ORGANIC MISANTHROPE

He seemed as benign as a flower pot dwarf with his tea cosy hat and wizard-like beard. But as he sat each morning in his favourite organic cafe drinking his soy chai latte he watched the people of the town with nothing but pure malice.

Having given a fairly convincing impression of being an upstanding and devoted member of the local community over the decades, the reality was Seamus Potter had come to increasingly ferment into a sour faced misanthrope, reviling the town he lived in and what he saw as its lethargic and passive response to the catastrophic global issues of the 21st century. Oh, there had been an impressionable few (mostly young, middle class people) he had impressed his concern on and who had joined him for some pamphleting and street protests but it wasn't enough.

He needed an army. An army of men, women and children who were prepared to lay down their lives if necessary for the good of the planet. The trouble was, Seamus was losing his own battle against time. He was getting old and feeling every day of his angst-ridden life on this earth in his tired bones. Arthritis and political protest are unhappy bedfellows at the best of times but lately he felt as stiff as the dead fox which had landed outside his door after being hit by a passing car. He couldn't help but see the symbolism of the dead creature awkwardly strewn between the stone wall and stone bench in his front garden as being in some way a metaphor for his own reaching the end of the mortal line. As he'd gazed into the still eyes of the frozen, animal corpse he saw his own mortality reflected back at him. It was a sobering moment of recognising that his days on this earth were surely numbered now.

But if he was to only remain on earth (Gaia) for a tiny bit longer, then he had every intention of banging his drum and shouting his creed in a bid to save the planet in any way he could think to. Plus, he'd had a literal drum to bang too, being the head of the local samba band. It was true though that he made music more for protest than for pleasure. It had often made him laugh to watch people raise their hands to their ears as they marched through the farmers' market like bolsheviks running roughshod over the bourgeoisie in 1917 Russia. But his drumming also came at a price for he was now suffering from acute tinnitus which drowned out so many sounds he used to previously delight in, especially the sweet sounds of nature - babbling brooks, wind through trees, the hooting of owls etc, not to mention his beloved Orchestra Baobab and Buena Vista Social Club world music albums. The condition had made him much angrier, too. He now raged even more vehemently against the injustices of the world and as he banged his instrument he could feel centuries of pent up ancestral fury from ghostly protestors beating their drums before him.

But to his dismay he now found the social justice processions he organised becoming increasingly slower through the town as his physical mobility became further restricted, as with each pronounced bang of the drum it came to resemble more a funeral march than a protest.

THUD!

THUD!

THUD!

Taking an unofficial census of the local population on this grey, miserable January afternoon at the table outside the cafe, Seamus scouted and assessed who might be prepared to join his fight to save the world from behind his coffee cup and hand rolled cigarette.

He spied a few blue and pink haired potentials wearing identical knee high doc marten boots. Rebellion was still alive, he thought and he was happy to see it.

Then he noticed some 'gym rat' wearing a t-shirt that read 'you are the carbon they want to reduce' and found himself remarkably untriggered by the slogan, in fact he saw absolutely no problem with the sentiment, even if it was intended to be ironic. He gave the youth his own ironic thumbs up. "At last, our true motive has been revealed!" he shouted in a passive aggressive way. The well groomed teenager smiled back at him without any sign of taking offence.

"The privilege of ignorance!" Seamus said snidely under his breath as he took an over zealous sip of his coffee only to discover he'd spilt some of his oaty latte onto his grey, wiry beard as he dabbed at it with the same snotty tissue he'd just blown his nose into.

People, to Seamus's mind, were always the problem when it came to the planet and nature. He'd known many elderly folk (women mostly) who had come to far prefer the company of dogs and cats to actual humans. Writing in his noteback with his ink-depleted pen he scratched the words as if he were tattooing his thoughts onto the page - "most humans are just simply dreadful, destructive creatures who need to be harnessed by those tuned into a higher frequency of consciousness." He was one such higher consciousness type of guy and he felt a great burden of responsibility to enforce the planet's needs before anyone else's individual concerns."Individuals with their self serving, selfish interests are the reason the world is in such bad shape currently," he continued to scrawl angrily.

As he plunged his knife down the remainder of his date and walnut cake outside the cafe where he was sitting, he thought how little of an actual fundamental shift in society he had truly helped achieve throughout his life. There was a futility, it seemed to all his hollering and red faced bluster. It bothered him that change was so slow and life was so fast. And to add to his increasing sense of despair, the sudden image of the dead fox's eyes flashed before him and he felt somewhat tormented and harassed by this portentous symbolism.

"Do you mind I sit here?" a smiley faced woman in her mid 60's asked politely clutching half a dozen bags of shopping.

"By all means!"

She was wearing a fox fur hat (which he hoped for her sake was fake) that made her look like an older Julie Christie from Doctor Zhivago and a violent red lipstick. To Seamus's mind she was the epitome of all that was wrong with late stage capitalist Western decline and the reason he had to summon greater strength and inner resources to turn the axis of the world away from this doomed direction of travel. She also reminded him somewhat of his late mother, an unwitting victim of the propaganda of the last dregs of empire, the death rattle of British colonialism.

Like a mind reader, he felt he could easily imagine the empty vessel that was the woman's mind with all her department store bags on display like an advertising board, happily ignoring the destruction of the enviroment, the increase in ocean temperatures and the razing of rainforests in South America.

"You have to go and serve yourself here," he suggested to her, assuming she was waiting to be attended to by the cafe staff but the woman ignored him appearing to be too deeply absorbed, looking at her phone.

"Excuse me, did you hear me?"

But the woman continued to scroll on, oblivious to Seamus's attempt to engage her in conversation.

"More privilege!" he spluttered angrily under his breath.

It was at this moment he decided it was time to get up and leave. He'd been sitting for too long in the cold anyway and he knew he would be stiff as hell as a consequence.

But before he departed from the organic cafe he decided he would try one last time to confront the woman, probably against his better judgement.

"I hope that's not real fur!"

But still she stubbornly refused to look up from her phone.

It wasn't until he slapped his hands together close to her face that she finally looked at him. Taken aback by his aggression, she immediately tried to reply to his provocation in her monotone nature but noticed Seamus was now suddenly distracted by the young waitress approaching the woman's table carrying a tray with an elderflower presse and a plate of lasagne.

"Oh, so you do serve your customers?!"

"We serve this lady, yes."

"And what societal privilege affords her this luxury then?"

The young waitress seemed wholly unimpressed with Seamus's abrasive tone and replied as matter of factly as she could muster.

"She's deaf!"

Sometimes in life, you run past the finish line and keep on running even though the race is over. Seamus had got himself worked up into a terrible bother and gone from 0-90 without any hope of being able to reduce his internal speedometer.

"She's deaf alright!" he shouted like a loon and with that he seized the hat off her head and ran up the high street as if he'd just stolen a rare faberge egg.

Had he been triggered by the sight of red fox fur or was it some deep desire in him to break free from his feelings of increasing ineptitude of late? Or perhaps it was latent rebellion on display against his late mother. Seamus didn't even rightly know, but as he ran with the spirit of youth for a brief moment he felt something re-born inside of him, that inner Dionysian fire of anarchy.

That was until his back seized up and he felt an almighty click at the very bottom of his spine.

"OWWWW! FUCK!"

Suddenly his reprise of youth was instantly snuffed out as he found he could move no more move than a stone statue. Seeing a local community officer and the young waitress headed towards him, he sensed even his back problem would fail to excuse his sudden impulsive behaviour.

Staring at the fox fur hat in his hand, he suddenly saw the image of the dead one that had haunted him so frequently these past few weeks.

"The fox curse!"

And then he noticed the label at the back of the hat.

It read:

Contains Faux Fur

80% Polyester

20% Acrylic

"Still bad for the enviroment though," he said to himself, vainly attempting to claw victory from the jaws of defeat.