Who has ever witnessed a small accident immediately accompanied by Homer's "D'oh!"? For a while, a day did not seem complete until this small homage had been paid. Groovy, life wasn't meant to be easy, it's beyond my control, like wow, get outta here, I'll be back, high five, chill, greed is good, wicked, take a photograph it'll last longer, all experienced a time in the sun. The film Wayne's World ignited a plague of dullisms. "No way" - "Yes, way" became the dumb-dumb chant for a nation looking for instant linguistic fulfilment.

The phrase that's currently experiencing unprecedented popularity is "think outside the square". The original expression was "think outside the circle", but it was appropriated for the Freedom Furniture ad where they ingeniously changed the geometric shape from a circle to a square. An ad exec was probably paid a fortune for that squalid lump of lateral thought. In the past few weeks I've heard it everywhere. A waiter used it to suggest that a habit-entrenched patron try a pimply herbal tea rather than a heart-starting, sure-fire short black. A thespian said she was trying to "think outside it" to develop personality traits in her latest creation.

For someone to say this to you, he's made the assumption that you don't already think outside the square (circle). He'll also assume you must be crazy with jealousy over his ability to juxtapose conflicting ideas to create harmonious concepts: "Look at that clever bugger sailing along the outskirts of thought. Look at them, way out there beyond the square. God damn their canny lateral thinking process." What is it with these people? Have they had a pep talk from Stormin' Norman? Have they been listening to that fat-necked freak who balloons onto the TV at three in the morning and rants about self-improvement? Have they had a look in the mirror lately?

And yet, even with it being everywhere, it never crossed my mind that it could happen to me (that might be my restrictive thinking problem). So when a multi-hat-wearing mid-'80s cliché managed to spit it in my direction, I went into an audacity seizure. I stood there, upright and rigid with a comatose mouth. Why is it that we can never think of the appropriate thing to say at the appropriate time? Why does the best response to a stupid question or a smug comment take so long to and percolate up to the lips?

For the better part of a day I was consumed with finding the perfect pithy response. I've listed some of the less offensive replies below. In the likely event that you're requested to "think outside the square", it may help to have one handy. Feel free to use any of them, or if you're feeling adventurous, try a mix-and-match.

1. The only square I see around here is you (pause for effect), buddy!

2. I'll think outside the square if you stop plagiarising a furniture ad as the pinnacle of contemporary thought.

3. Don't you find the square itself limiting? Can't we try thinking outside the rhombus? Or the tetrahedron? Or what about thinking "inside" Penrose's five-folded symmetry?

4, Why don't you take the square in which you live and ram it up the circle you're going around in?

5. How many fingers am I holding up?

6. F*** you, arsehole (Arnie's defence).

7. (Visual) Take the lead from the great apes and rugby league players and hurl your dung at them. It's not only extremely unsettling but can be justified intellectually: "The coarseness of your suggestion merits this degrading physical response."

I have always supported the notion that dialogue is the best way to deal with disagreements - rational, coherent ideas presented in an environment of trust and acceptance. Although I must confess, as I grow older I am swayed by the concept of overly violent responses to seemingly harmless situations. The one thing your ad-quoting, condescending opponent would not be expecting would be a cheery knuckle sandwich. In this way you would doubtless prove that you were well outside the square.

A mausoleum of memory that grows slowly over the years. Hidden beneath stairs, tucked down behind the couch, at the back of the cupboard are all the things we once loved. In these confined containers of memory, laid out like so many exquisite corpses, are the fascinations and playthings of the past. They're the old friends we've locked away, buried beneath the house or starved of oxygen in carefully stored black garbage bags.

It's time to set them free. To release our inert hostages, to experience the garage sale of the soul. Do inanimate objects have a sense of being? Do they have an independent sense of self that exists ouside the investments we bestow upon them? Before we discover them are they waiting for us? Is there destiny in the life of inanimate objects? And is their life slowly worn down at our fingers? By the grease and the muck, by the acid of our touch do we eventually kill them?

It must be very difficult for them - these inanimate objects that live and die on our whims. They could be anything, from the crappiest piece of mass-produced nothing that was ever coughed up by a multinational, to a stick with a nail through it.*

When they first enter our lives, fresh and new, we're attracted to them, obsessed by them. We devote time to them, carry them everywhere or hurry home to see them again. We breathe life into them. We give them purpose. Then, one day, without warning. our mood changes. Overnight, we've grown bored with that toy or that piece of jewellery or that stick with a nail through it and need something new, another attraction. As quickly as it was embraced, it's discarded. Some months later we may pick it up again, remembering the good times before we consigned it to oblivion in a box. We all know in our hearts that the humane thing to do would be to get rid of it. But in the back of our minds a voice keeps murmuring: Who knows when a 1960s Ben Hur plastic sword could come in handy, or half a bottle of putrid soap bubbles from Finland, or a commemorative belt buckle from the Munich Olympics?

How inhumane and callous it is to hold these inanimate objects in the purgatory of our attics. We must give them a chance to live again. To be dumped and discovered by a stranger who'll love them and nurse them back to life. To keep them locked up is as perverse as hanging on to dead skin. If we continue to hold on to the past, it places a limit on our possible futures.

To illustrate this point: There was once a renowned second-hand dealer who acquired his fame because he would never sell anything. His store overflowed with junk. There was so much wonderful rubbish, he was often forced to sit outside the store on the street. It was here he'd perform his often protracted and bizarre business dealings.

You encountered the first hurdle when you saw something you liked. You'd have to get it yourself. This often meant digging at the dirty coalface of his shopfront cave until you prised your treasure from the shelves. Finally, with the trophy in hand, you'd inquire about the price only to find that the article was not for sale.

I'm sure he had every intention of flogging all his wares when he woke up of a morning. It was just that, when confronted with the reality of the situation, he couldn't bear to be parted from his goods - from the things he loved. I couldn't fathom if he was a guard imprisoning the merchandise or a guardian protecting it from harm. In all the years I visited his shop, I was never allowed to purchase anything and I never witnessed a single sale.

The shop became more and more bloated and still nothing was ever removed. He eventually went out of business.

*I held onto my American Motorcycle Cop With Real Siren Action until there was virtually nothing left of it. The clog chewed the head off the motorcycle cop, then the wind-up engine rusted, the Real Siren Action failed, the rear wheel went missing and the headless cop lost his right leg in an experiment to test the blades of a blender. Years later I saw him again, looking better than he had in years. He was in a second-hand shop but for some reason the idiot owner wouldn't sell him to me.

People can be seen on any street corner pouring themselves and their intense, untamed feelings into these dark plastic rectangles. The only thing that separates them from the incoherent banter of those poor souls who are certifiably insane is the assumption someone is listening. If the mentally unstable carried mobile phones, no-one would look twice. You could be smeared with chicken giblets and carrying a chilled flagon of meth, but if you're speaking into a mobile you're considered sane.

Like the woman I witnessed the other day who decided to squat in the middle of a busy pedestrian thoroughfare because she'd received a call. She gesticulated wildly, laughing like a creature possessed, and had it not been for the phone she would have been carted away. Or the construction worker who blew wet kisses into the phone and spoke to his "frothy, huggy, lovey dove bear" as he pushed to the front of the queue.

When we see these incidents we only witness the effect, not the cause. We see and hear people speaking to the void. The full range of emotions are employed but we only understand half the story. Gone is the balancing image of two or more people relating physically. What we have is one person crying, swearing, singing or smugly flirting with the emptiness. It is the ultimate nihilism.

This aberrant, antisocial and offensive behaviour we're seeing with mobile phones is being accepted as normal. And there is a fear that it is spreading. Once, to use a phone in the street, you were incased in a booth. The metal and glass or moulded plastic served to distance and protect you from public scrutiny. You could bang on the glass in frustration, weep into the receiver or sing of universal happiness with relative safety. The mobile has no such barriers. You're vulnerable and connected to a disembodied voice, an electrical spectre, through space (and, with a long distance call, through time as well). You become displaced because the mobile has reduced your awareness of your surroundings and you begin to reveal your true self. And , as anyone knows, the reason we hide our true selves is because we are essentially repulsive. The phone call has forced naked emotion, raw and natural, out on the streets. And raw and natural emotion is, more often than not, fairly ugly. The paradox is that this marvel of technology strips you of the artifice of civilisation.

Over centuries we have managed to house our emotions, shielding them from prying eyes in workplaces and homes. We've confused the beautiful and the brutal - but at the end of the century, it's seeping out. Who knows what joys or horrors this will bring? If you've had the misfortune to find yourself out there on the streets, take a look at the madness we've accepted as rational.

Is there some way to make the mobile less mobile? Can we take away its essential nature, capture and enclose it? Can it come with its own protective booth? Or better still, be chained to a fixed point in the home? At the end of all the research, we may discover that the mobile phone has changed our behaviour more than it has corrupted our brain tissue.*

*All this being said, it's rude to listen to other people's conversations just as it's considered impolite to stare at them while they weep openly in public. Mind you, its becoming acceptable to employ a moderate amount of aggression and vulgarity if a mobile goes off during a film.

For some, brooding on possible deaths is seen as a negative or depressing pastime. For others, it's an enjoyable activity to while away a dull afternoon. I tend to fall into the latter category. It need not be a solitary activity but something the whole family can enjoy. Who has ever managed to repulse themselves by thinking of a truly gruesome demise? The imagination is a richly textured environment with which to explore that unimaginable moment. There is great diversity within these imaginings (many desired ways to expire are fanciful Leary-esque options too chemically complex to investigite here) but there is general consensus on three points:

1. Fire would be a lousy way to go.

2. Drowning would be OK.

3. No-one wants an embarrassing death.

An embarrassing death is any death where, if you had lived, you'd have said, "What a stupid thing to do." He was checking out a gas leak and didn't have a torch so he lit a match. He attempted to remove his own appendix with a grapefruit spoon. He sought to breastfeed an orphaned piranha. He had a heart attack, with his trousers round his ankles, while he was linked up to some B-grade filth on the Internet.

They're the stories we come across every other day. The embarrassing death that makes the afternoon papers and has people chortling on their way home from work. The sort of death that brings joy to strangers.

The sort of death that makes an amusing short film. The sort of death that is preceded by the exclamation: Oops! The sort of death that comes the focal point of after-dinner conversation in inner-city apartments, with groups of bloated, coiffured dandies discussing the intimate details of your final gasp. It's bad enough to have your name bandied about while you're living, but imagine the shame once you've gone. Of course, it's something you don't have to live with, but the idea alone is enough to cause you eternal pain in the afterlife.

Almost any death could lead down the avenue to shame. An old gent slips on a banana peel in the shower. Suddenly there are all these questions left unanswered. What was a banana peel doing in the shower? What happened to the rest of the banana? What was the old man doing in a shower miles from his own home?

I have always believed that an embarrassing end lies in wait for me, because whenever I am ludicrously happy I tend to become life-threateningly clumsy. (Oddly, it is only after spending days on end contemplating my death that I excel in the art of living.) I have witnessed this type of pathology with many other people and I'm grateful it's not mine alone (though I must confess on occasion the "ludicrous happiness" is a byproduct of alcohol, which may affect my motor coordination).

In this way, moments of unbridled joy are often accompanied by the proximity of eternal rest. It might have something to do with the invulnerability we experience when we're truly happy. But happiness is deceptive. It's no defence against a car careening out of the night. And there is no way mirth can protect you from failing crates. And, if you have an uncontrollable giggling fit as you're pursued across the Kalahari by ferocious beasts, then you'll get torn apart.

Evolution has seen to it that only the sensible survive. Happiness momentarily distracts us from the difficult task of living, the difficult task of self-preservation. This is why wild animals are wary of giggling and you rarely, if ever, see them laugh. Humanity, on the other hand, has created secure environments so we can cack, snigger and guffaw in relative safety. When we laugh we let ourselves go and, in that uniquely human moment, we become most vulnerable.

* Every time I have to type these letters - r, t, f, g - I feel a moderate amount of pain. When I am forced to bend my slowly healing Finger back to reach the c or the v keys, I am in serious danger of opening the wound afresh. For this reason there may be a deficiency of words in this article using those letters.