Green Matters

GREEN MATTERS



“Mr. Brand, I think we have toyed with the audience long enough. You care to give us a brief explanation of how you came to where you are, multi-billionaire environmentalist, with such a divergent, controversial yet genius plan?”



Mr. Brand leaned forward and looked directly at the Talk-show host, Paul Macdonald. He seemed to have forgotten the audience and the cameras. He looked as though he were talking with a friend. The camera’s loved it. The audience was silent.



“Well, Paul, let me tell you something which everyone seems to be afraid to say out loud. But we’ve all been thinking it. This is all about crap.”

He knew his assistant would strangle him later, along with thousands of critics, but what the heck, he was rich, and it was true. He continued, enjoying the slightly uncomfortable face Paul was displaying.



“Yes, that’s the word. I didn’t have any special Eureka moment on a bus or train, or in the middle of a smoke clogged intersection. Nope. I really wish I did, so that I could tell everyone something inspirational, but the hard facts are that I was a weird kid.”



Bushfires were lighting. Paul could actually feel the online ratings trickling into his account. He was enjoying himself now, and quite frankly, this was interesting. They had done and earlier trail run with Brand, and his ‘brief explainer’ had been more modest and professional. Namely, the word ‘crap’ or anything associating with it was to be turned into something technical: Bio-fuel, bio-degradable, green fuel, sewer redirection and bio-manipulation plan…



Mr. Brand continued, “I think I’ll be safe in presuming there’s quite a number of people who’ve had that weird ‘doodling’ phase in life. Whilst my friends drew cartoons or… uh… things… I drew about crap and all its friends. The nastiest, most disgusting drawings imaginable. Crap machines churning crap. Crap castles filled with crap, and crap people talking crap.”



Now things were interesting. Mr. Brand smiled and leaned back in his chair, “Well, don’t hate me, people, this is how it started. Would you prefer I told you a beautiful lie? Well, I’m not like that. And I definitely didn’t get where I am by sugarcoating the facts. So, where did a weird kid who drew weird stuff proceed from that stage? Well, I became an adolescent, and those drawings were left as a pile in a box. Now I was on the battlefields of peer pressure and failed love. Yes, I sucked at that department.”



He looked at the audience, most of them were smiling bemusedly. He turned to Paul, “Finally, I accepted defeat, and I became a nerd. I embraced its security. That’s when I found the box, and dug out those drawings.”



He turned to the camera,



“Who among you knows the strange joy and sensual nostalgia of seeing your nursery school doodles? I was fascinated, and I laughed myself hoarse at the disgusting depictions before me. But I saw inspiration there, people. I wish I could use a less over-the-top phrase, but inspiration is what I saw. As I studied them I was pretty good at drawing myself, but when you get older, by the time you’re making that third stroke, your already criticizing yourself and trashing the drawing. When I was that strange child, I had ploughed on ahead, doodling all these weird contraptions and gizmos. One batch of drawings gave me my eureka moment. I would show them to you, but my assistant shredded them. Sorry.”



Oh, he could feel her fingers squeezing him to death. His sister was really short tempered, handling such a vulnerable client.



“Anyway people, I saw a disgusting depiction of an ass on a toilet, feeding stuff to the sewer system, and from that to a weird oblong contraption, and from that to the engine of a car. And that’s when I went mad for a month, theorizing, trying to make a more adult, censored sense of the whole thing. I dropped into college, a full nerd, with a plan. Biochemistry was my realm.



“This part of the story, I don’t need to tell. I’m sure someone will write a biography about it.”



The crowd chuckled. Paul was more enraptured than he expected.



Mr. Brand continued, “Now I know, everyone has been dappling in the bio-fuel department. A lot of notable people, and I feel ashamed that I managed to break through, honestly, there are bigger and better brains out there. But my apologies stop there. I had bigger plans, and a bigger embarrassment threshold. I was a grunt, I tell you. I spent months constructing models of this country, running complex simulations. People have no idea how complex the sewer systems are, and the cities above it. America can be a pain in the butt, in that way.”



No one laughed, Mr. Brand wasn’t expecting them to, he continued, “Finally, I developed my system, Viridescent. Sorry for the name, folks, but I still had Star Wars and Star Trek in my head.”



A few people chuckled.



“In lay man terms, my system took away all that hassle of finding a way to dump fecal matter somewhere safe. It also bypassed the need for prolonged purification, and made the centers with almost completely natural processes which turned the stinking, useless mess into highly combustible – therefore useful and efficient – bio fuel. I’ve had news just now, that this marks the third year of my program, and pollution across the continent has been cut down by twenty percent. And the numbers keep getting better. Technologies from my plans have trickled into other industries, and eventually, we won’t need a single drop of environment-killing fuel to boost a car.”



He turned to Paul with a smile, “And the best part of it is, it doesn’t smell one bit.”



WORD COUNT: 967