that stuff about the five richest percent of the population controlling ninety-five percent of the wealth. In terms of volume of people they do rather form a cone-shape but the representation of the wealth (and I suppose power too) they represent, have access to or control (whether real or not) is much more likely to be represented by an inverted cone-shape. But I do like this idea of just affected those I can affect... it doesn't matter if I don't know hundreds of people... just a few here and there would be some good. In fact, the less I try to affect the more likely I am to make some difference to those I do know. I do certainly feel a lot more positive about things now."
"The Horace-human has witnessèd the wisdom of the cone. He is changèd. I have... erm... spokèd? speakingèd? spaked at him of the SENSE and made him neither sheep nor driver but human of purpose and think."
"Oh dear! But... what about that thing about us just,,, you know! Being here? Surely he... it... can't just mean what I think it means?"
"That would DEPEND. If you mean to think, what do you think I meant? Are you certain you do not require some sense? I have plenty."
"Well, you said that we're just an accident! That can't just be it, surely?!"
"It most certainly is. And I should know. Look at this street... fifty-three cones, of two distinct styles with at least three sub-types of each. Their abilities to withstand the wind common in this settlement differ greatly as do their abilities to be comfortably stacked within one another. Hmmm. A judgment of experience. The whole street transformed from a simple street in which foolish humans convinced they need them may park the travel-modules in which they sit and fret and fume for hours each day into a street in which few may park and those who wish to travel may only do so with much difficulty. That which happens by accident and without plan often has a somewhat... unobvious nature to it. Such is this street, and many like it, and the planet and all lives upon it whether they propel themselves in travel-modules energised by the rotted remains of the bodies of those that might be their distant ancestors or whether they are simple beings much like those ancestors who may never have a chance to live and then die in volumes sufficient to refuel the deep chambers of the planet. The planet is an unlikely accumulation amongst others; its position, composition and distance from its unlikely single star are all unlikelinesses heaped upon one another but their presence confirms unlikeliness and refutes impossibility. To foolish eyes such as yours, tempted to the fallacy of your eventual presence being a form of pinnacle of a cone of directed endeavour it is perhaps also tempting to consider what you see from the top of this cone as meant... were there no cone beneath you would see nothing for you would be not there. Just because there is a cone means not that the cone had to be. The haphazards of this simple street are shambolic and ill-thought and yet were 'planned' by those atop the cone. If you, Rupert-human, attempted to construct again your cone: well... look at this street again. The inner positive does not make the outward happiness; your colleague's misanthropy is well-directed - human persons are not universally deserving of respect and must sometimes be mistrusted."
"I must thank you, Mr Cone. You've been very helpful; I don't feel even slightly helpless."
"Such was my intention. You know it makes sense. Soon, I must leave. First, humans... you see over there, across the road?"
"What? Where?"
*pop*
"Aha, he's gone. Or she. It, perhaps."

******

If you feel ineffectual, useless or weak
and are growing quite tetchy and tense
Remember the lesson the Cone came to speak
and how now it all seems to make sense