strangereality86
06.30.04 (11:15 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Today I was driven at high speed in a white car with a black roof to a secret location in the remotest part of Lincolnshire, many tens of miles from home. Or is it hundreds of miles away? I forget. The location was a former Benedictine monastery now converted into a business conference centre. Yes, it was a work assignment, and my driver there and back was Eileen, one of the managers who was also taking part in the little show I was about to become a part of.
I was to act the role of a team member. It was a test day for people who had applied to become managers at the company. As part of their test, the candidates had to chair an unruly team meeting where all of the 'staff' would be by turn objectionable, abusive, rowdy, disruptive, and sullen. I was given my role before the first mock team meeting: my character was called Jim and his (my) brief was to [i]disagree with everything that the manager said and be generally disruptive[/i]. I loved every minute of it. I was there from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. and when it was over, I didn't feel that I'd spent a day working. The candidates trooped into the room one after the other and we all gave them Hell. Eileen's character was scheduled to burst into tears halfway through the meeting, whereupon Jim (me) would start laughing and jeering... I feel quite guilty about just how [i]bad[/i] we were now. Not one of the candidates coped very well. If it was my decision I wouldn't give any of them the job. As part of my role I had to lean back in my chair and shout 'OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE' at a certain key moment. Only one of the candidates asked me to leave the meeting until I'd calmed down. The others all just stared at me in shock and then pretended to ignore me, while the assessors, sitting silently in a corner making notes, made notes...
It was a full day with 8 such test meetings, but between each one there was half an hour or so. We had to recuperate, we actors (seven of us from all over the company, although just Eileen and me from our office). We had to have some time to each work up our parts, and tell each other to [i]break a leg[/i], and amusing stuff like that.
The former monastery is on top of a hill in the middle of rural Lincolnshire. Standing outside on the grass, smoking cigarettes one after another, all you could see from horizon to horizon, in 360 degrees, was your stereotypical, rolling English countryside. Fields, woodland, grazing sheep, babbling brooks, the works. All that could be seen of our more familiar urban setting was a line of traffic moving along a road in the distance. And, every now and then, a light aeroplane humming overhead, as if to complete the peaceful stillness.
Eileen drove me home, all the way to my front door, through all the rush hour traffic. Which was very good of her. By the time we got to the city I'd run out of things to say, having used up all of my [i]people energy[/i] earlier on. She's very attractive, is Eileen, a bit of an office heartthrob, so to run out of things to say and spend the last 15 minutes of the drive in near-silence was hard for me to accept. But I just didn't have anything left.
When she dropped me outside the house I slammed the car door shut, leaned down and showed her my palm. Farewell. I got inside and shut the door and relaxed into solitude, like a caught fish returned to water.
Today I was driven at high speed in a white car with a black roof to a secret location in the remotest part of Lincolnshire, many tens of miles from home. Or is it hundreds of miles away? I forget. The location was a former Benedictine monastery now converted into a business conference centre. Yes, it was a work assignment, and my driver there and back was Eileen, one of the managers who was also taking part in the little show I was about to become a part of.
I was to act the role of a team member. It was a test day for people who had applied to become managers at the company. As part of their test, the candidates had to chair an unruly team meeting where all of the 'staff' would be by turn objectionable, abusive, rowdy, disruptive, and sullen. I was given my role before the first mock team meeting: my character was called Jim and his (my) brief was to [i]disagree with everything that the manager said and be generally disruptive[/i]. I loved every minute of it. I was there from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. and when it was over, I didn't feel that I'd spent a day working. The candidates trooped into the room one after the other and we all gave them Hell. Eileen's character was scheduled to burst into tears halfway through the meeting, whereupon Jim (me) would start laughing and jeering... I feel quite guilty about just how [i]bad[/i] we were now. Not one of the candidates coped very well. If it was my decision I wouldn't give any of them the job. As part of my role I had to lean back in my chair and shout 'OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE' at a certain key moment. Only one of the candidates asked me to leave the meeting until I'd calmed down. The others all just stared at me in shock and then pretended to ignore me, while the assessors, sitting silently in a corner making notes, made notes...
It was a full day with 8 such test meetings, but between each one there was half an hour or so. We had to recuperate, we actors (seven of us from all over the company, although just Eileen and me from our office). We had to have some time to each work up our parts, and tell each other to [i]break a leg[/i], and amusing stuff like that.
The former monastery is on top of a hill in the middle of rural Lincolnshire. Standing outside on the grass, smoking cigarettes one after another, all you could see from horizon to horizon, in 360 degrees, was your stereotypical, rolling English countryside. Fields, woodland, grazing sheep, babbling brooks, the works. All that could be seen of our more familiar urban setting was a line of traffic moving along a road in the distance. And, every now and then, a light aeroplane humming overhead, as if to complete the peaceful stillness.
Eileen drove me home, all the way to my front door, through all the rush hour traffic. Which was very good of her. By the time we got to the city I'd run out of things to say, having used up all of my [i]people energy[/i] earlier on. She's very attractive, is Eileen, a bit of an office heartthrob, so to run out of things to say and spend the last 15 minutes of the drive in near-silence was hard for me to accept. But I just didn't have anything left.
When she dropped me outside the house I slammed the car door shut, leaned down and showed her my palm. Farewell. I got inside and shut the door and relaxed into solitude, like a caught fish returned to water.
strangereality85
06.29.04 (11:16 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Well I got the new job. From the end of July I will no more be doing manager callbacks or dealing with the public at all on the telephone. I'll be a letter-writer, weaving my web of company-approved lies in a new medium. I will be fussy about apostrophes and anxious lest a misplaced comma changes the meaning or rhythm of a, sentence. Shame I won't be getting any more money, but I would have actually taken a pay cut to get off the phones.
Donna, the manager of managers at the call centre (a charming, witty woman on a good day, but a real Nazi bitch when she's in a bad mood) stood next to me at about 2 o'clock this afternoon. "Lord Strange," she said, "are you on a call?" I shook my head mutely, looking up at her, transfixed. This was it. This was the moment. "Can I borrow you for a minute," said Donna. That is code in our office for "follow me to a meeting room where I will whisper secrets in your ear".
So she took me to the meeting room and congratulated me on getting the job (why congratulate me when there's no more £££s coming my way?), and I said "Great!" and so on.
Then she said: "But wait a moment. The other candidates won't be told that they've failed until Monday morning." I didn't think to ask: [i]Why the hell not?![/i]. It does seem strangely illogical, doesn't it, to tell me 5 days before them, and then - "Please don't tell anyone about this," said Donna. "It'd be very unprofessional if this came out before we have the chance to speak to the others." I agreed - what else could I do? I followed Donna from the meeting room. A hundred people turned their heads and watched me walk with Donna. Most of them have spent the past few days sidling up to me and saying: [i]Have you heard yet?[/i] This was going to be difficult.
I went to lunch immediately, and outside at the bike shed I lit up my cigarette, inhaled, and gazed at the sky in a newly-liberated manner. The sky was blue with a few pale wisps of cirrus. Behind me the door clattered open and shut. I was [i]rushed[/i] by Sonia, one of the call centre supervisors. She's a close-ish buddy who will come out for my leaving drink, I think.
"Well? Well?" she said. I couldn't help myself. "I got it!" I said, and she did one of those girly squeals made popular by American films and TV shows. "But," I said, "don't say a word to anyone, it's not official until Monday. Okay?" Sonia nodded solemnly and I lit her cigarette and we started swapping the usual bullshit about how great our weekends were.
Then Paul came out for a cigarette. Paul is 6'6" tall, 47 years old, divorced, and used to be in the Army. His personal and psychological profile is a near-match for those of spree killers that I have read about. He creeps out all of the women in the office, and most of the men too. Having been in the Army, no doubt he has a spare gun or two lying around at home, and one day he'll come into work and just blow my head off from behind. I get on fine with him, as we have a shared interest in computer games, and he has a certain wry humour about him that I do appreciate.
The thing with Paul is, he always brings in bags of lollipops and offers them around to everyone. The office joke about this is that the lollipops are all 'date-rape-flavoured', and this creeps out the women even more (even though I'm sure it [i]is[/i] only a joke), and now no one will take any of his lollipops (or if they do, they put them in a drawer immediately after: some of the girls have quite a collection).
Today when he came out for a cigarette, Sonia kind of inched closer to me and bent her head towards me whilst continuing our aimless chatter about the weekend. This was implicitly excluding Paul from any possibility of participating in the conversation. He stood leaning against a wall a few yards away, quietly smoking and looking at Sonia and myself with a slight smile on his face. I tried a few subtle methods of bringing him in from the cold - methods like looking over at him and saying: "Hahaha, did you hear that, Paul, eh? Eh?!" Really subtle, that one. But Sonia always blocked the attempts, as she never directly looked at him once, and so the implicit exclusion was unbreachable from Paul's perspective.
In the end Paul trod on his cigarette and turned to leave. By now I felt really bad, and I called out a too-hearty: "See you later, Paul!" He sensed the false note in my voice. He paused at the door and looked at me over his shoulder, then he moved inside. I hope that he knew what I was about. Sometimes I look at Paul and I can see the despair of life that is behind his public face.
Well I got the new job. From the end of July I will no more be doing manager callbacks or dealing with the public at all on the telephone. I'll be a letter-writer, weaving my web of company-approved lies in a new medium. I will be fussy about apostrophes and anxious lest a misplaced comma changes the meaning or rhythm of a, sentence. Shame I won't be getting any more money, but I would have actually taken a pay cut to get off the phones.
Donna, the manager of managers at the call centre (a charming, witty woman on a good day, but a real Nazi bitch when she's in a bad mood) stood next to me at about 2 o'clock this afternoon. "Lord Strange," she said, "are you on a call?" I shook my head mutely, looking up at her, transfixed. This was it. This was the moment. "Can I borrow you for a minute," said Donna. That is code in our office for "follow me to a meeting room where I will whisper secrets in your ear".
So she took me to the meeting room and congratulated me on getting the job (why congratulate me when there's no more £££s coming my way?), and I said "Great!" and so on.
Then she said: "But wait a moment. The other candidates won't be told that they've failed until Monday morning." I didn't think to ask: [i]Why the hell not?![/i]. It does seem strangely illogical, doesn't it, to tell me 5 days before them, and then - "Please don't tell anyone about this," said Donna. "It'd be very unprofessional if this came out before we have the chance to speak to the others." I agreed - what else could I do? I followed Donna from the meeting room. A hundred people turned their heads and watched me walk with Donna. Most of them have spent the past few days sidling up to me and saying: [i]Have you heard yet?[/i] This was going to be difficult.
I went to lunch immediately, and outside at the bike shed I lit up my cigarette, inhaled, and gazed at the sky in a newly-liberated manner. The sky was blue with a few pale wisps of cirrus. Behind me the door clattered open and shut. I was [i]rushed[/i] by Sonia, one of the call centre supervisors. She's a close-ish buddy who will come out for my leaving drink, I think.
"Well? Well?" she said. I couldn't help myself. "I got it!" I said, and she did one of those girly squeals made popular by American films and TV shows. "But," I said, "don't say a word to anyone, it's not official until Monday. Okay?" Sonia nodded solemnly and I lit her cigarette and we started swapping the usual bullshit about how great our weekends were.
Then Paul came out for a cigarette. Paul is 6'6" tall, 47 years old, divorced, and used to be in the Army. His personal and psychological profile is a near-match for those of spree killers that I have read about. He creeps out all of the women in the office, and most of the men too. Having been in the Army, no doubt he has a spare gun or two lying around at home, and one day he'll come into work and just blow my head off from behind. I get on fine with him, as we have a shared interest in computer games, and he has a certain wry humour about him that I do appreciate.
The thing with Paul is, he always brings in bags of lollipops and offers them around to everyone. The office joke about this is that the lollipops are all 'date-rape-flavoured', and this creeps out the women even more (even though I'm sure it [i]is[/i] only a joke), and now no one will take any of his lollipops (or if they do, they put them in a drawer immediately after: some of the girls have quite a collection).
Today when he came out for a cigarette, Sonia kind of inched closer to me and bent her head towards me whilst continuing our aimless chatter about the weekend. This was implicitly excluding Paul from any possibility of participating in the conversation. He stood leaning against a wall a few yards away, quietly smoking and looking at Sonia and myself with a slight smile on his face. I tried a few subtle methods of bringing him in from the cold - methods like looking over at him and saying: "Hahaha, did you hear that, Paul, eh? Eh?!" Really subtle, that one. But Sonia always blocked the attempts, as she never directly looked at him once, and so the implicit exclusion was unbreachable from Paul's perspective.
In the end Paul trod on his cigarette and turned to leave. By now I felt really bad, and I called out a too-hearty: "See you later, Paul!" He sensed the false note in my voice. He paused at the door and looked at me over his shoulder, then he moved inside. I hope that he knew what I was about. Sometimes I look at Paul and I can see the despair of life that is behind his public face.
strangereality84
06.28.04 (10:23 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Lost [i]another[/i] long blog just now, and I really haven't got the time to type another one. I don't know what happened. I had finished, and clicked 'publish' etc below, and the fecker just disappeared who knows where?
It was a good 'un as well - I think so, anyway. Today I hosted a Korean visitor at work, for half an hour. North or South Korean wasn't specified and I didn't ask. He was a call centre manager in 'Korea', and was visiting to see how we do things here.
He arrived at my desk with another man, his 'translator'. My visitor didn't speak very good English and the translator was there to help things run smoothly (said the translator).
"I'm a duty manager here," I said to begin with. "My job is to deal with angry customers who won't get off the phone."
I waited expectantly for the translator to translate. I've seen TV, I knew I had to wait.
The 'translator' cleared his throat and said in a loud voice: "HE TALKS TO ANGRY PEOPLE. [i]ANGRY[/i] PEOPLE. YOU KNOW, [i]GRRRRR[/i]." And he made a cartoon-furious face, with a deep frown and vicious scowl.
The Korean visitor just looked at me and smiled.
After a pause the translator nudged me and said in his London accent: "I think he got that. You carry on, mate."
The original blog that I wrote about this was five times longer and ten times better. RIP, dear blog, wherever you are now.
Lost [i]another[/i] long blog just now, and I really haven't got the time to type another one. I don't know what happened. I had finished, and clicked 'publish' etc below, and the fecker just disappeared who knows where?
It was a good 'un as well - I think so, anyway. Today I hosted a Korean visitor at work, for half an hour. North or South Korean wasn't specified and I didn't ask. He was a call centre manager in 'Korea', and was visiting to see how we do things here.
He arrived at my desk with another man, his 'translator'. My visitor didn't speak very good English and the translator was there to help things run smoothly (said the translator).
"I'm a duty manager here," I said to begin with. "My job is to deal with angry customers who won't get off the phone."
I waited expectantly for the translator to translate. I've seen TV, I knew I had to wait.
The 'translator' cleared his throat and said in a loud voice: "HE TALKS TO ANGRY PEOPLE. [i]ANGRY[/i] PEOPLE. YOU KNOW, [i]GRRRRR[/i]." And he made a cartoon-furious face, with a deep frown and vicious scowl.
The Korean visitor just looked at me and smiled.
After a pause the translator nudged me and said in his London accent: "I think he got that. You carry on, mate."
The original blog that I wrote about this was five times longer and ten times better. RIP, dear blog, wherever you are now.
strangereality83
06.27.04 (11:16 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
In a forum where I'm a semi-regular poster (only semi-regular because the moderators keep closing down threads that are actually quite good, and so I go away and sulk for a while), they were asking for riddles today.
The best riddle I have ever come across is this one:
[i]What is the only thing in the world, except for water, that can fall into water without getting wet?[/i]
Some argued, quite ingeniously, that the answer must be 'oil', but I successfully counter-argued that at least the outside of the oil would be wet if it was in water. The thing with oil and water is that they [i]don't mix[/i], not that the water cannot touch the oil at all!
If you want to go away and try to think of the answer yourself, then please do so. I'll post the answer tomorrow. The first person who answers correctly can have all my tblog bucks, and that's a promise. I'd throw in a luxury car as well, but apparently it's against tblog rules for members to give away cars in competitions. Oh well.
In a forum where I'm a semi-regular poster (only semi-regular because the moderators keep closing down threads that are actually quite good, and so I go away and sulk for a while), they were asking for riddles today.
The best riddle I have ever come across is this one:
[i]What is the only thing in the world, except for water, that can fall into water without getting wet?[/i]
Some argued, quite ingeniously, that the answer must be 'oil', but I successfully counter-argued that at least the outside of the oil would be wet if it was in water. The thing with oil and water is that they [i]don't mix[/i], not that the water cannot touch the oil at all!
If you want to go away and try to think of the answer yourself, then please do so. I'll post the answer tomorrow. The first person who answers correctly can have all my tblog bucks, and that's a promise. I'd throw in a luxury car as well, but apparently it's against tblog rules for members to give away cars in competitions. Oh well.
strangereality82
06.26.04 (10:43 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
I have spent the whole day playing games. At the age of 34, with no home of my own, no wife, no children, an unpublished novel manuscript sitting gathering dust, and a barely-started new novel gathering virtual dust on my hard drive, I have spent the day playing games. Not just any old day either. I have spent [i]Saturday[/i] in playing games. Saturday: the traditional day for fun and frolics amongst people. The time when friends are met up with for drinks, and new friends encountered, and possibilities for romance open themselves out to the avid seeker...
A person is not meant to spend all of Saturday in playing games, you would think. But I tend not to go anywhere or see anyone much these days. What's more: I do not want (really) to go anywhere or see anyone much these days. My life strategy is to reserve as much time as possible for solitude. In years gone by this was time spent reading and/or contemplating the ineffable mysteries of Being. Nowadays it's time spent blasting aliens out of the sky or improving my economy to the level where I can afford that missile shield I've been hankering after.
Today I have played [i]Haegemonia: Legions of Iron[/i], a genre-fusing blend of 3D space strategy and resource management. (Build an interstellar empire sufficient to ward off the Alien Threat. Control massive fleets of ships in huge, sweeping battles through spectacular dust clouds and nebulae. Make tough decisions whether to improve a planet's morale with social improvements, or spend the reserach credits on a capital-ship-busting Quantum Bomb instead.)
I have also been playing the latest iteration of [i]Splinter Cell[/i] on my PS2. Sorry, make that [i]Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell[/i], and stick one of those [b]tm[/b] marks next to it. He gets upset, does Tom, if his origination of the franchise isn't acknowledged. Never mind that his likely involvement in the games probably didn't extend much past signing his name at the bottom of a contract... Anyway: the latest [i]Splinter Cell[/i] is subtitled [i]Pandora Tomorrow[/i], for reasons not yet clear (there'd better be a box involved or I'll feel cheated). As with the first game in the series, the aim is to sneak around various locations, hugging the shadows, completing objectives, and capping the bad guys in the head from behind. I won't go on about the gameplay, but it is intuitive and compelling. I should really apply for a job at a games magazine, shouldn't I? The voice of the lead character is supplied by Michael Ironside (most remembered, by me at least, for his role in the mid-80s series [i]V[/i]. He's been in other stuff too, most notably [i]Total Recall[/i], but to me [i]V[/i] represents the high watermark of his career. Higher even than being in [i]Splinter Cell[/i].) Also featured in the voice-acting roster for this game is one Dennis Haysbert - President Palmer out of [i]24[/i]. Hope I spelt Haysbert right. He's very good too, but now back to my original point -
Is it remiss of me to seemingly fritter away so much time in just playing games? No, it's not. I haven't got time to flesh out this point - there's games a-callin'. Suffice to say: people, socialising, going out to have fun - are overrated. Ditto one's supposed 'duty' continually to [i]improve oneself[/i]. As you may know, I am a sometime adherent of the Zen philosophy. One of Zen's cornerstones is that there is no need to perfect yourself, because you are the avatar of reality, and reality is already perfect. [i]One does not wipe a clean mirror clean[/i], as some Zen master once said, and then presumably went back to his game of chess.
Whew. Am I glad I discovered Zen. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a colony to defend. Can I ship my new minelayers there in time to absorb the aliens' first attack? I hope so. I do hope so.
I have spent the whole day playing games. At the age of 34, with no home of my own, no wife, no children, an unpublished novel manuscript sitting gathering dust, and a barely-started new novel gathering virtual dust on my hard drive, I have spent the day playing games. Not just any old day either. I have spent [i]Saturday[/i] in playing games. Saturday: the traditional day for fun and frolics amongst people. The time when friends are met up with for drinks, and new friends encountered, and possibilities for romance open themselves out to the avid seeker...
A person is not meant to spend all of Saturday in playing games, you would think. But I tend not to go anywhere or see anyone much these days. What's more: I do not want (really) to go anywhere or see anyone much these days. My life strategy is to reserve as much time as possible for solitude. In years gone by this was time spent reading and/or contemplating the ineffable mysteries of Being. Nowadays it's time spent blasting aliens out of the sky or improving my economy to the level where I can afford that missile shield I've been hankering after.
Today I have played [i]Haegemonia: Legions of Iron[/i], a genre-fusing blend of 3D space strategy and resource management. (Build an interstellar empire sufficient to ward off the Alien Threat. Control massive fleets of ships in huge, sweeping battles through spectacular dust clouds and nebulae. Make tough decisions whether to improve a planet's morale with social improvements, or spend the reserach credits on a capital-ship-busting Quantum Bomb instead.)
I have also been playing the latest iteration of [i]Splinter Cell[/i] on my PS2. Sorry, make that [i]Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell[/i], and stick one of those [b]tm[/b] marks next to it. He gets upset, does Tom, if his origination of the franchise isn't acknowledged. Never mind that his likely involvement in the games probably didn't extend much past signing his name at the bottom of a contract... Anyway: the latest [i]Splinter Cell[/i] is subtitled [i]Pandora Tomorrow[/i], for reasons not yet clear (there'd better be a box involved or I'll feel cheated). As with the first game in the series, the aim is to sneak around various locations, hugging the shadows, completing objectives, and capping the bad guys in the head from behind. I won't go on about the gameplay, but it is intuitive and compelling. I should really apply for a job at a games magazine, shouldn't I? The voice of the lead character is supplied by Michael Ironside (most remembered, by me at least, for his role in the mid-80s series [i]V[/i]. He's been in other stuff too, most notably [i]Total Recall[/i], but to me [i]V[/i] represents the high watermark of his career. Higher even than being in [i]Splinter Cell[/i].) Also featured in the voice-acting roster for this game is one Dennis Haysbert - President Palmer out of [i]24[/i]. Hope I spelt Haysbert right. He's very good too, but now back to my original point -
Is it remiss of me to seemingly fritter away so much time in just playing games? No, it's not. I haven't got time to flesh out this point - there's games a-callin'. Suffice to say: people, socialising, going out to have fun - are overrated. Ditto one's supposed 'duty' continually to [i]improve oneself[/i]. As you may know, I am a sometime adherent of the Zen philosophy. One of Zen's cornerstones is that there is no need to perfect yourself, because you are the avatar of reality, and reality is already perfect. [i]One does not wipe a clean mirror clean[/i], as some Zen master once said, and then presumably went back to his game of chess.
Whew. Am I glad I discovered Zen. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a colony to defend. Can I ship my new minelayers there in time to absorb the aliens' first attack? I hope so. I do hope so.
strangereality81
06.25.04 (10:44 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
We live in a universe of unexplained phenomena. The universe itself is an unexplained phenomenon, so technically everything within it is unexplained too. There's a certain phenomenon, which I believe must be universal (at least among human beings), but for which there is no name. I'll describe an instance of it and if anyone can give it a name I would love to hear it. Here we go: You enter a shop (doesn't matter which kind) and head directly for the shelf or the counter where the stuff you've come to get is kept. Today I went to the local supermarket to get some chilli sauce. I'm a regular buyer of chilli sauce from this supermarket. So much so that I should get a bulk discount, and be welcomed at the entrance by the manager in person, wearing a bow tie and beaming gratefully, but I digress.
I went to the appropriate aisle in the supermaket and walked up to the shelf where the chilli sauce was kept. The place was all but deserted: only one or two stragglers, dotted here and there. It was 7 o'clock this evening.
Now, this is the phenomenon I mean: [i]In an otherwise empty supermarket aisle, there was a shopper standing right in front of the chilli sauce bottles.[/i] She was a plump woman in a confused state, frowning at two bottles of salad cream in her hands. (They were the same size and brand, so I don't know what she was frowning about.) She wasn't looking at, or apparently interested in, the chilli sauce bottles, but there she was, directly in front of them. "Excuse me," I had to say, and leaning past her I scooped up my precious chilli sauce (can't eat meals without it). She reared back in shock and pursed her lips at me. I paid for the chilli sauce and left the building...
Perhaps that's not the most vivid example I could've come up with - I kind of got distracted there by the salad-cream lady, didn't I? She was strange though. Anyway, my point is that this is always happening to me, especially in bookshops and libraries. I'll walk in and head for the fiction section, looking for a book by Franz Kafka, say, and there right in front of the relevant 'K' shelf - there will be somebody standing, immovable like a rock, in my way. This can happen in an otherwise [i]completely empty bookshop[/i].
What is this phenomenon? Is it widespread? It must be. Am I making too much out of it? What about all the times I go to buy chilli sauce or a Franz Kafka book and there's nobody in the way? What about those times?
And what about the times when I am the one standing in somebody else's way? That happens too. Does it irritate and/or perplex those other people as much as it does me?
Bermuda Triangle, looking at it from my angle.
We live in a universe of unexplained phenomena. The universe itself is an unexplained phenomenon, so technically everything within it is unexplained too. There's a certain phenomenon, which I believe must be universal (at least among human beings), but for which there is no name. I'll describe an instance of it and if anyone can give it a name I would love to hear it. Here we go: You enter a shop (doesn't matter which kind) and head directly for the shelf or the counter where the stuff you've come to get is kept. Today I went to the local supermarket to get some chilli sauce. I'm a regular buyer of chilli sauce from this supermarket. So much so that I should get a bulk discount, and be welcomed at the entrance by the manager in person, wearing a bow tie and beaming gratefully, but I digress.
I went to the appropriate aisle in the supermaket and walked up to the shelf where the chilli sauce was kept. The place was all but deserted: only one or two stragglers, dotted here and there. It was 7 o'clock this evening.
Now, this is the phenomenon I mean: [i]In an otherwise empty supermarket aisle, there was a shopper standing right in front of the chilli sauce bottles.[/i] She was a plump woman in a confused state, frowning at two bottles of salad cream in her hands. (They were the same size and brand, so I don't know what she was frowning about.) She wasn't looking at, or apparently interested in, the chilli sauce bottles, but there she was, directly in front of them. "Excuse me," I had to say, and leaning past her I scooped up my precious chilli sauce (can't eat meals without it). She reared back in shock and pursed her lips at me. I paid for the chilli sauce and left the building...
Perhaps that's not the most vivid example I could've come up with - I kind of got distracted there by the salad-cream lady, didn't I? She was strange though. Anyway, my point is that this is always happening to me, especially in bookshops and libraries. I'll walk in and head for the fiction section, looking for a book by Franz Kafka, say, and there right in front of the relevant 'K' shelf - there will be somebody standing, immovable like a rock, in my way. This can happen in an otherwise [i]completely empty bookshop[/i].
What is this phenomenon? Is it widespread? It must be. Am I making too much out of it? What about all the times I go to buy chilli sauce or a Franz Kafka book and there's nobody in the way? What about those times?
And what about the times when I am the one standing in somebody else's way? That happens too. Does it irritate and/or perplex those other people as much as it does me?
Bermuda Triangle, looking at it from my angle.
strangereality80
06.24.04 (10:25 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
A nation is in mourning but I do not care. Here is why a nation is in mourning: within the past hour, England have crashed out of the European Championship tournament at the hands of the hosts, Portugal. Michael Owen scored for England after 4 minutes and they held this 1-0 lead until the 82nd minute, when Tottenham's erstwhile midfield misfit, Helder Postiga, headed a goal for Portugal from 6 yards out. England's best player, Wayne Rooney, broke a bone in his foot and was out of the game. Both teams scored another goal apiece during extra time, and then came the dreaded penalty shootout. England don't win penalty shootouts, as a rule, and they didn't win this one either. And just to rub it in a bit more, Portugal's winning penalty was taken by their [i]goalkeeper[/i]... That never happens. In nearly 25 years of watching football, I have never seen a goalkeeper take a penalty in a penalty shootout. I have now.
So the nation of which I am putatively a part - England - is in mourning. And I do not care. While tonight just about everyone in the country seemed to be crammed into pubs and bars to watch the game on big screens, I preferred to watch it on my own, in my room. Why was I watching it at all? Bread and circuses. That I watch such events, and am even swept up by them to a certain extent, is an ongoing mystery to me. Socio-cultural conditioning (i.e. brainwashing) has done its obscure work on me. It seems that no one is immune. Just knowing about the conditioning (the brainwashing) isn't enough to save you. The billion-headed public hydra, the elemental force that is [i]other people[/i], will sweep you along with it whatever you think. It's like being in [i]1984[/i] or something.
A nation is in mourning but I do not care. Here is why a nation is in mourning: within the past hour, England have crashed out of the European Championship tournament at the hands of the hosts, Portugal. Michael Owen scored for England after 4 minutes and they held this 1-0 lead until the 82nd minute, when Tottenham's erstwhile midfield misfit, Helder Postiga, headed a goal for Portugal from 6 yards out. England's best player, Wayne Rooney, broke a bone in his foot and was out of the game. Both teams scored another goal apiece during extra time, and then came the dreaded penalty shootout. England don't win penalty shootouts, as a rule, and they didn't win this one either. And just to rub it in a bit more, Portugal's winning penalty was taken by their [i]goalkeeper[/i]... That never happens. In nearly 25 years of watching football, I have never seen a goalkeeper take a penalty in a penalty shootout. I have now.
So the nation of which I am putatively a part - England - is in mourning. And I do not care. While tonight just about everyone in the country seemed to be crammed into pubs and bars to watch the game on big screens, I preferred to watch it on my own, in my room. Why was I watching it at all? Bread and circuses. That I watch such events, and am even swept up by them to a certain extent, is an ongoing mystery to me. Socio-cultural conditioning (i.e. brainwashing) has done its obscure work on me. It seems that no one is immune. Just knowing about the conditioning (the brainwashing) isn't enough to save you. The billion-headed public hydra, the elemental force that is [i]other people[/i], will sweep you along with it whatever you think. It's like being in [i]1984[/i] or something.
strangereality79
06.22.04 (6:57 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Yesterday I had an interview for a new job at the company (see below - and I'll be getting back to the truly [i]strange[/i] stuff, the really [b]deep[/b] stuff about time and death and shit, soon, I promise...)
Wearing a tie that I had tied slightly too tight and which was, um, actually slightly strangling me, I entered the room at the bottom end of the office. I knew that there were to be two interviewers and I had envisaged the scene I would face. A table, with an empty chair on my side, and the two interviewers on the other side, seated and smiling encouragingly. But I walked into the room and what do I find? An empty seat on my side all right. So far so [i]envisaged[/i]. But the two women interviewers had positioned themselves at [i]either end[/i] of the table, side-on to me and facing one another. So with me in the 6 o'clock position, they were positioned at 9 and 3 o'clock respectively. I had to keep turning my head to include the other in whatever bland bullshit I was spouting - "[i]I think the essence of good customer service is honesty. Honesty, first and foremost[/i]" - and a good few times I addressed my remarks to the blank wall at 12 o'clock. If the intention was to throw me off-guard and lower my mask of self-control, it worked. Bloody business types, with their business psychology bullshit. Grrr.
The interview seemed to be over very quickly. Before I knew it I was at the door, grinning backwards over my shoulder like a loon and saying too many Thank-yous. After an hour's lunchbreak with the other candidates subtly undermining each others' confidence, we made the trek down the road to the training building where the afternoon letter-writing test was to be held. We each had a PC and a maximum of three-and-a-half hours to compose a reply to a real customer's real letter of complaint. The best letter would really be sent to the real customer in today's real post, they told us. Probably more business bullshit but you never know.
"And it doesn't matter how long you take," said one of the interviewers. "If you finish in half-an-hour, that's fine. You can go home."
I looked out of the window: what a sunny, warm afternoon. I resolved to finish first, if not within half-an-hour then at least [i]first[/i], because that would show my coolness and competence under pressure. The letter I had to write was easy. I've written loads just like it. So many of my telephone customers ask for me to confirm stuff in writing. I finished in one hour and ten minutes. Next to me, another candidate sat talking to himself and swearing quietly. It was Mike from upstairs, a giant man frequently encountered in corridors, perspiring and talking to himself and swearing quietly. Seriously, he has Tourette's syndrome, but has learned to partly control it by [i]whispering[/i] his curses. He's a character all right, and boy does he need a job writing letters.
So I was the first to finish. I didn't ask anyone how long it would be before I heard how I'd done. I think I did well enough to get the job, but the political scenario at my office is particularly fraught at the moment, so... Oh, who cares. We shall see. It was about 2:45 and the whole afternoon was before me. I walked out, walked across the manicured lawn to the main road, and walked across to wait for a bus into town. It wasn't long in coming. When it stopped in front of me I dropped onto the ground the cigarette that I had only half smoked. I missed it with my foot when I tried to stamp it out. As I took my seat on the bus I saw the smoke from my half-smoked cigarette curling lazily upward into the air.
Yesterday I had an interview for a new job at the company (see below - and I'll be getting back to the truly [i]strange[/i] stuff, the really [b]deep[/b] stuff about time and death and shit, soon, I promise...)
Wearing a tie that I had tied slightly too tight and which was, um, actually slightly strangling me, I entered the room at the bottom end of the office. I knew that there were to be two interviewers and I had envisaged the scene I would face. A table, with an empty chair on my side, and the two interviewers on the other side, seated and smiling encouragingly. But I walked into the room and what do I find? An empty seat on my side all right. So far so [i]envisaged[/i]. But the two women interviewers had positioned themselves at [i]either end[/i] of the table, side-on to me and facing one another. So with me in the 6 o'clock position, they were positioned at 9 and 3 o'clock respectively. I had to keep turning my head to include the other in whatever bland bullshit I was spouting - "[i]I think the essence of good customer service is honesty. Honesty, first and foremost[/i]" - and a good few times I addressed my remarks to the blank wall at 12 o'clock. If the intention was to throw me off-guard and lower my mask of self-control, it worked. Bloody business types, with their business psychology bullshit. Grrr.
The interview seemed to be over very quickly. Before I knew it I was at the door, grinning backwards over my shoulder like a loon and saying too many Thank-yous. After an hour's lunchbreak with the other candidates subtly undermining each others' confidence, we made the trek down the road to the training building where the afternoon letter-writing test was to be held. We each had a PC and a maximum of three-and-a-half hours to compose a reply to a real customer's real letter of complaint. The best letter would really be sent to the real customer in today's real post, they told us. Probably more business bullshit but you never know.
"And it doesn't matter how long you take," said one of the interviewers. "If you finish in half-an-hour, that's fine. You can go home."
I looked out of the window: what a sunny, warm afternoon. I resolved to finish first, if not within half-an-hour then at least [i]first[/i], because that would show my coolness and competence under pressure. The letter I had to write was easy. I've written loads just like it. So many of my telephone customers ask for me to confirm stuff in writing. I finished in one hour and ten minutes. Next to me, another candidate sat talking to himself and swearing quietly. It was Mike from upstairs, a giant man frequently encountered in corridors, perspiring and talking to himself and swearing quietly. Seriously, he has Tourette's syndrome, but has learned to partly control it by [i]whispering[/i] his curses. He's a character all right, and boy does he need a job writing letters.
So I was the first to finish. I didn't ask anyone how long it would be before I heard how I'd done. I think I did well enough to get the job, but the political scenario at my office is particularly fraught at the moment, so... Oh, who cares. We shall see. It was about 2:45 and the whole afternoon was before me. I walked out, walked across the manicured lawn to the main road, and walked across to wait for a bus into town. It wasn't long in coming. When it stopped in front of me I dropped onto the ground the cigarette that I had only half smoked. I missed it with my foot when I tried to stamp it out. As I took my seat on the bus I saw the smoke from my half-smoked cigarette curling lazily upward into the air.
strangereality78
06.20.04 (2:45 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
I have an interview tomorrow for a new position in the company I work for. If successful, I'll no longer be on the 'operational' side of things, i.e. I won't have to deal with unhappy/angry/irate/incan descent-with-rage customers on the telephone. ([i]"'Customer care[/i]?' I'll fucking [i]customer care[/i] you in a minute my friend...") At the moment my time at work is a state of more or less prolonged tension. I can never fully relax because at any moment the door might swing open and a supervisor from the call centre, red-faced and flustered, will burst in and say: "Lord Strange, there's a customer on the phone demanding to speak to a manager. He/she actually made poor Anna [i]cry[/i]..." And then I have to harrumph in a businesslike fashion and lick my lips and say: "OK! Put them through." My phone will beep and it'll be Anna (or whoever), her voice still trembling, and she'll say: "Lord, hi. Sorry. This customer is a [i]bastard[/i]..." And I always say something like: "Don't worry about it, Anna. Put Mr Smith through." And then I have a good old row with Mr Smith. For twenty minutes or so.
As I said, if successful in tomorrow's interview all of this will be at an end for me. I'll be doing much the same job, but instead of doing it on the telephone I'll be doing it via the Royal Mail. I'll be replying to angry customers' letters.
I'm slightly peeved that I even have to go through an interview process for this move. It's not as if the new role would mean any more money for me. I suspect a conspiracy. I'm good at what I do at the moment - unhappy customers are soon soothed by Lord Strange's elegant bullshit. Many's the time I feel like concluding a call by saying to the customer: "Er, could you get out of the palm of my hand now, please?" I only say this because it's true. So the managers might not want to let me go. Part of me suspects that it doesn't matter how I do in the interview. On Tuesday they'll summon me to the meeting room and say [i]We think you're best suited to remain where you are...[/i]. If that happens I'm getting out of there - getting out of the company. The prolonged tension that I mentioned earlier isn't good for me. As calm and unflappable as I am on the phone with an angry customer, you should see the doodles I draw on my notepad while in the midst of a 'full and frank exchange of views'. Huge menacing spirals, hangman's nooses, slashing stabs of biro ink across whole pages. Then I come home and the knot in my stomach eases up after a while. Then I pour myself a drink, and another, every night. It's not good and I have to get out. I want the peace of going to work every day knowing that the most stress I'll face is topping up the paper tray in the printer.
I've already got my emergency tie out of the wardrobe. We can wear open-necked shirts at my office, so it's been 2 years since I last wore a tie to work. For an interview, though, a tie is appropriate. Hence the emergency tie, in its glass case: [b]BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF INTERVIEW[/b]. It's a nice tie, cobalt-blue coloured, and not too dusty after its long confinement. Now all I have to do is think up something novel to say to the dreaded interview question: "Why do you want this job?" It's a kind of Rorschach ink-blot of a question, that one. I'm going to say something like: "So that I can take the skills I have learned in a new direction." They love that kind of bullshit, those business-types. And I will have no qualms in spreading it, that bullshit, all over the place tomorrow. I think back to myself of 10 years ago and I know that he would be so ashamed of me.
I have an interview tomorrow for a new position in the company I work for. If successful, I'll no longer be on the 'operational' side of things, i.e. I won't have to deal with unhappy/angry/irate/incan descent-with-rage customers on the telephone. ([i]"'Customer care[/i]?' I'll fucking [i]customer care[/i] you in a minute my friend...") At the moment my time at work is a state of more or less prolonged tension. I can never fully relax because at any moment the door might swing open and a supervisor from the call centre, red-faced and flustered, will burst in and say: "Lord Strange, there's a customer on the phone demanding to speak to a manager. He/she actually made poor Anna [i]cry[/i]..." And then I have to harrumph in a businesslike fashion and lick my lips and say: "OK! Put them through." My phone will beep and it'll be Anna (or whoever), her voice still trembling, and she'll say: "Lord, hi. Sorry. This customer is a [i]bastard[/i]..." And I always say something like: "Don't worry about it, Anna. Put Mr Smith through." And then I have a good old row with Mr Smith. For twenty minutes or so.
As I said, if successful in tomorrow's interview all of this will be at an end for me. I'll be doing much the same job, but instead of doing it on the telephone I'll be doing it via the Royal Mail. I'll be replying to angry customers' letters.
I'm slightly peeved that I even have to go through an interview process for this move. It's not as if the new role would mean any more money for me. I suspect a conspiracy. I'm good at what I do at the moment - unhappy customers are soon soothed by Lord Strange's elegant bullshit. Many's the time I feel like concluding a call by saying to the customer: "Er, could you get out of the palm of my hand now, please?" I only say this because it's true. So the managers might not want to let me go. Part of me suspects that it doesn't matter how I do in the interview. On Tuesday they'll summon me to the meeting room and say [i]We think you're best suited to remain where you are...[/i]. If that happens I'm getting out of there - getting out of the company. The prolonged tension that I mentioned earlier isn't good for me. As calm and unflappable as I am on the phone with an angry customer, you should see the doodles I draw on my notepad while in the midst of a 'full and frank exchange of views'. Huge menacing spirals, hangman's nooses, slashing stabs of biro ink across whole pages. Then I come home and the knot in my stomach eases up after a while. Then I pour myself a drink, and another, every night. It's not good and I have to get out. I want the peace of going to work every day knowing that the most stress I'll face is topping up the paper tray in the printer.
I've already got my emergency tie out of the wardrobe. We can wear open-necked shirts at my office, so it's been 2 years since I last wore a tie to work. For an interview, though, a tie is appropriate. Hence the emergency tie, in its glass case: [b]BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF INTERVIEW[/b]. It's a nice tie, cobalt-blue coloured, and not too dusty after its long confinement. Now all I have to do is think up something novel to say to the dreaded interview question: "Why do you want this job?" It's a kind of Rorschach ink-blot of a question, that one. I'm going to say something like: "So that I can take the skills I have learned in a new direction." They love that kind of bullshit, those business-types. And I will have no qualms in spreading it, that bullshit, all over the place tomorrow. I think back to myself of 10 years ago and I know that he would be so ashamed of me.
strangereality77
06.20.04 (12:08 am) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
[b]Time, time, time, see what's become of me[/b] - as those pert poet-philosophers [i]The Bangles[/i] once memorably sang. Tonight I want to talk about time and how I haven't got any of it. Time is not like a cake or a bag of potatoes that you can place on one side of a room and look at from another, and contemplate its size, and consume it at your leisure. No, time is more like a sack of grain with a permanent hole in the side. Out of it leaks time, at various rates, depending on your state of attention. When you are bored, the leak leaks slowly; when you are focused upon something, it speeds up; and conversely, accident victims report that time slowed to a crawl for those few seconds when the car crashed or the plane hit. (I have a suspicion that time does not exist in reality, that it is an as-yet-unrecognised human myth. These unacknowledged myths are legion. Here's a biggie: the Big Bang theory in cosmology is just another Creation Myth. But I'm going off-topic. Or off-blog.)
The quantity of time that you have is measured to a precise amount (but you don't know if the next grain that falls will be the last). Ahhhh I'm bored of this vein of blogging now.
It's 01:07 hours precisely on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I'll sum up what I was going to say in a few sentences. I haven't got time for anything anymore. It seems that a year is shorter than it was when I was 10 years old. There's a reason for this: perhaps time is memory. A year to a 10-year-old is 1/10th of his life. To a 34-year-old, a year is 1/34th of his life. Hence smaller than it was when he was 10. That's all I wanted to say. I don't know what it means either. This is way more than a few sentences.
[b]Time, time, time, see what's become of me[/b] - as those pert poet-philosophers [i]The Bangles[/i] once memorably sang. Tonight I want to talk about time and how I haven't got any of it. Time is not like a cake or a bag of potatoes that you can place on one side of a room and look at from another, and contemplate its size, and consume it at your leisure. No, time is more like a sack of grain with a permanent hole in the side. Out of it leaks time, at various rates, depending on your state of attention. When you are bored, the leak leaks slowly; when you are focused upon something, it speeds up; and conversely, accident victims report that time slowed to a crawl for those few seconds when the car crashed or the plane hit. (I have a suspicion that time does not exist in reality, that it is an as-yet-unrecognised human myth. These unacknowledged myths are legion. Here's a biggie: the Big Bang theory in cosmology is just another Creation Myth. But I'm going off-topic. Or off-blog.)
The quantity of time that you have is measured to a precise amount (but you don't know if the next grain that falls will be the last). Ahhhh I'm bored of this vein of blogging now.
It's 01:07 hours precisely on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I'll sum up what I was going to say in a few sentences. I haven't got time for anything anymore. It seems that a year is shorter than it was when I was 10 years old. There's a reason for this: perhaps time is memory. A year to a 10-year-old is 1/10th of his life. To a 34-year-old, a year is 1/34th of his life. Hence smaller than it was when he was 10. That's all I wanted to say. I don't know what it means either. This is way more than a few sentences.
strangereality76
06.18.04 (6:33 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Another blankish kind of day. Got up, went to work, came home. These make up the bulk of one's days, don't they? Whether you go to work or not, the bulk of your days are [i]blankish[/i]. Nothing truly remarkable about them whatsoever. No profound spiritual insights, no shattering mystical visions, no psyche-cleaving encounters with other people, no extraordinary sights, sounds, or smells to be had anywhere. I got up. Went to work. Came home. End of story.
Or is it? Now that I think about it, I remember that the bus this morning was late and I went on an interesting mental journey. The kind of mental journey you go on when you are bored and waiting for something and your mind just drifts. A young couple were standing next to me at the bus stop. They were playing a game where he bent down for a kiss and she withdrew playfully and he reached out and grabbed her... and so on. I watched this game (out of the corner of my eye of course) and whilst watching it I simultaneously thought about everything to do with couples and being in a couple and the kinds of games you play in couples and the colour of the sky one time when I was in a couple and we played a game just like the one that was going on next to me this morning.
So I think there are no [i]truly[/i] blank days. Just days when you don't pay attention, when you forget to take note of the incredible richness of experience.
A lesson from Zen: there is no overarching, transcendent truth about reality that can be grasped by the mind. For the mind [i]is[/i] reality: just as your teeth cannot bite your teeth, your mind cannot think itself.
Awakening to this truth is akin to the kind of dream where you suddenly intuit that you are dreaming, and acknowledge the world to be your mind's 'physical' appearance. There is wonder here, and insanity to be had if you want it.
Another blankish kind of day. Got up, went to work, came home. These make up the bulk of one's days, don't they? Whether you go to work or not, the bulk of your days are [i]blankish[/i]. Nothing truly remarkable about them whatsoever. No profound spiritual insights, no shattering mystical visions, no psyche-cleaving encounters with other people, no extraordinary sights, sounds, or smells to be had anywhere. I got up. Went to work. Came home. End of story.
Or is it? Now that I think about it, I remember that the bus this morning was late and I went on an interesting mental journey. The kind of mental journey you go on when you are bored and waiting for something and your mind just drifts. A young couple were standing next to me at the bus stop. They were playing a game where he bent down for a kiss and she withdrew playfully and he reached out and grabbed her... and so on. I watched this game (out of the corner of my eye of course) and whilst watching it I simultaneously thought about everything to do with couples and being in a couple and the kinds of games you play in couples and the colour of the sky one time when I was in a couple and we played a game just like the one that was going on next to me this morning.
So I think there are no [i]truly[/i] blank days. Just days when you don't pay attention, when you forget to take note of the incredible richness of experience.
A lesson from Zen: there is no overarching, transcendent truth about reality that can be grasped by the mind. For the mind [i]is[/i] reality: just as your teeth cannot bite your teeth, your mind cannot think itself.
Awakening to this truth is akin to the kind of dream where you suddenly intuit that you are dreaming, and acknowledge the world to be your mind's 'physical' appearance. There is wonder here, and insanity to be had if you want it.
strangereality75
06.16.04 (4:41 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Nothing to write about today: hayfever-mucus in recession, no major incidents. I was thinking about this state - not having anything to write about - and I thought: [i]What I need is a filler[/i]. Newspapers permanently keep on standby many articles, short and long, with which to pad out their pages should there be a dearth of 'news' on any particular day. (That's the news industry all over: not a picture of what's going on in the the world at all, but a mere commercial interest like any other. Don't read newspapers or watch TV news if you want to know what's going on in the world. )
Newspapers' favourite time for using fillers is on the days between Christmas and New Year. You know those days - the eye of the holiday storm. Everything is very strange. Time feels sluggish and unnatural. You are at a loose end, coming down from Christmas whilst permanently tensed for the bigger celebration to come. And nothing much is happening in any of the arenas where the news industry traditionally harvests its product, the 'news'. Also, people are less inclined to buy newspapers at that time of the year: money is short, interest is lessened. Newspapers suffer dramatic losses of circulation between December 26 and January 1.
So this is what they do. Of course they produce their 'fillers' - articles about waterworks, 4-page analyses of minor politicians' chances of a tilt at Prime Minister/President/whatev er, and detailed accounts of celebrity shenanigans that they've held back precisely for this purpose. These are harmless fun, mostly. But the newspapers have to get the public to buy the paper to begin with. They have lots of tricks up their sleeves (competitions, giveaways, etc etc.)
But here is one way that some of them do it. 1 in 3 people will get cancer in some form during their lifetimes. 1 in 3: that's a lot of people. It follows, naturally, that most people even if they do not have cancer, will [i]know[/i] somebody who has cancer. The newspapers know these facts - exploiting them has been part of the news industry's strategy since the whole sorry industry came into being, 200 years or more ago.
This is what they do. They print a front page headline that will say something like: [b][i]CANCER BREAKTHROUGH[/i][/b], or more explicitly: [b][i]CANCER CURE WITHIN 5 YEARS?[/i][/b]. The story behind the headline is full of ages-old details about some or other research program that is looking 'promising' - nothing more. But you see the headline on the newspaper in the shop, in the newsagent, on the street vendor's hoarding. Either you have cancer yourself or you know someone who does. You buy the paper. The end.
10 years ago an uncle was dying of bowel cancer. December 27 or 28 rolled around. The local newspaper's front page boasted the headline [b][i]CANCER BREAKTHROUGH[/i][/b], above the customary kind of vague story about nothing at all. I had read about this scam a while before: it's a global thing, apparently. Newspapers see it as sound business practice. I called as many relatives as I could, hoping to keep my uncle away from the newspaper's cynical clutches. Too late: a sister had actually [i]called him up and read the whole article to him over the phone[/i]. All of it utterly bogus. A marketing ploy, aimed squarely at people's most vulnerable portions.
That uncle died 5 months later. I still see the cure-for-cancer headlines, every year between December 26 and January 1. Watch out for them.
Nothing to write about today: hayfever-mucus in recession, no major incidents. I was thinking about this state - not having anything to write about - and I thought: [i]What I need is a filler[/i]. Newspapers permanently keep on standby many articles, short and long, with which to pad out their pages should there be a dearth of 'news' on any particular day. (That's the news industry all over: not a picture of what's going on in the the world at all, but a mere commercial interest like any other. Don't read newspapers or watch TV news if you want to know what's going on in the world. )
Newspapers' favourite time for using fillers is on the days between Christmas and New Year. You know those days - the eye of the holiday storm. Everything is very strange. Time feels sluggish and unnatural. You are at a loose end, coming down from Christmas whilst permanently tensed for the bigger celebration to come. And nothing much is happening in any of the arenas where the news industry traditionally harvests its product, the 'news'. Also, people are less inclined to buy newspapers at that time of the year: money is short, interest is lessened. Newspapers suffer dramatic losses of circulation between December 26 and January 1.
So this is what they do. Of course they produce their 'fillers' - articles about waterworks, 4-page analyses of minor politicians' chances of a tilt at Prime Minister/President/whatev er, and detailed accounts of celebrity shenanigans that they've held back precisely for this purpose. These are harmless fun, mostly. But the newspapers have to get the public to buy the paper to begin with. They have lots of tricks up their sleeves (competitions, giveaways, etc etc.)
But here is one way that some of them do it. 1 in 3 people will get cancer in some form during their lifetimes. 1 in 3: that's a lot of people. It follows, naturally, that most people even if they do not have cancer, will [i]know[/i] somebody who has cancer. The newspapers know these facts - exploiting them has been part of the news industry's strategy since the whole sorry industry came into being, 200 years or more ago.
This is what they do. They print a front page headline that will say something like: [b][i]CANCER BREAKTHROUGH[/i][/b], or more explicitly: [b][i]CANCER CURE WITHIN 5 YEARS?[/i][/b]. The story behind the headline is full of ages-old details about some or other research program that is looking 'promising' - nothing more. But you see the headline on the newspaper in the shop, in the newsagent, on the street vendor's hoarding. Either you have cancer yourself or you know someone who does. You buy the paper. The end.
10 years ago an uncle was dying of bowel cancer. December 27 or 28 rolled around. The local newspaper's front page boasted the headline [b][i]CANCER BREAKTHROUGH[/i][/b], above the customary kind of vague story about nothing at all. I had read about this scam a while before: it's a global thing, apparently. Newspapers see it as sound business practice. I called as many relatives as I could, hoping to keep my uncle away from the newspaper's cynical clutches. Too late: a sister had actually [i]called him up and read the whole article to him over the phone[/i]. All of it utterly bogus. A marketing ploy, aimed squarely at people's most vulnerable portions.
That uncle died 5 months later. I still see the cure-for-cancer headlines, every year between December 26 and January 1. Watch out for them.
strangereality74
06.15.04 (4:46 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Sometime this afternoon a sky-covering grey cloud appeared like a sheet being pulled over one's head. Blotting out the sun. Temperatures have dropped but my hay fever is still at full throttle. It'll take a few days of cool, wet weather to soothe my streaming nostrils. How much mucus can one man take - or give?! Over the past three days I must have expelled half my bodyweight in mucus. Sorry if this subject matter repels you, but I don't find substances (such as mucus) in-and-of-themselves repellent. It is in our attitude to the substances (like mucus) that the repulsion is to be found. As the Bard, via his mouthpiece Hamlet, said: "There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so."
Aversion to things, ideas, words, are our own learned behaviours, not an inherent quality of the thing, or the idea, or the word. For example somebody at work today said the word 'cunt' in a loud voice. (It wasn't me. I never swear at work. People don't like it.) You should have seen the reaction. People's faces twisted in disgust. (But only some people's faces: most people, I find, are seasoned cursers who didn't mind the enunciation of 'cunt' at all.)
But there is nothing at all in the word 'cunt', in any form, that is in any way offensive - its offensiveness is entirely based upon social convention and taboos, and their inevitable by-products: those who wish to shock others, and those who permit themselves to be shocked by others.
Like a fool ([i]he who speaks does not know[/i]) I trotted out a longer version of this argument following the 'cunt' incident today. It didn't go down well. Apparently it's an obvious, established fact that the word 'cunt' is offensive, and no questioning of underlying assumptions - the [i]meta-concepts[/i] as it were - is allowed.
[i]Cunts[/i], I thought.
More about my mucus tomorrow.
Sometime this afternoon a sky-covering grey cloud appeared like a sheet being pulled over one's head. Blotting out the sun. Temperatures have dropped but my hay fever is still at full throttle. It'll take a few days of cool, wet weather to soothe my streaming nostrils. How much mucus can one man take - or give?! Over the past three days I must have expelled half my bodyweight in mucus. Sorry if this subject matter repels you, but I don't find substances (such as mucus) in-and-of-themselves repellent. It is in our attitude to the substances (like mucus) that the repulsion is to be found. As the Bard, via his mouthpiece Hamlet, said: "There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so."
Aversion to things, ideas, words, are our own learned behaviours, not an inherent quality of the thing, or the idea, or the word. For example somebody at work today said the word 'cunt' in a loud voice. (It wasn't me. I never swear at work. People don't like it.) You should have seen the reaction. People's faces twisted in disgust. (But only some people's faces: most people, I find, are seasoned cursers who didn't mind the enunciation of 'cunt' at all.)
But there is nothing at all in the word 'cunt', in any form, that is in any way offensive - its offensiveness is entirely based upon social convention and taboos, and their inevitable by-products: those who wish to shock others, and those who permit themselves to be shocked by others.
Like a fool ([i]he who speaks does not know[/i]) I trotted out a longer version of this argument following the 'cunt' incident today. It didn't go down well. Apparently it's an obvious, established fact that the word 'cunt' is offensive, and no questioning of underlying assumptions - the [i]meta-concepts[/i] as it were - is allowed.
[i]Cunts[/i], I thought.
More about my mucus tomorrow.
strangereality73
06.14.04 (4:28 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Sat behind a man on the bus who was shouting at the top of his voice about last night's amazing football result. (France beat England 2-1 in their European Championship qualifying group game. The amazing thing was that England led 1-0 until the last minute of the game, when France scored two goals right at the death. This is very rare in football and today everyone was talking about it.)
The man, who was not accompanied by anyone, was fixing each passenger in turn with his rolling, beady eyes. At each person he shouted: "[i]Don't be disheartened! It's just the first game of the tournament! There's still everything to play for! The boys can do it![/i]"
It was the kind of thing he must have read in any of this morning's newspapers. In his own mad way he was trying to start a conversation. But no one was taking him up on it. Everybody just stared fixedly ahead in the way that people do in the presence of a social taboo-breaker.
After some time (it was a packed bus) my turn came to be addressed. I was sitting directly behind him and he had to awkwardly twist his body in his seat, and twist his neck, to look at me. At full volume he went through his little speech. I didn't look at him. I shrugged, I looked out of the window, I tensed myself to evade a sudden lunge... Nothing happened. A few stops later he stood up to get off. "Ignorant fucking bastards," I heard him mutter. I think only I heard it.
Sat behind a man on the bus who was shouting at the top of his voice about last night's amazing football result. (France beat England 2-1 in their European Championship qualifying group game. The amazing thing was that England led 1-0 until the last minute of the game, when France scored two goals right at the death. This is very rare in football and today everyone was talking about it.)
The man, who was not accompanied by anyone, was fixing each passenger in turn with his rolling, beady eyes. At each person he shouted: "[i]Don't be disheartened! It's just the first game of the tournament! There's still everything to play for! The boys can do it![/i]"
It was the kind of thing he must have read in any of this morning's newspapers. In his own mad way he was trying to start a conversation. But no one was taking him up on it. Everybody just stared fixedly ahead in the way that people do in the presence of a social taboo-breaker.
After some time (it was a packed bus) my turn came to be addressed. I was sitting directly behind him and he had to awkwardly twist his body in his seat, and twist his neck, to look at me. At full volume he went through his little speech. I didn't look at him. I shrugged, I looked out of the window, I tensed myself to evade a sudden lunge... Nothing happened. A few stops later he stood up to get off. "Ignorant fucking bastards," I heard him mutter. I think only I heard it.
strangereality72
06.12.04 (12:25 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
No one was in the other morning when the postman tried to deliver five books I'd ordered from Amazon UK. When I got home there was a card on the doormat: [i]Sorry you weren't in[/i], it said. (Sorry? Really? I don't think so. That [i]Sorry[/i] is just a social politeness like [i]How are you?[/i] - a conventional greeting that is entirely rhetorical, not to be taken at face value. There is no person or group of persons at the Royal Mail who feel one speck, one [i]iota[/i], of sorrow that I wasn't at home last Wednesday morning.)
[i]Please come to this office to collect your parcel[/i], the card went on, and there was a handstamped address and a handwritten reference number in a box below. I tutted and sulked on Wednesday, as I read this card when I got home. The office in question, where my parcel was being held, is not too out-of-the-way, but still. It's supposed to be a [i]mail[/i] service: you'd think they'd try again at least once. I made tea and blew my nose and rubbed my hay-fevered eyes and stared across the sunlit garden and resigned myself to a trek to the Royal Mail collection office.
So I went yesterday morning, before my late shift. I walked up the short hill to the building in question and located the doorway that led to the office wherein my parcel lay... Was chagrined to find a long queue leading to the sole clerk on duty. He was a short, tubby Asian man in bottle-lensed glasses and a fixed grin. This grin never faltered even when the woman at the front harangued him for being unable to locate her stuff. "But, madam," he was saying, "that card was only left for you half an hour ago. Our postman isn't back from his round yet, please come back in one hour..." She swore at him in a strangely unenthusiastic manner (possibly aware of the seethingly impatient audience behind her, of which I, at the rear, was the most seethingly impatient). Then with a swish of floral-patterned dress she about-turned and marched out. She slammed the door, right next to me. I flinched. I got to the front after a few minutes. The Asian clerk didn't look at me as I slid the card under the perspex screen. "One moment," he said softly, and disappeared stage left. I heard the sound of a door opening and closing and then there was nothing for a long time. I stared straight ahead and breathed evenly, conscious of the growing queue behind me, all of them staring ahead and breathing evenly as well. A couple of minutes passed and then I began to wonder: what if the clerk had chosen this exact moment to walk out on, to peremptorily quit, his job? Even now he might be in his car on his way home and here we were, here I was, waiting like a lemon. How long would I/we wait, before realising the embarrassing truth? Then with a rustle and bustle the clerk reappeared carrying a large brown parcel, my parcel. "ID," he said sternly, and I held up a bank statement for his inspection. He nodded and pushed the parcel under the partition and I wheeled around and left the building.
Outside, I opened the parcel and bagged my books. I took them to work where I didn't have a chance to look at any of them until I was in a taxi on my way home at 8:00 in the evening. It had been a torrid, hardcore late shift. For some reason all the nutters come out to play on Friday evenings. By 6:00 my headset felt glued to the side of my head. One customer who stayed on the phone for 30 minutes gave me a damn good hiding as he beat me into a corner from which there was no strategic retreat other than my final, whimpered plea: "Let me look into it for you on Monday...?"
The books are sitting stacked on the bed next to me as I type and I look at them knowing I'll never have the time to read them.
No one was in the other morning when the postman tried to deliver five books I'd ordered from Amazon UK. When I got home there was a card on the doormat: [i]Sorry you weren't in[/i], it said. (Sorry? Really? I don't think so. That [i]Sorry[/i] is just a social politeness like [i]How are you?[/i] - a conventional greeting that is entirely rhetorical, not to be taken at face value. There is no person or group of persons at the Royal Mail who feel one speck, one [i]iota[/i], of sorrow that I wasn't at home last Wednesday morning.)
[i]Please come to this office to collect your parcel[/i], the card went on, and there was a handstamped address and a handwritten reference number in a box below. I tutted and sulked on Wednesday, as I read this card when I got home. The office in question, where my parcel was being held, is not too out-of-the-way, but still. It's supposed to be a [i]mail[/i] service: you'd think they'd try again at least once. I made tea and blew my nose and rubbed my hay-fevered eyes and stared across the sunlit garden and resigned myself to a trek to the Royal Mail collection office.
So I went yesterday morning, before my late shift. I walked up the short hill to the building in question and located the doorway that led to the office wherein my parcel lay... Was chagrined to find a long queue leading to the sole clerk on duty. He was a short, tubby Asian man in bottle-lensed glasses and a fixed grin. This grin never faltered even when the woman at the front harangued him for being unable to locate her stuff. "But, madam," he was saying, "that card was only left for you half an hour ago. Our postman isn't back from his round yet, please come back in one hour..." She swore at him in a strangely unenthusiastic manner (possibly aware of the seethingly impatient audience behind her, of which I, at the rear, was the most seethingly impatient). Then with a swish of floral-patterned dress she about-turned and marched out. She slammed the door, right next to me. I flinched. I got to the front after a few minutes. The Asian clerk didn't look at me as I slid the card under the perspex screen. "One moment," he said softly, and disappeared stage left. I heard the sound of a door opening and closing and then there was nothing for a long time. I stared straight ahead and breathed evenly, conscious of the growing queue behind me, all of them staring ahead and breathing evenly as well. A couple of minutes passed and then I began to wonder: what if the clerk had chosen this exact moment to walk out on, to peremptorily quit, his job? Even now he might be in his car on his way home and here we were, here I was, waiting like a lemon. How long would I/we wait, before realising the embarrassing truth? Then with a rustle and bustle the clerk reappeared carrying a large brown parcel, my parcel. "ID," he said sternly, and I held up a bank statement for his inspection. He nodded and pushed the parcel under the partition and I wheeled around and left the building.
Outside, I opened the parcel and bagged my books. I took them to work where I didn't have a chance to look at any of them until I was in a taxi on my way home at 8:00 in the evening. It had been a torrid, hardcore late shift. For some reason all the nutters come out to play on Friday evenings. By 6:00 my headset felt glued to the side of my head. One customer who stayed on the phone for 30 minutes gave me a damn good hiding as he beat me into a corner from which there was no strategic retreat other than my final, whimpered plea: "Let me look into it for you on Monday...?"
The books are sitting stacked on the bed next to me as I type and I look at them knowing I'll never have the time to read them.
strangereality71
06.10.04 (7:06 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
For 20 minutes I had typed my way through a long and engaging entry about secondhand bookshop owners whom I have known, and all of their quirks, and how they all seem to be auditioning to play the next Doctor Who. Towards the end I was wrapping things up when for some reason the page disappeared and I found myself looking at the [b]My Account[/b] page on this site. My crest was truly fallen. What had happened? I must have accidentally hit some kind of keyboard shortcut combo thing - it's happened before. That whole area of the QWERTY keyboard, down on the left there, with its SHIFT and CTRL and ALT keys all in innocent proximity to each other - it's a dangerous area all right. So the blog I had intended to post is gone, and lost forever. I think it would have been good. [i]Bittersweet[/i] is perhaps the best word to describe it. I might try to resurrect it sometime. But not right now.
Look outside: it is a beautiful evening. The blustery wind of earlier on has died away and the sun is shining without impediment. The neighbour's children are out playing across the road. They're noisy but it's all right. Somewhere in the distance, an ice-cream van sounds its chimes.
At 4 o'clock today I virtually sprinted out of the office and leapt onto the minibus. Was home by half-past. Some of the others had wanted me to go out for a big night they're having in celebration of somebody's birthday. I declined, they applied pressure, I refused, they heaped more pressure (is there a stronger force in human relations than [i]peer group pressure[/i]?), and eventually I said with some heat: "No!" And so at this moment I look sideways at the dwindling light outside and imagine them all arrayed around some giant bench in a pub garden, talking, laughing, enjoying the summer evening.
Perhaps I should have gone out after all. But I really didn't want to at the time. And I know that if I had gone out with them, then right about now I'd be drunk and squinting at the sun and feeling tired and ill and wishing that I was at home with a clear head, sitting in front of my computer and typing this. And here I am, typing this.
But consider this possibility. Perhaps I [i]did[/i] go out with them after all, and whilst I was out I wished fervently that I hadn't gone out at all, and that I was at home - and then the wish came true. How would I know that it was otherwise?
For 20 minutes I had typed my way through a long and engaging entry about secondhand bookshop owners whom I have known, and all of their quirks, and how they all seem to be auditioning to play the next Doctor Who. Towards the end I was wrapping things up when for some reason the page disappeared and I found myself looking at the [b]My Account[/b] page on this site. My crest was truly fallen. What had happened? I must have accidentally hit some kind of keyboard shortcut combo thing - it's happened before. That whole area of the QWERTY keyboard, down on the left there, with its SHIFT and CTRL and ALT keys all in innocent proximity to each other - it's a dangerous area all right. So the blog I had intended to post is gone, and lost forever. I think it would have been good. [i]Bittersweet[/i] is perhaps the best word to describe it. I might try to resurrect it sometime. But not right now.
Look outside: it is a beautiful evening. The blustery wind of earlier on has died away and the sun is shining without impediment. The neighbour's children are out playing across the road. They're noisy but it's all right. Somewhere in the distance, an ice-cream van sounds its chimes.
At 4 o'clock today I virtually sprinted out of the office and leapt onto the minibus. Was home by half-past. Some of the others had wanted me to go out for a big night they're having in celebration of somebody's birthday. I declined, they applied pressure, I refused, they heaped more pressure (is there a stronger force in human relations than [i]peer group pressure[/i]?), and eventually I said with some heat: "No!" And so at this moment I look sideways at the dwindling light outside and imagine them all arrayed around some giant bench in a pub garden, talking, laughing, enjoying the summer evening.
Perhaps I should have gone out after all. But I really didn't want to at the time. And I know that if I had gone out with them, then right about now I'd be drunk and squinting at the sun and feeling tired and ill and wishing that I was at home with a clear head, sitting in front of my computer and typing this. And here I am, typing this.
But consider this possibility. Perhaps I [i]did[/i] go out with them after all, and whilst I was out I wished fervently that I hadn't gone out at all, and that I was at home - and then the wish came true. How would I know that it was otherwise?
strangereality70
06.09.04 (7:01 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Work is the subtlest enslavement. How passive does it make you? Here's how passive it makes me: between Monday and Friday I have no energy to do anything, no time to do anything, no motivation either to regain energy or create time to do anything, and most disturbingly, I simply drift in a kind of mental null-spot where none of this seems to matter... George Bernard Shaw was a great enthusiast for the concept of work. One of his most-quoted pithy sayings: [i]A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.[/i] Bollocks, George. Your much-quoted pithy saying is a steaming pile of cow manure, with flies buzzing around it. And with suspicious yellow bits in it as well. Human beings are individuals, regardless of their liking for banding themselves into group identities. Invert the terms of that saying - i.e., change Hell to Heaven - and you will have something nearer to the truth for [i]me[/i].
One of my favourite novels - it'd be in my top 10 novels - is [i]A Confederacy Of Dunces[/i]by John Kennedy Toole. The savage, poignant comedy of this tale is unique within literature, in my experience. It's a story about one Ignatius J. Reilly, a bizarre denizen of New Orleans whose main aim in life is to evade work at all costs. When his mother lays down an ultimatum to Get A Job Or Else, what follows is a bleakly comic account of his various misadventures in the world of work. At one point he encounters a police officer who takes it upon himself to deliver an impromptu lecture, George Bernard Shaw-style, on the merits of going out to work every day. Ignatius says of this person: "Evidently one of those people who believes that everything will be all right if everybody works continuously..." In context, in the novel, this would be one of my top 10 most memorable literary moments. Now having got this far in this evening's blog entry, I'm not sure how to finish it. I'm feeling tired and unmotivated: what small amount of energy I had is all but spent. I want to go and lie down and watch TV for four hours until it's time to go to bed. I have to go to work tomorrow.
So I'm lazily going to finish with my top 10 novels, which are:
1. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
2. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. Money - Martin Amis
4. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
6. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino
7. The Pigeon - Patrick Suskind
8. Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
9. Night's Dawn Trilogy - Peter F. Hamilton
10. Factotum - Charles Bukowski
That's strictly off the top of my head, mind. No doubt five minutes after I have clicked below on [b]Publish This Post[/b], I'll be overtaken by remorse at having forgotten to include XYZ by Whoever at number 2. And it's already started! Kafka! How could I ignore Kafka? Forget [i]The Trial [/i]and [i]The Castle[/i]. [i]Metamorphosis[/i] is better than [i]The Trial [/i]or [i]The Castle.[/i] Damn. And it's too late now. Look: I have already clicked....
Work is the subtlest enslavement. How passive does it make you? Here's how passive it makes me: between Monday and Friday I have no energy to do anything, no time to do anything, no motivation either to regain energy or create time to do anything, and most disturbingly, I simply drift in a kind of mental null-spot where none of this seems to matter... George Bernard Shaw was a great enthusiast for the concept of work. One of his most-quoted pithy sayings: [i]A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.[/i] Bollocks, George. Your much-quoted pithy saying is a steaming pile of cow manure, with flies buzzing around it. And with suspicious yellow bits in it as well. Human beings are individuals, regardless of their liking for banding themselves into group identities. Invert the terms of that saying - i.e., change Hell to Heaven - and you will have something nearer to the truth for [i]me[/i].
One of my favourite novels - it'd be in my top 10 novels - is [i]A Confederacy Of Dunces[/i]by John Kennedy Toole. The savage, poignant comedy of this tale is unique within literature, in my experience. It's a story about one Ignatius J. Reilly, a bizarre denizen of New Orleans whose main aim in life is to evade work at all costs. When his mother lays down an ultimatum to Get A Job Or Else, what follows is a bleakly comic account of his various misadventures in the world of work. At one point he encounters a police officer who takes it upon himself to deliver an impromptu lecture, George Bernard Shaw-style, on the merits of going out to work every day. Ignatius says of this person: "Evidently one of those people who believes that everything will be all right if everybody works continuously..." In context, in the novel, this would be one of my top 10 most memorable literary moments. Now having got this far in this evening's blog entry, I'm not sure how to finish it. I'm feeling tired and unmotivated: what small amount of energy I had is all but spent. I want to go and lie down and watch TV for four hours until it's time to go to bed. I have to go to work tomorrow.
So I'm lazily going to finish with my top 10 novels, which are:
1. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
2. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. Money - Martin Amis
4. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
6. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino
7. The Pigeon - Patrick Suskind
8. Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
9. Night's Dawn Trilogy - Peter F. Hamilton
10. Factotum - Charles Bukowski
That's strictly off the top of my head, mind. No doubt five minutes after I have clicked below on [b]Publish This Post[/b], I'll be overtaken by remorse at having forgotten to include XYZ by Whoever at number 2. And it's already started! Kafka! How could I ignore Kafka? Forget [i]The Trial [/i]and [i]The Castle[/i]. [i]Metamorphosis[/i] is better than [i]The Trial [/i]or [i]The Castle.[/i] Damn. And it's too late now. Look: I have already clicked....
strangereality69
06.07.04 (10:29 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
The hottest day of the year so far - about 77 degrees Farenheit. By UK standards it is, in tabloid parlance, a 'scorcher'. This morning I left the house at 10:45, heading for the late shift at work. My white shirt blazed in the sunshine, and I mean [i]blazed[/i]: I was like a walking washing powder commercial. People looking at my shirt transferred their gazes to the sun to give their eyes a rest. Thusly glowing, I got on the bus and headed for town. Once there I had 15 minutes to kill before the minibus arrived so I mooched around the shops not really looking at anything. Sales assistants watched me like the proverbial hawks. I, the proverbial dove, wandered insouciantly among their wares. Watchful sales assistants: they do make you paranoid, don't they. To the point where you walk out of the shop with the kind of open gait that's calculated to convey: [i]Look, I haven't shoplifted anything, all right?[/i] And perhaps you even hum a little tune, to underscore just how carefree and uncriminal you truly are.
I walked down to where the minibus stops to pick up everybody. Past me strolled hordes of folk all noisily sucking ice creams. The bars and cafes were doing a roaring trade, tables out on the pavements and all the rest of it. It's in the summertime that England is most European. Chic young women in white wearing sunglasses and smiling at nothing. Groups of students lolling on the grass looking lazy. On days like this you can almost taste the future pan-European culture that the present-day nations will inevitably meld into. That's me done for politics today.
Work was all right for a change. I pressed ahead with my application for a new job in another department. Same money, different duties. If I'm successful, and I think I will be, I'll be writing letters to customers instead of speaking to them on the telephone. And I won't have to work any more late shifts or Saturdays. In my application I was careful to include correctly-spelt words like 'successful' and 'accommodate' and I also deployed the apostrophe in its most rigorously correct form throughout. No shockers like [i]apple's[/i] or [i]customer's[/i] - just how the apostrophe came to be widely held across the English-speaking world to denote a plural is beyond me. That's me done for punctuation today.
At 8 o'clock this evening after work it was still very sunny and humid. We stood smoking our after-work cigarettes in the car park outside reception and the universal sentiments were: "It's a beautiful evening" and "It's going to be like this tomorrow as well". The minibus came to take us back into town. Myself and Neil got off a bit early, at a strategic point where, if we were lucky, we would just catch a public bus already on its way from town to our home districts. We were lucky. We ran across the park grass, past children playing football and men walking their dogs and the rest of it. As we got to the bus stop, the bus appeared around the corner. We got on, Neil and me. We sat upstairs at the back and he watched disapprovingly as I lit up another cigarette. Ignoring this, I started some light conversation and the journey passed less awkwardly than it might have. I revealed to him (he's new in the office) that about a year ago it was unheard of to go straight home after a late shift. "Everyone went to the pub at 8 o'clock," I said, "and we stayed out until the wee small hours. It was a tradition." He said: "Really? There's no atmosphere like that there now..." And I said sadly: "No." Neil lives about a mile from my house so I got off first. "See you in the morning," I said. Neil said: "See you."
The hottest day of the year so far - about 77 degrees Farenheit. By UK standards it is, in tabloid parlance, a 'scorcher'. This morning I left the house at 10:45, heading for the late shift at work. My white shirt blazed in the sunshine, and I mean [i]blazed[/i]: I was like a walking washing powder commercial. People looking at my shirt transferred their gazes to the sun to give their eyes a rest. Thusly glowing, I got on the bus and headed for town. Once there I had 15 minutes to kill before the minibus arrived so I mooched around the shops not really looking at anything. Sales assistants watched me like the proverbial hawks. I, the proverbial dove, wandered insouciantly among their wares. Watchful sales assistants: they do make you paranoid, don't they. To the point where you walk out of the shop with the kind of open gait that's calculated to convey: [i]Look, I haven't shoplifted anything, all right?[/i] And perhaps you even hum a little tune, to underscore just how carefree and uncriminal you truly are.
I walked down to where the minibus stops to pick up everybody. Past me strolled hordes of folk all noisily sucking ice creams. The bars and cafes were doing a roaring trade, tables out on the pavements and all the rest of it. It's in the summertime that England is most European. Chic young women in white wearing sunglasses and smiling at nothing. Groups of students lolling on the grass looking lazy. On days like this you can almost taste the future pan-European culture that the present-day nations will inevitably meld into. That's me done for politics today.
Work was all right for a change. I pressed ahead with my application for a new job in another department. Same money, different duties. If I'm successful, and I think I will be, I'll be writing letters to customers instead of speaking to them on the telephone. And I won't have to work any more late shifts or Saturdays. In my application I was careful to include correctly-spelt words like 'successful' and 'accommodate' and I also deployed the apostrophe in its most rigorously correct form throughout. No shockers like [i]apple's[/i] or [i]customer's[/i] - just how the apostrophe came to be widely held across the English-speaking world to denote a plural is beyond me. That's me done for punctuation today.
At 8 o'clock this evening after work it was still very sunny and humid. We stood smoking our after-work cigarettes in the car park outside reception and the universal sentiments were: "It's a beautiful evening" and "It's going to be like this tomorrow as well". The minibus came to take us back into town. Myself and Neil got off a bit early, at a strategic point where, if we were lucky, we would just catch a public bus already on its way from town to our home districts. We were lucky. We ran across the park grass, past children playing football and men walking their dogs and the rest of it. As we got to the bus stop, the bus appeared around the corner. We got on, Neil and me. We sat upstairs at the back and he watched disapprovingly as I lit up another cigarette. Ignoring this, I started some light conversation and the journey passed less awkwardly than it might have. I revealed to him (he's new in the office) that about a year ago it was unheard of to go straight home after a late shift. "Everyone went to the pub at 8 o'clock," I said, "and we stayed out until the wee small hours. It was a tradition." He said: "Really? There's no atmosphere like that there now..." And I said sadly: "No." Neil lives about a mile from my house so I got off first. "See you in the morning," I said. Neil said: "See you."
strangereality68
06.05.04 (11:03 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Is it me or does it always seem that the world could be coming to an end? I live quite near an airport, so you would think I'd be accustomed to the sounds of aircraft in the vicinity. But no. Earlier this evening I was lying on my bed watching, of all things, Big Brother on TV. The curtains were open and a gentle breeze wafted in. Then there was a low rumbling sound outside. It grew in volume to a roar, and then built into a room-juddering crescendo that made me think: Nuclear bomb! I gazed at the sky outside the window, expecting it to turn an incandescent, retina-searing white at any moment. Nothing happened. It was an aeroplane taking off from the airport, that was all. (I kind of gave that away earlier, didn't I... Damn.)
I returned to watching Big Brother. (So-called 'trash' of this kind is what TV does best. When I wish to be intellectually stimulated, which isn't often these days, I read a book.) Why had I believed for a split second that the sound of an aircraft engine was a nuclear bomb exploding? Is it a [i]zeitgeist[/i] kind of thing - 9/11 and all that? I don't tend to buy into the view that an individual is the plaything of his/her socio-cultural environment. I believe that individuals can recognise the forces that try to control them and, by recognising them, be instantly free of them - without the messy need for protests and politics and leafleting campaigns and action groups and all the sorry rest of 'em. But I digress slightly.
I was leading up to a confession of sorts - this is a revelation from my deepest introspection: [i]I perceived the aircraft engine to be a nuclear bomb because I secretly [b]want[/b] the world to end[/i]. And I think I know why this is. I have a terror of growing old and sickening and suffering the kind of agonising death that I have seen others undergo. If the world ended I would be guaranteed not to come face-to-face with such an outcome. Yes, overkill or what. (Or should that be underkill?)
And I went to a funeral yesterday and my thoughts are not currently in a very healthy place. Many years ago I used to experience bouts of what today's TV talk shows would blithely term 'depression'. I want to stop typing now. It's just gone midnight and I have to go and fetch some ice for my vodka. I'm watching Big Brother on the live broadband feed. Nothing much is happening. Nothing much at all.
Is it me or does it always seem that the world could be coming to an end? I live quite near an airport, so you would think I'd be accustomed to the sounds of aircraft in the vicinity. But no. Earlier this evening I was lying on my bed watching, of all things, Big Brother on TV. The curtains were open and a gentle breeze wafted in. Then there was a low rumbling sound outside. It grew in volume to a roar, and then built into a room-juddering crescendo that made me think: Nuclear bomb! I gazed at the sky outside the window, expecting it to turn an incandescent, retina-searing white at any moment. Nothing happened. It was an aeroplane taking off from the airport, that was all. (I kind of gave that away earlier, didn't I... Damn.)
I returned to watching Big Brother. (So-called 'trash' of this kind is what TV does best. When I wish to be intellectually stimulated, which isn't often these days, I read a book.) Why had I believed for a split second that the sound of an aircraft engine was a nuclear bomb exploding? Is it a [i]zeitgeist[/i] kind of thing - 9/11 and all that? I don't tend to buy into the view that an individual is the plaything of his/her socio-cultural environment. I believe that individuals can recognise the forces that try to control them and, by recognising them, be instantly free of them - without the messy need for protests and politics and leafleting campaigns and action groups and all the sorry rest of 'em. But I digress slightly.
I was leading up to a confession of sorts - this is a revelation from my deepest introspection: [i]I perceived the aircraft engine to be a nuclear bomb because I secretly [b]want[/b] the world to end[/i]. And I think I know why this is. I have a terror of growing old and sickening and suffering the kind of agonising death that I have seen others undergo. If the world ended I would be guaranteed not to come face-to-face with such an outcome. Yes, overkill or what. (Or should that be underkill?)
And I went to a funeral yesterday and my thoughts are not currently in a very healthy place. Many years ago I used to experience bouts of what today's TV talk shows would blithely term 'depression'. I want to stop typing now. It's just gone midnight and I have to go and fetch some ice for my vodka. I'm watching Big Brother on the live broadband feed. Nothing much is happening. Nothing much at all.
strangereality67
06.04.04 (1:10 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
Let's go to a funeral! After yesterday's frankly disturbing blog-style ramblings, the ideal antidote to existential angst is [i]surely[/i] to attend a funeral! I will brook no argument here.
My brother-in-law, Jeff, died suddenly two weeks ago. He was 48 years old. The funeral was today. As a close family member I was assigned a position in the second pew from the front. We filed into an already-packed church. I won't dwell on my sister's state here: that stuff's private. There were 200 people already inside the small Catholic church at the top of the hill. Outside there were another 500 people listening to loudspeakers. "Everyone knew Jeff," someone told me later. Indeed they did.
The service wasn't long underway when I began to feel throbbings of unreality (see below) but they soon passed. Instead I felt generally awful. I was right at the inside-end of my pew. I could've reached out with my hand and placed it on Jeff's coffin. I focused on the priest instead. He was reading the Mass. It's amazing how the responses are ingrained into one. I thought I had left my Catholic upbringing in the dim past. But there I was going along with the 'Holy, holy, holy, Hosanna' stuff. And the rest of it. It was an emotion-charged Mass. I bet priests love doing funerals: all the raw feeling in the air is perfect for their craft. The priest was a kind-faced man of about my age. I looked at him and thought it could've been me. I mean: I could've been a priest. I'm the youngest son in our family and there's a tradition in Irish families (especially in ones transplanted to England) that the youngest son joins the priesthood. And it nearly happened. Then my adolescent atheism awoke and put paid to [i]that[/i] particular destiny...
Everybody filed outside behind the coffin. The scenes around me were harrowing. I vowed never to attend another funeral. I reached the open air. It was like a stadium crowd outside. I lit a cigarette after seeing dozens of others doing so. The dead are the dead and they are beyond all caring.
I climbed into a funeral car and endured the ride to the cemetery. Chitchat in the car was alternately sombre and hysterical. Then it was silent. We got there, got out, and merged with the milling hundreds who were heading for the newly-dug plot. After a brief ceremony the coffin was lowered into the ground. I walked back to the car and waited there for everybody to be finished. A cousin I haven't seen in years passed nearby and we said hello. [i]See you at the next funeral[/i], I thought as she walked away. A strange man and woman approached. His sunglasses pointed at me as she grinned manically and asked to borrow my cigarette lighter. I handed it over and she lit a cigarette. I waited for them to move away. They did not. A minute passed. I looked across the cemetery: on this beautiful blue June day, people clad in black were dallying among the dead. ([b]So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.[/b]) I picked out my sister, and my poor nieces, walking along the rows of wreaths laid out on the grass. For something to say I said to the strange couple: "Did you see all the flowers?" After a pause the man pointed his sunglasses at me again and said: "No. I'm blind." And the woman gave a nervous laugh. I saw the stick in the crook of the man's elbow. I should have seen it straightaway. They walked off.
I went to the wake and had one pint of Guinness and then I left and came home.
Let's go to a funeral! After yesterday's frankly disturbing blog-style ramblings, the ideal antidote to existential angst is [i]surely[/i] to attend a funeral! I will brook no argument here.
My brother-in-law, Jeff, died suddenly two weeks ago. He was 48 years old. The funeral was today. As a close family member I was assigned a position in the second pew from the front. We filed into an already-packed church. I won't dwell on my sister's state here: that stuff's private. There were 200 people already inside the small Catholic church at the top of the hill. Outside there were another 500 people listening to loudspeakers. "Everyone knew Jeff," someone told me later. Indeed they did.
The service wasn't long underway when I began to feel throbbings of unreality (see below) but they soon passed. Instead I felt generally awful. I was right at the inside-end of my pew. I could've reached out with my hand and placed it on Jeff's coffin. I focused on the priest instead. He was reading the Mass. It's amazing how the responses are ingrained into one. I thought I had left my Catholic upbringing in the dim past. But there I was going along with the 'Holy, holy, holy, Hosanna' stuff. And the rest of it. It was an emotion-charged Mass. I bet priests love doing funerals: all the raw feeling in the air is perfect for their craft. The priest was a kind-faced man of about my age. I looked at him and thought it could've been me. I mean: I could've been a priest. I'm the youngest son in our family and there's a tradition in Irish families (especially in ones transplanted to England) that the youngest son joins the priesthood. And it nearly happened. Then my adolescent atheism awoke and put paid to [i]that[/i] particular destiny...
Everybody filed outside behind the coffin. The scenes around me were harrowing. I vowed never to attend another funeral. I reached the open air. It was like a stadium crowd outside. I lit a cigarette after seeing dozens of others doing so. The dead are the dead and they are beyond all caring.
I climbed into a funeral car and endured the ride to the cemetery. Chitchat in the car was alternately sombre and hysterical. Then it was silent. We got there, got out, and merged with the milling hundreds who were heading for the newly-dug plot. After a brief ceremony the coffin was lowered into the ground. I walked back to the car and waited there for everybody to be finished. A cousin I haven't seen in years passed nearby and we said hello. [i]See you at the next funeral[/i], I thought as she walked away. A strange man and woman approached. His sunglasses pointed at me as she grinned manically and asked to borrow my cigarette lighter. I handed it over and she lit a cigarette. I waited for them to move away. They did not. A minute passed. I looked across the cemetery: on this beautiful blue June day, people clad in black were dallying among the dead. ([b]So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.[/b]) I picked out my sister, and my poor nieces, walking along the rows of wreaths laid out on the grass. For something to say I said to the strange couple: "Did you see all the flowers?" After a pause the man pointed his sunglasses at me again and said: "No. I'm blind." And the woman gave a nervous laugh. I saw the stick in the crook of the man's elbow. I should have seen it straightaway. They walked off.
I went to the wake and had one pint of Guinness and then I left and came home.
strangereality66
06.03.04 (6:36 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
[b]Unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn[/b]
-[i]T.S.Eliot[/i]
For most of my life I have suffered frequent episodes of unreality: short periods of time when the phenomenal world, myself included (body and soul), seems [i]impossible[/i], in the sense that [i][b]it should not exist[/b][/i]. Just like the world that one sees in a dream. So vivid, so logical (on its own terms), yet ultimately nothing, a wisp of vapour that evaporates a few moments after one opens one's eyes.
I can remember as a child lying on the sofa in the house that I grew up in and willing myself into one of these episodes. Back then I didn't have the concepts or the language to 'understand' what I was doing. All I knew was that the feelings they engendered were different and unusual and a little frightening. By the age of 8 or so I could deliberately guide myself into a mental state where I perceived myself and the world around me as unreal. I was a kind of mannequin, the world was a mirage populated by ghosts and fake scenery. These states only ended when I stirred myself and shook myself like a dog shaking off water: it was fear that made me move, made me shrug off the state, and seek and return to 'normality'. Over the years as I moved into my teenage years and then adulthood, my ability to induce this [b]unreality[/b] disappeared, and I largely forgot all about it. My interests moved into philosophy, where I found kindred thoughts in the writings of the Idealists and the Esoterists. In these systems (broadly speaking) the world-as-we-see-it is only a socially-conditioned conventional idea - a delusion (nb: but not an illusion). Then I went away to university and the inevitable happened. Cannabis happened. I have never taken any other drug. Cannabis and I spent 3 largely happy years in one another's (almost daily) company. I preferred to smoke alone. I went on many mental journeys. On dozens of occasions I believed that I had discovered the Absolute, God, the secret of the Universe - whatever you want to call it. My ability to induce episodes of unreality at will returned. Gradually, of course, the snake began to eat its own tail.... I became prone to attacks of the most profound fear: anxiety, panic, the whole shebang. Cannabis and I parted company. Several years passed. Then, over the last couple of years, the episodes of unreality began to recur, involuntarily, without an obvious cause. They were not willed by me. They came at any time, without warning, without encouragement. I could be sitting soberly next to you on a bus in the morning on my way to work: and an episode begins. Slowly, my head turns. Everything I see, everything I think, [i]everything[/i]: none of it is real...
I understand how language and common-sense concepts falter and fail when dealing with subjects like this one. If you have seen [i]The Matrix[/i] (if you knew this was going to be mentioned, award yourself a bonus point) there's a sequence where the 'unreality of reality' is revealed to its hero, Neo. His reaction is one of total existential fear. Most of my episodes are less extreme than that. But some are not. Some are almost exactly like that.
Insane, [i]moi[/i]? Perhaps. Or perhaps not yet. I don't [i]feel[/i] insane. But what does it feel like, how would you know? I chose this subject today because I had an episode while at work today. It was 11:00. I was looking forward to my lunch in an hour's time. Then, click. It happened. I stood up and walked slowly out to the bathroom. Through my field of vision the unreal world flowed smoothly, people, walls, sounds, all in motion [i]through me [/i]like a tracking shot in a movie. I wondered if I would fall over and, if so, whether I would get up. Yet there were no physical symptoms. I made it to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Someone came into the bathroom, looked at me (I saw him in the mirror: [i]a reflection of unreality[/i]), and disappeared into a cubicle. Disappeared from the world.
I began to emerge from it. The strongest episode for several months. I paced up and down for a minute, collecting myself. This felt as though it was literally true: I was literally [i]collecting myself[/i], rebooting reality as it were. I had a good think about whether or not I am going, or am about to go, crazy. I had to acknowledge to myself that it's possible. There's a general assumption that insanity is a sudden switch from normality on the one hand to all-out insanity on the other: like the flicking of a switch. But it is not so. In most cases the process of going insane lasts for a good portion of a lifetime, proceeding by imperceptible degrees until a certain 'critical mass' is reached. And then there is no going back. I really must stop reading those books.
I had a last look in the mirror. Everything seemed all right again. I returned to my desk and began to exchange cheerful banter with people as if nothing had happened.
[b]Unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn[/b]
-[i]T.S.Eliot[/i]
For most of my life I have suffered frequent episodes of unreality: short periods of time when the phenomenal world, myself included (body and soul), seems [i]impossible[/i], in the sense that [i][b]it should not exist[/b][/i]. Just like the world that one sees in a dream. So vivid, so logical (on its own terms), yet ultimately nothing, a wisp of vapour that evaporates a few moments after one opens one's eyes.
I can remember as a child lying on the sofa in the house that I grew up in and willing myself into one of these episodes. Back then I didn't have the concepts or the language to 'understand' what I was doing. All I knew was that the feelings they engendered were different and unusual and a little frightening. By the age of 8 or so I could deliberately guide myself into a mental state where I perceived myself and the world around me as unreal. I was a kind of mannequin, the world was a mirage populated by ghosts and fake scenery. These states only ended when I stirred myself and shook myself like a dog shaking off water: it was fear that made me move, made me shrug off the state, and seek and return to 'normality'. Over the years as I moved into my teenage years and then adulthood, my ability to induce this [b]unreality[/b] disappeared, and I largely forgot all about it. My interests moved into philosophy, where I found kindred thoughts in the writings of the Idealists and the Esoterists. In these systems (broadly speaking) the world-as-we-see-it is only a socially-conditioned conventional idea - a delusion (nb: but not an illusion). Then I went away to university and the inevitable happened. Cannabis happened. I have never taken any other drug. Cannabis and I spent 3 largely happy years in one another's (almost daily) company. I preferred to smoke alone. I went on many mental journeys. On dozens of occasions I believed that I had discovered the Absolute, God, the secret of the Universe - whatever you want to call it. My ability to induce episodes of unreality at will returned. Gradually, of course, the snake began to eat its own tail.... I became prone to attacks of the most profound fear: anxiety, panic, the whole shebang. Cannabis and I parted company. Several years passed. Then, over the last couple of years, the episodes of unreality began to recur, involuntarily, without an obvious cause. They were not willed by me. They came at any time, without warning, without encouragement. I could be sitting soberly next to you on a bus in the morning on my way to work: and an episode begins. Slowly, my head turns. Everything I see, everything I think, [i]everything[/i]: none of it is real...
I understand how language and common-sense concepts falter and fail when dealing with subjects like this one. If you have seen [i]The Matrix[/i] (if you knew this was going to be mentioned, award yourself a bonus point) there's a sequence where the 'unreality of reality' is revealed to its hero, Neo. His reaction is one of total existential fear. Most of my episodes are less extreme than that. But some are not. Some are almost exactly like that.
Insane, [i]moi[/i]? Perhaps. Or perhaps not yet. I don't [i]feel[/i] insane. But what does it feel like, how would you know? I chose this subject today because I had an episode while at work today. It was 11:00. I was looking forward to my lunch in an hour's time. Then, click. It happened. I stood up and walked slowly out to the bathroom. Through my field of vision the unreal world flowed smoothly, people, walls, sounds, all in motion [i]through me [/i]like a tracking shot in a movie. I wondered if I would fall over and, if so, whether I would get up. Yet there were no physical symptoms. I made it to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Someone came into the bathroom, looked at me (I saw him in the mirror: [i]a reflection of unreality[/i]), and disappeared into a cubicle. Disappeared from the world.
I began to emerge from it. The strongest episode for several months. I paced up and down for a minute, collecting myself. This felt as though it was literally true: I was literally [i]collecting myself[/i], rebooting reality as it were. I had a good think about whether or not I am going, or am about to go, crazy. I had to acknowledge to myself that it's possible. There's a general assumption that insanity is a sudden switch from normality on the one hand to all-out insanity on the other: like the flicking of a switch. But it is not so. In most cases the process of going insane lasts for a good portion of a lifetime, proceeding by imperceptible degrees until a certain 'critical mass' is reached. And then there is no going back. I really must stop reading those books.
I had a last look in the mirror. Everything seemed all right again. I returned to my desk and began to exchange cheerful banter with people as if nothing had happened.
strangereality65
06.01.04 (7:53 pm) [edit]
Welcome to reality. Within 'reality' all kinds of things exist. The following is a random selection from reality.
An ultra-short entry today. I have about half an hour's computer time due to having been on the late shift. It's ten to nine and I've just got in. I need to get something to eat soon, and then it's an hour or so of TV and then bed. Got to be up at 6 a.m. for the early shift... Drat. These late-to-earlys come along once in a while. You just have to put up with them. And here in the twelfth sentence of today's ultra-short entry I find that I have nothing more to say.
An ultra-short entry today. I have about half an hour's computer time due to having been on the late shift. It's ten to nine and I've just got in. I need to get something to eat soon, and then it's an hour or so of TV and then bed. Got to be up at 6 a.m. for the early shift... Drat. These late-to-earlys come along once in a while. You just have to put up with them. And here in the twelfth sentence of today's ultra-short entry I find that I have nothing more to say.