strangereality147
12 March was the third birthday of StrangeReality.
In many ways, it's fitting that I completely failed to realise until just now that the anniversary had come and gone.
It's fitting because of the way I've treated, or mistreated, this blog. The great nineteen-months hiatus from January 2005 to August 2006 shook off what few regular readers I had picked up back in the day. And now that it's back, now that I am blogging again, I can't seem to make up my mind what kind of blog I want StrangeReality to be. I lurch from one ghastly failed experiment to the next, and they all involve pictures for some reason. There's a cheap amusing parallel to be drawn here with my actual life, but I won't draw it.
There's also the fact that I disbelieve in time and calendric systems and anniversaries. Anybody who ever mentions the year 2000 and that whole faux Millennium to me had better be ready for an argument that they will lose. Because the year 2001 was the start of the 21st Century and of the 3rd Millennium and that's just a fact and nothing can contradict it. I don't believe in the calendar anyway – I don't believe that there ever is, was, or can be any such things as years, months, or even days of the week outside of the collective human agreement to believe that such things exist. You don't think that there really is such a thing as a Monday, do you?
It's possible to disbelieve in everything. You wouldn't believe some of the things I disbelieve in. I disbelieve that time is real. Yes. I touched on it in the last paragraph, and I'm giving it major attention in this paragraph. Let me clarify: I disbelieve in time as a dimensional property of reality. That there are observable changes in external phenomena is one thing, one substantive fact; that there is this whole thing called 'time' in which said phenomena are held to exist and have their coming-to-be, their existing-now, and their passing-away phases, is quite another. Is the past real? Yes and no. I can remember yesterday: I went into town, I paid a bill, I came home; I remember with particular satisfaction the appearance of a large field near my house in the warm evening sunshine. But where is this memory? It is in the present moment – in this moment, I should say. Calling this moment the present moment is being partial. There is an eternal present within which everything exists in persistent mutability. What it is and how it is and so forth is unknown. What is certain – to me, anyway – is that the category of 'time' is a bogus interpolation. A papering over of the crack in human understanding of reality, which is not so much a crack as a gaping fissure, or maw - a giant elephant in the room, that isn't wearing any clothes. We give things names, dress them in concepts, so that we don't have to understand them.
I also disbelieve in myself. I'll clarify: I disbelieve in a self. When I examine the category of phenomena that I am socio-culturally conditioned to call my mind, I can find no agent that produces this phenomena. There is no little homunculus called 'I' anywhere to be found. My persistent sense of self, or 'I', is rooted in the very phenomena that I can find no cause for. I no more produce my thoughts than I am personally in charge of my digestion. Thought, emotion, the whole shebang – they all just happen. That the whole constellation taken together represents a self or 'I' is another one of those socio-cultural delusions that I love so much.
I'm enjoying this - this is a way to spend a birthday celebration. Onto my next thing. Identity. I disbelieve in identity – racial, national, cultural. They're all bollocks. There is no such thing in reality as any nation you care to mention. There are just people who believe in them. There is no such thing as (for example) a Norwegian; there is just a man or woman who believes that he or she is Norwegian, and has a supporting cast of billions who are prepared to share the belief and expect him or her to reciprocate in turn for all of their beliefs about their own national identities. “The man of knowledge has no country,” someone once said. I forget who.
Thus the world goes on, and the human story continues. Like giant ants in a giant colony, fetching, carrying, building, reproducing, going who knows where and to what end.
Now this is the way to attract and keep readers.
strangereality146
I am in the middle of a few days off work – days when I have done nothing, gone nowhere, and voluntarily spoken to nobody except for a few of Strangereality's stock characters, i.e. supermarket checkout girls. In the past four days the longest conversation I have had with a human being went something like this:
Lord Strange: 40 Benson & Hedges, please.
[Supermarket checkout girl, a freckled, gum-chewing minx with a pert little bottom on her, turns to the cigarette display and plucks 20 Benson and Hedges from the shelf; then waves its barcode at the scanner before Lord Strange can say - ]
Lord Strange: - 40, please.
Supermarket checkout girl: Oh, sorry.
[She returns the pack of 20 whence they came, and picks a pack of 40 from the lower shelf. She scans the pack of 40.]
Supermarket checkout girl: Sixteen pounds twenty-nine, please.
Lord Strange [puzzled]: Is that right? Did you remove the 20 first?
Supermarket checkout girl [correcting the error]: Oh. Right. Sorry.
Lord Strange [chuckling avuncularly]: It's okay.
When you don't speak to people, the most minor and fleeting of encounters take on an extraordinary significance. You can mull for days over the fine details of the briefest few words exchanged with anybody at all. You indulge in an activity peculiar to the lone individual in an otherwise societal milieu: you brood. You dissect, and analyse.
My taxi driver on Sunday morning, for example. I was working the night shift and finished at 8 a.m. My employer provides a free taxi home for those who work what it calls 'unsociable hours'. As an asocial loner by nature and inclination, all my hours are unsociable, but I must not digress. The routine goes that the taxi driver, who will have been booked up to 48 hours previously, calls you an hour before picking you up. This is to make sure that you're at work, and they won't be making a wasted journey.
Just after 7 a.m. I got the call. “Hello, Lord Strange?” said a voice. I confirmed that I was he. “I'm Gary,” said the voice. Gary went on: “I'll be driving you home at 8, okay?” I enthusiastically endorsed Gary's intentions, and then it was a matter of waiting for the clock to hit the top of the hour. Which it did soon enough.
Gary was waiting for me in his cab next to the bus stop, which is a short walk from the office. As I got nearer to his vehicle I noticed an odd thing: Gary was Asian. He was sitting in the driver's seat, wearing a big blue turban, and he had brown skin and everything. So the signs were unambiguous.
I have met many Asian people who have unofficially adopted an Anglicised version of their actual names for general day-to-day usage while out and about in the world. How many years of mispronunciations, whether inadvertent or maliciously deliberate, must a man named 'Gurdjwaral' have to go through, before deciding To hell with this, from now on I'm telling people my name's Gary?
It's an interesting question, and one that merits some kind of study, but not here. Not now.
I got into the cab and we drove off. It's always only about a 10-minute journey from the office to my house at that time – Sunday morning, no traffic, plain sailing all the way – and for once I felt well-disposed to Gary's inevitable taxi-driver conversational sallies. I usually decline to get involved in whatever line of chatter my taxi drivers want to start up – I tend to just sit there and grunt vaguely until they get the fucking message and shut up.
But this morning I was in a different mood. I was at the start of a few days' holiday. The sun was shining. There was a light mist in the air. The birds were singing their collective heads off, heralding spring. And Gary had turned out to be Asian. He was wearing a fascinating blue turban that scraped the car's ceiling. Perhaps it was a combination of demob-happy glee and costume-incongruity that tipped the scales. I just felt like yakking for a few minutes.
Taxi-drivers are skilled interrogators. They know where to take a line of conversation and how to pitch their remarks to yield the maximum amount of information. Within a few minutes I was sharing with Gary the joy of having a few days off work to do as I pleased. He flashed a big grin at me in the rearview mirror. “You can't beat it,” he said. “Got any plans?”
“Nope,” I said, “and that's the point. I intend to do nothing at all. Taking time off work to do things isn't taking time off.”
“I know what you're saying, mate, I know what you're saying.” Gary nodded, wafting an unsecured tuft of cloth at the top of his big blue turban (I could hardly take my eyes off it).
So we got to my house, and I leaned forward to open the door.
“Cheers, much appreciated,” I said, pressing the handle.
“No problem. Have a good holiday.”
I paused in my action and turned to look at Gary. He, meanwhile, had turned his neck to look at me.
“Oh, I intend to,” I said in a firm kind of way.
He laughed. “Nice one.”
I got out and slammed the door shut. Gary drove away. I went inside the house, and upstairs to bed.
strangereality145
I'm an irregular user of eBay - a dozen or so items bought over the space of a couple of years, always without a problem. Recently, however, I had a problem: a seller withdrew the PayPal facility after the auction had closed, and asked me to pay by direct bank transfer instead.
I smelled trouble and declined to do so, as was my right. After some to-ing and fro-ing (the seller stubbornly clinging onto the vain hope that I'd simply cave in), the transaction was mutually cancelled.
All of this took a week of daily e-mails ping-ponging between us, with me becoming increasingly firm and no-nonsense, and the seller becoming increasingly wheedling and sulky.
But I'm honest, you can trust me, was the gist of the seller's position.
I do not want to pay by bank transfer and I am not obliged to: please cancel the transaction, was the gist of mine.
I seriously worried that this little tiff would impact upon my so-far 100% feedback. But in the end it all ended well. I only mention it here because at one point I was Googling for eBay horror stories, seeking information about precedents. It's common for disgruntled consumers of any stripe, in any field, to take their grievances online, usually under the banner of X is shit, with X being whatever-it-is they're disgruntled about.
So I Googled eBay is shit, just to find the largest concentration of gripes and groans in the quickest possible fashion. I did find many instances of sellers yanking the PayPal rug from under buyers' feet at the last moment. Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - it was indeed a ruse as part of a larger scam; but most often it was entirely innocuous, and the buyer was entitled to insist upon mutual withdrawal.
So that eased my mind. And whilst Googling, I saw this sponsored link, which amused me:
