As the world veers towards Nuclear or climate annihilation I want to let it be known that Mr Hummels had a rotten sequence of events happen to him. But that won’t keep him down.

Mr Hummels is writing this for posterity’s sake. The creative act, in this instance, writing, is a futile one.
To write to no audience is questionable, to write for a coming apocalypse is silly.
And to write for a strange collection of billionaire-spawn who exist in Mars or New Zealand in the future and have one task – to trawl, or design a programme which trawls, through the internet and document or understand what humanity was and why it possibly wasn’t the worst thing that Grandaddy Jeff didn’t do so.

This blog is a counter example. And, the way Mr Hummels lives his life is testament to that argument.
Mr Hummels is everything that encapsulates what it is to be Mr Hummels.
A real Hummel being.

Mr Hummels is everything Jeff is not. (Rich being the most discernible difference.)

Mr Hummel’s was working in a job he didn’t like very much. Actually, he almost hated it. He thought it ridiculous, he knew he was wasting his time and worse still, he was wasting vast quantities of time. Over 40 hours a week plus several hours commuting. That sounds bad. However things were about to get a whole lot worse.

Mr Hummels went to work one day and found that his work had employed a security guard. That spelled trouble! Despite the fluctuating fortunes of the company he worked for, Mr Hummels felt a degree of security – not from the guard! From the permanent contract, and the fact that out of 30 plus staff members he was one of two people who knew how to fix the machine. Not even the team of understudies they’d employed, knew what he knew. And the other guy who he fixed the machine with, he knew other things to Mr Hummels. They were safe together.

Or so he thought. Mr Hummels received an email that night, saying he would be under threat. There would be redundancies and he would be considered at risk. He called his friend – he’d had the same letter. Drat! He called the understudies and they were safe! What a strange position. Leaving wouldn’t be as simple as he’d thought. So, Mr Hummels and his friend began fighting it out, may the best man lose! There was a redundancy package on offer.

The battle raged for a full month. I say raged, but really it dragged on and on. During this time Mr Hummels had to attend the doctor. He had to attend the doctor because his knee had been playing up for the best part of 10 years and he should get it sorted out. Especially if he could do so on the companies healthcare. He had scans and tests and eventually the surgeon agreed to see him. And the company would pay.

Now all he had to do was wait.

When the fateful day came, Mr Hummels had a phonecall. Not from the company but from his family. Mr Hummels Grandfather had taken very ill and was very likely to pass away. Mr Hummels didn;t know what to do, should he go home? Should he call? It seemed as if there wasn’t anything to do. Somehow it was already done and anything he did was immaterial. He went upstairs, to see the boss, and he got more news. He was to be made redundant.

Well. What are the chances? The elation he felt from the coming freedom was smothered with grief. He explained to his manager that he had to go, and they explained that he had to go. He wouldn’t serve a notice period. Pack up your things, they said.

He did. And before long he was home. Standing at the grave of his Grandfather, who’d meant more to him than he knew. Who’d not featured enough in his life recently. Bloody job. Bloody pandemic. Bloody pain.

He did what he knew how to do. He got awfully drunk and eventually he cried and his family all cried. Then he got drunk again, this time a celebration. His brother’s stag do. He got so drunk he spent lots of money and ate very spicy food. When he woke up he felt ill and sore. He tested himself for signs of the pandemic disease and found he was still, remarkably, all ok. All that was left was for him to see the surgeon again. And so he did.

The surgeon asked him some questions and before he could answer…. zzz.
He woke up and felt a slooooow feeling. The nurse shook him and said ‘Time to wake up’. The surgeon came in and said ‘Everything went well.’ And they sent him home again.
At home he came off the drugs that the surgeon had injected. His knee was sore and swollen and took weeks to recover. Mr Hummels had nothing to do but attempt to rehabilitate his knee, so he did. He was lucky too, the sun was shining and Mr Hummels slowly worked up to doing jobs in the garden and, he hoped, riding his bike again.

He even applied for jobs. Mr Hummels applied for a great job that he would have liked, not like the one before. He was passionate about the job, it involved riding bikes. And he was well suited to the job, he knew a lot about the job. But, even after the best interview Mr Hummels had ever had. He didn’t get the job. The boss told him ‘You were great. But, we chose someone who was a little bit more experienced. That’s a shame, Mr Hummels. You’re not experienced enough for this role but you won’t be able to gain experience in the role either. What will you do?’

Mr Hummels didn’t know what to do. He supposed he would keep applying for jobs. He guessed he should keep rehabbing his knee. He speculated he should make the most of the sunshine and his new, paralysing freedom (, and the handsome redundancy package he would soon receive). But most of all, he assumed he would keep thinking of his Grandfather, and his Grandmother, and his family, and all the good things he wanted to happen in the world. Like bikes being ridden instead of cars driven. And words being written. And so, he limped happily in the sunshine to the swimming pool, where he went to strengthen his knee. And when he got back, he emailed the bosses a pleading, cloying email. And he started searching for another job. And he never wrote a book.

Isn’t that a good tale, future children of the billionaires who we hate?

A good tale that doesn’t at all read like an emotionally crippled cataloging of events before a breaking point. And what was the morale of the story?

Don’t feel anything!

Only joking, robo-nazi-kids. The morale is that we have to keep going, endlessly. And that we can feel pride and pain, contentedness and sad, empty, longing at the same time. That life is not reducible to a single morale, that it is futile. Like writing you this little ditty.

Of course, there is some comfort to be taken in the apocalypse. That you, the children of Musk and Besos, should be subjected to this blog is comfort to me that the suffering your kin imparted on your fellow man was fairly amended and some retribution was dealt. Also, writing something which is futile is surely then a radical act. Like, radical. Dude. Something which isn’t for money, something your Grandaddy Jeff wouldn’t understand. A statement, that, Mr Hummels is not an economic actor. He is not a entrepreneur. Mr Hummels is a purely creative and hummel entity. Mr Hummels was, is and always will be Mr Hummels.

Life being futile is a reductive single morale kiddies but there you are. Next you should learn about post-modernism and stop spending the dying seconds of humanities existence in the universe focused on the pseudonymous blog page of an ultimately, comfortable and normal white guy from Scotland who went on to write children’s books.