strangereality109
The strangest thing has happened. Thursday I got home from work to find on the doormat a card from the Post Office saying: We are holding a recorded delivery letter for you. Please come to the office named below to collect it within the next 2 weeks. Nobody had been in at my house when the postman tried to deliver it. So, after work today, I made the long walk up to the Royal Mail collection office. I was excited, I’ll admit. What could the letter be? A summons? A redundancy notice? A cheque?
I’ll come clean and say what I thought, what I hoped, the letter would be. Some 6 weeks ago I sent to the UK’s biggest-selling computer magazine an article I wrote about some of the weird and eccentric and downright nasty denizens of internet multiplayer gaming chatrooms that I have come across. The article was well-written, breezy, and it was quite funny, I thought. I sent it to the magazine believing that I was on the verge of getting something published, at last, in the only way that really matters: ink on paper. (Internet Schminternet…) So I thought this mysterious registered letter might be a cheque from the magazine, with an accompanying note to tell me when I would finally see my name, my real name, in print.
Vanity, all is vanity.
I’ll cut to the chase: I collected the letter, walked outside, opened it up and - it was from the local council. I saw their letterhead and I felt fear. What could the council be sending me a registered letter for? This was going to be bad, I thought, and started to read. The council department responsible for maintaining the city’s largest cemetery had written to tell me that a memorial headstone ‘for which you are registered as responsible’ had been removed from its grave due to ‘safety issues’. My jaw dropping, I read on: ‘Please find attached a list of local memorial masons who will be able to help you further.’
Needless to say, I have no knowledge of this. I have never been responsible for anything, least of all for somebody’s gravestone. None of my family or friends are even buried in the cemetery. It is an administrative error, as I say in my own job. I jumped into a taxi and headed home.
The taxi driver was a talker. More, he was a nutter as well. “Nostradamus said one person would end up ruling the world,” he told me as he negotiated rush-hour traffic. I hmmed non-committally. “Still,” said the taxi driver reflectively, “he said the world would end in 1997, so there you go. Nostradamus, eh?” And he waggled his eyebrows at me in his mirror. I looked to the side, out of the window, through the rain-flecked glass. After a moment the taxi-driver abruptly started in on ‘the terrorist threat’. “These kids they send off to be suicide bombers, they’re all brainwashed, you know?” he said. He was Asian, by the way, but neither obviously Muslim nor obviously non-Muslim, so again I hmmed. Just before he dropped me at home he performed a minor soliloquy on the subject of nightclub-goers and how depraved they all are. I actually sort of agreed with him on that one, but I didn’t want to provide any encouragement. Hmmm.
I got in and composed a long e-mail to the council department and the manager who had sent me the letter. In my e-mail I said that if they could not clear up this administrative error, then could they tell me whose grave it is? That might provide a clue as to how I’ve got involved in all this.
If they tell me the grave is Lord Strange's then I will run out into the street, screaming.
strangereality108
As it's such a fine and hot September Sunday I thought I'd drop by. What has been happening in my absence? Answer: nothing. Nothing at all. Nada. When you look at the superfluity of phenomena that is our reality, with its billowing clouds in the sky up above the billions of folk on the Earth, it seems odd, or strange, for me to contend that nothing is happening, but contend it I do. There's a longer, different kind of blog in prospect following that statement - the kind where I delve into Zen and solipsism and the like - but I think I've covered that kind of thing more than enough already.
One of the things I dislike about this new tblog design is the huge spaces it leaves between paragraphs. There's probably a way around it but I. Can't. Be. Bothered. Trying.
I was thinking, the other day, about failure. About what it will mean if, as now seems likely, I live out my allotted life-span without achieving the few real goals that I set out, a long time ago, to achieve. I was thinking: Would it really matter? I answered myself: Yes, it would. It will.
Now if I were a character in a film or a book, that would have been the moment when the Rocky-style music would've blared in the background, and the calendar leaves would've started to flutter and fall, and in no time at all, like magic, hey, I've achieved my goals, I no longer feel perpetually frustrated and lacking.
And perhaps this is the core, the nub, of the issue. The expectation we have, that I have, that effort need not be expended, because countless films and books have taught - brainwashed - me to believe that it must all fall into my lap, if I only desire it hard enough. Yes, the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that I am under the illusion, or the delusion, that I am a character in a fictional world, and I need not do anything at all: because it's all scripted for me.
I don't know what to say next.