Who or What is the Freelance Guru

A brief history of the Freelance Guru

Not long ago, I sold insurance for a living. This was as awful as it sounds and twice as depressing. Then, one day, the toy snake on top of my monitor smiled at me. Right then, I realised I was wasting my life in a cascade of career prospects, pay packets and plastic tasting coffee. If a stuffed toy with no job and no money was happy why could I not be?

Praise for the Guru
The next time I find myself meddled with one of life's many uncertainties, be sure I will ask The Guru.

Joshua

Until I read The Freelance Guru, I thought all gurus were smelly old opinionated men who cackled madly and gave nonsensical advice. Now I know that they don't have to be old or smelly!

Avitable

Even my husband goes to read it!

Shelly

Part ghandi, two parts candy and three parts Jack Handey [...] and most importantly, I believe he shares my love of orgies.

Canucklehead

What in thunder are you doing on top of a pole?
No, on second thought, don’t tell me...

Dora

Despite my wife's protests, I quit my job and erected a Guru's pole in my garden, a more complicated task than you may imagine. Taking only those things essential to life, such as my mobile phone, my laptop and my Nivea intensive-care moisturiser, I climbed atop of my hermits’ erection and set myself to finding enlightenment.

Several days later, I achieved my goal.

Now, I return to my pole 8 hours a day (with the exception of Bank Holidays and weekends) to change the world. My mission is simple: I will enlighten all who come to me. Through the wisdom of the infinite, and with the aid of Luke, the toy snake who revealed my path to me, I will teach them all the error of their ways. Together, we will discover their destiny.

I am the Freelance guru − fountain of knowledge in the desert of ignorance, giver of light in a land of darkness, and the best mantra chanter in the south-west of England.

Allow me to enlighten you.

The Purpose of the Freelance Guru Blog

This blog is for those who cannot walk the hazardous path to my back garden, yet seek my infinite wisdom.

In its pages I answer the questions of all that come to me. Any who seek answers will find them here, and even those who seek nothing will leave wiser than whence they came. Through this blog's message even the most lost of Pilgrims may find his own path to the infinite.

It is a place for me to share new enlightements, teach the wisdom of the infinite to the searching masses, and keep me occupied during Pilgrim downtime.

It is the blog of the Freelance Guru. And it is the greatest gift the Internet will ever give you.

Marcus

9 Reasons to be Afraid in 2012

As 2012 approaches, rumours are emerging of it's disastrous consequences. Frankly, I'm getting bored of panicked pilgrims, so here, in no particular order, are the actual 9 major tragedies of 2012.

1. We will all have to live through another Presidential Election.


2. Asteroid 334-Eros will pass within 17 million miles of Earth, If it earth were the corner pocket this is the equivalent of bouncing off the cushion and hitting the cat. Nonetheless, astronomers will get very excited and run to their observatories, leaving their families to fend for themselves.


3. US troops will hand back control of the Korean Military. Congress will declare a war to keep the troops busy.


4. The Freedom Tower will be completed in New York causing the terror threat to be raised just in-case some terrorist somewhere tries something with it at sometime.


5. There will be an annular Solar Eclipse - for 3 whole minutes hundreds of people will be unable to see where they left their keys.


6. The UK will turn off analogue broadcasting; millions of pensioners will miss Countdown. Mass rioting will ensue, albeit it very slowly.


7. The Sun’s magnetic poles will flip; it's inhabitants will get briefly lost when their compasses start pointing backwards.


8. The Mayan calendar will roll over from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. The Mayans will have to buy a new calendar. They will also have one hell of a New Year celebration. There is no evidence to suggest the Mayans believed the world would end when their calendar did, although possibly they were worried that their computer clocks would reset to 0.0.0.0.1.


9. The Earth's population will excel 7 billion people, making it impossible to find a free parking space

That's it! Nothing else to worry about. Now please, Panicking Pilgrims, stop bugging me!

Oh, and don't forget to leave some change in the bowl on the way out...

Thanks to Skeptoid.com for inspiring this post

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Helping Stacey Come

Dear Guru

Will Stacey be allowed to come tommorrow?

Darrenshine

What is stopping Stacey coming I wonder? Does she have an overly strict mother? A selfish lover? Is she forced to stay at home and cook for the children?

Does Stacey trust you? She may not want to come if she feels nervous around you. When I feel anxious, I talk to my stuffed snake, Luke. Maybe you have a stuffed snake Stacey can talk too? Maybe stroking your snake will help her feel more relaxed about coming? Try to find an average sized snake however as most woman feel intimated by very big ones.

Perhaps Stacey is agoraphobic? Does she panic when she opens the door and sees how far away the horizon is? If so this would be why she cannot come as she cannot leave her house, and it may be necessary for you to come to her instead. Blinkering Stacey may help here! A riding crop may be needed however to make her come and keep her focused.

Maybe Stacey believes coming will send the wrong message. A woman must be careful, at least until marriage, after which she will probably never come when you want her to again. If she feels she can trust you she will come eventually. Treat her to some wine, this has encouraged many women to come before.

If however, it is Stacey’s mother stopping her from coming, more drastic measures are required. Engage all your charm by letting her mother come first. By giving her mother this honour and letting her come before her daughter she will be able to see you are a caring, non-threatening, morally erect gentlemen, and Stacey will be allowed to come before you know it. As an added bonus, this 'let them come first' technique works on fathers and husbands too.

Hope this helps.

Marcus

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Slightly Unbalanced Duck Tails

Dear Guru

Why do ducks tuck up one leg when sleeping?

Autolycus

Birds! Don’t get me started! Everyone thinks birds are beautiful, graceful creatures. They glide on a few air currents or sing at first light and get songs or poetry written about them. But they become somewhat less poetic when I'm meditating on top of a 15 foot pole and they use me as a perch. During mating season, I had bits of twig and straw in my hair for weeks.

Ducks are the worst of all. They beguile children to give them bread with cute stories about turning into swans, and then they excrete all over the banks of lakes and rivers, causing innocent children to fall in. They cover their wings in water droplets and then shake them dry, soaking innocent bystanders. And when innocent Guru’s are blissfully meditating on the infinite, ducks fly up next to them and squawk loudly in their ear. Being shocked is never a good thing, but it's somewhat worse when you're delicately balanced on a pole 15 foot above the ground.

I get my revenge however. Because their legs and feet have 3 times more blood running through them than the flying muscles do, ducks tuck a leg into their feathers when they sleep to conserve heat. Luckily for me, this makes them very unstable.

Have you ever indulged in Duck Tipping? It helps keep me occupied during the early part of spring. Simply creep up to a sleeping duck and give them a quick nudge. Being nudged is never a good thing, but it becomes somewhat worse when you're delicately balanced, standing on one leg, on a perch 15 foot off the ground.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a rudely awoken duck.

Hope this helps.

Marcus

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• Why do we link Red to Love and Anger
• Why do we say Alright?
• Can we find Ultimate Happiness

Love, Anger and Communism

Dear Guru

We use colour to show ones emotions - then please explain why the colour red is used for two opposite emotions - anger and love?

** Just Wondering **

Colours are overrated. You've seen one sunset you've seen them all, especially when viewed from an elevation of 15 foot. But humans are obsessed with colours, attaching them to everything from 'Blue Mondays' to 'Orange Wednesdays', and now, due to colour overuse, we've run out.

There are more colours in existence than the non-enlightened mind can imagine, but most of them don’t have names yet. The average pilgrim can’t even name the 120 colours of crayola, yet alone the 4x10⁹ colours available on the average monitor. As such, as soon as we get beyond 'pale peach' and 'Midnight blue', we have to resort to ‘A little bit lighter than “Fuzzy-Wuzzy Brown”’ and the whole thing becomes ridiculous. The only other option is to use Hexadecimal, but, somehow, telling your sweetheart ‘their eyes are of the deepest #DEA681’ isn't quite the same.

To solve this, we assigned colours ‘themes’. For example, Black came to signify death, green, nature, and Yellow, vomit.

Red, being a hot colour, is used for things that make us passionately hot under the collar, such as love, anger or third-degree sunburn. It reminds us both of danger (such as my wife’s angry face) and of romance (such as the petite lingerie of next-door-but-one), and easily encompasses both Love and Anger as varying expressions of passion.

It may interest you to know that red stands for far more than just kisses and slaps. It is the colour of power, war, warnings, fire, sin, guilt, sex, dwarfs, communism, and of course, the wiggly line under spelling mistakes in Microsoft word. For the latter reason, if nothing else, the colour red has made the world a much better place: I dread to think where the blogosphere would be without it.

Hope this helps.

Marcus

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Why do we say 'Alright'?

Dear Guru,

Why is it that people greet each other with "Alright" but don't actually answer the question? For example I walk into the office and see J, here's our conversation:

J: Alright
X: Alright
[End]
Please help me guru it is a conundrum that needs solving.

Xander

I envy the cordial greeting you enjoy! Most greetings sent my way begin, "What the," and end, "do you think you're doing?" Prophets are always despised in their own house, possibly because they're always meditating when it comes time to wash up.

This 'Alright' greeting is not as strange as you may think. As a country, we previously greeted each other by saying 'A hoy hoy!' After that, we tried asking 'How do you do?', but, as the appropriate answer was 'How do you do?', it formed a vicious greeting-cycle which trapped hundreds of innocent people for years. 'How do you do?' was finally scrapped in the early 1990' and 'Alright' took it's place. It has worked well for two reasons.

Firstly, being British, we despise the American trait of 'unnecessary talking', as exploited during any Oscar speech. For this reason, 'Alright' is both a question (Alright?) and an answer (Alright!), saving the effort of 'Are you' and 'Yes I'm' . With the added benefit that it needed to be said just once each, 'Alright?' allowed us to shorten conversations by several seconds, and go back to ignoring the other person much quicker than previously.

Secondly, when we ask 'Alright?', the responder understands that we don't actually want to know. 'Alright' is not supposed to be answered, or at least not answered honestly. It is the equivalent of 'Hello' and as such saves us from having to actually talk to people. It would be extremely awkward for any Brit if, on asking 'Alright?', they got the reply, "No! I can't make this months mortgage payment , my house is being repossessed, my wife is having an affair with the Milkman and the Window Cleaner, my back is killing me, I'm going blind, there's a rash around my third nipple, I'm chronically impotent, and my hamster died yesterday. Alright?"

In short, without 'Alright?' we'd spend so much time counselling each other that we'd never actually get any work done, causing the pound to weaken and the economy to collapse; before long there would be even more repossessions to moan about, and the vicious greeting-cycle would begin all over again. And one only need look at America's economy to see exactly where that would get us. Unnecessary talking costs lives. Alright?

Hope this Helps.

Marcus

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Can we find Ultimate Happiness?

Dear Freelance Guru,

Ultimate happiness. Think it can be achieved? If yes, how would you describe it?

Mystery*

Buddha believed in ultimate happiness. He believed that to find Nirvana you must free yourself from desire. This is rubbish of course. To quote the great philosopher Will Young, losing desire means you ‘lose the highs to be spared the lows.’ As such all that can truly be experienced is an ultimate state of ‘meh.’ Besides, based on his depictions, Buddha was a fat, jolly man and a thin, serious one, making him a schizophrenic and about as trustworthy as Fox News.

You yourself are proof that ultimate happiness is impossible. Your smiles last for only a moment, normally a reaction to something good, such as a funny joke, or a brilliant Guru blog. However this state of ‘good’ lasts only a small amount of time. If it didn’t, each subsequent thing would have to be better than the last in order for us to feel as good about it, until the world became one happy, bouncy ball of bunnies and page three models. At which point there would be nothing to strive for. Everything would be good. And we would all be bored. With nothing to make us feel bad we would have no reason to feel good at all. And as a loud noise eventually fades into the background, so our good feelings would become dull and invisible. Plus, everyone would be smiling all the time which would just be disturbing.

Finally, it is impossible to define the Ultimate anything; one man’s trash is another man’s Blue Peter Model; ultimate happiness means different things to everyone: one person becoming happy would mean another could not. For example, my wife’s way of finding happiness is to nag me, where as mine is to hide on the top of my pole, listening to my iPod and pulling the ladder up behind me. The two are mutually exclusive, and it would be the same for everyone else. At most only 50% of the world could be happy at any one time; we would have to take it in turns and be happy every other week. And this would be far from anyone's idea of ultimate happiness, unless, of course, they were a little bit Buddha.

Hope this helps

Marcus

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Why don't the Germans speak proper English?

Dear Guru,

I live here in Germany and can't help but wonder why it is that the Germans have a different word for practically everything over here. A different English word, I mean. They say "Handy" when they mean cell phone and "Talkshow" when they mean talk show, for instance. I've been told that you have lots of different words in your country, too (I'm an American), but I can understand you guys a whole lot better, usually. So like what is it with these Germans and their German English anyway?

Thanks, Clarsonimus.

Thank you for letting me know that you are American. As I want you to understand my reply I will type very slowly. It took me a while to find this answer, the infinite was not an expert on Languages and Luke is strictly a English snake. But thankfully, being all knowing, I merely needed to re-awaken my knowledge which I eventually achieved by searching Wikipedia and about.com. I hope you will consider all this effort when you pass the prayer bowl on the way out.

I do try not to pass blame; all in this world are equal, or at least all those who have not transcended to Guru Status. In this instance however, I cannot help it: This mixing of the 2 languages is your fault.

The merge happened after World War II largely due to English speakers, like yourself, migrating to Germany and hogging all the sun-beds, forcing the Germans to migrate elsewhere and hog the sun-beds there. As a result, and as English became the global business language, the two languages pooled, and, overtime, words like Workshop and Meeting crept into the German vocabulary. Germany welcomed the change. After the mess they'd made during World War II they pretty much had too.

It had the added benefit that the language became slightly camp, making Germans seem less threatening. For example, the word Handy, unique in Denglish, comes from a 1940 Motorola Walkie-talkie model, the Handie-talkie, and is possibly the least threatening word a German can use. The sight of a middle-age German man, frantically searching for his mobile phone and muttering ‘Wo ist mein Handy?', is enough to make a heterosexual male pluck his eyebrows and wear lycra for a month.

However, none of this explains why you can understand us English better than them Germans. This is because both the Americans and the English speak English, which is extremely helpful when it comes to communication. The Germans however, speak German.

Hope this helps

Marcus

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McFeng-shui

A Californian McDonalds has employed a feng shui expert to improve their customers’ fortune. The fast-food restaurant, now awash with water features and bamboo plants, hopes the oriental technique will improve their patrons’ luck. Presumably, if you have a Happy Meal there now you’ll actually burn-off calories thanks to the restaurants energy flow. That, after all, is the kind of fortune most McDonalds lovers need.

I tried to feng shui my pole once, but every expert had different ideas. It became very confusing. One day my waterfall was in my right hand, the next in my left. With the lucky bamboo in my other hand, it was difficult to use my laptop, especially as it was balanced on my head at the time. To be honest, I spent most of the time worrying I would drop my money tree, which wasn't cheap after all, and any benefits were somewhat lost on me.

But I do wish the restaurant luck: I believe they will need it; an arbitrary arrangement of expensive ornaments will be somewhat wasted on customers who are too busy suffering from obesity-induced total coronary failure to notice. McDonalds needs all the oriental-placebo it can get.

Personally, I don't hold with any of that oriental nonsense. I'll stick to good old-fashioned meditative communication with the infinite, thank you very much! That's something I can truly believe in.

Besides - I prefer Burger King.

Marcus

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Pilgrim's Identity Crisis

A un-enlightened soul has come to me.
Here is the knowledge they seek.

Dear Freelance Guru

Were you known as Simon?
You look like a Simon...

Pre-Enlightenment

Thank you for your question pilgrim.

Since starting this blog I have been surprised how many times I've been asked this question. It confuses me somewhat, because I had rather intended the Ask the Guru form to allow people to come to me seeking Wisdom, instead of causing me to have an identity crisis. But then, of course, thanks to my weeks of private devotions, I am never confused for long.

You state in you Question that I 'look like a Simon.' In order to affirm this, I searched 'Simon' on Google Images. These are the first 3 results.

Now then, exactly which of these 3 are you suggesting I look like?

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Ask the Guru - Holiday Mum

Yet another weary traveller has made the arduous trek to my blog seeking wisdom. If they keep coming at this rate, I'm going to have to expand my pole to include a waiting room.

Dear Freelance Guru.

Why do we celebrate mothers' day? My boyfriend and I have a bet about it and it's beginning to get violent.

Relationship Issues

I just don’t get Mothers’ day. Motherhood isn’t an annual event, unless you’re a highly fertile Catholic. Having one day a year when you act more ‘motherly’ than the other 364 would normally result in a visit from Social Services.

It all started in Britain in the 16th Century as a day to visit your Mother-church, possibly to present status reports on the plans to conquer Earth. After the Civil War however, Anna Jarvis stole the idea for America, warping it to give servants a day off so they could annoy their mothers by hanging around the house. It’s interesting to note that 9 years later Miss Jarvis hated her holiday so much she rallied against it. Nowadays, Mothers day is little more than an excuse for Mothers to lie about while their kids run around doing a terrible job of the housework. Several other ‘special days’ have spun off from it, such as Fathers’ Day, Grandparents’ Day and Professional Administrators’ Day. Personally, I’ve been trying to publicize Guru Day - a day when I can stop being a guru and get off this pole. Weekends and bank holidays are just not enough…

But of course, mothers are blessed, they deserve a special day, and we should be thankful for them. I seldom see mine and I’m highly thankful for that. An elevation of 15 foot gives me plenty of time to turn on my iPod, close my eyes and pretend I can’t hear her shouting up at me. This is for her benefit as well as mine. She struggles to handle my infinite wisdom and, apparently, talking to me ‘exhausts her.’

And at her age, I feel it’s only right to let her rest.

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