strangereality140

First of all, thanks are due to a reader - possibly my only reader, I think - who has located the missing archives. Some other blogsite somewhere is shortly going to acquire me. I will post details here as and when, and then Lord Strange and his so-called strangereality will be no more.

Over the past couple of days I have heard about a Japanese writer called Haruki Murakami, who has a new book out. Reading its reviews, I was intrigued. From the reviewers’ descriptions of his style and themes, it seemed that Murakami is writing - and getting published - the kind of stuff that I have written and tried to get published. Naturally, last night I made a beeline for Amazon and quickly tracked down the Murakami novel that I wanted to read: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. This isn’t the book that he currently has out, whose reviews I was reading, but it is the one that most reviewers mentioned as being the epitome of his style. I was about to hit the BUY button when I paused in the act. ‘Delivery in 3-4 days’ seemed like a poor deal, when here I was feeling inspired and wanting to compare notes with the mysterious Murakami.

So I cancelled the order, and decided to travel into town, in person, to buy the book at a bookshop.

Today - the past few days, in fact - has been bright, sunny, and almost warm in the way that odd days at the Z-end of winter sometimes are. This morning (well, this afternoon, really: I didn’t get up until 1 p.m., but it was still morning for me) I had a quick breakfast, smoked a quick cigarette, donned my glasses that I only ever wear outdoors, and went outdoors. I bought a bottle of water at the newsagent and waited for the bus. The water was mainly for drinking purposes, but also to distract me from my anxiety/panic, should the need arise. How can a bottle of water distract one from anxiety/panic? Wait and see.

Wouldn’t you know it. I finally pluck up the courage to head on out of homesville, and there isn’t a bus in sight. After ten minutes of waiting the thought occurred to me that God was effectively saying: Get back in that fucking house. Now. I didn’t move, though. I stared at the corner of the street, around which the blocky shape, yea, a veritable bus, in its blue and white livery, had to appear at some point. Another few minutes passed. Whilst waiting, I had accumulated behind me a queue of people all waiting, like me, for the bus. Everyone was breathing quietly through their noses and staring at the same patch of street and trying not to fume. Now there were one or two voices starting to grumble to their neighbour. Just as things were about to turn ugly, with a roar the bus turned the corner and gentled to a stop in front of me. I took a deep breath, thinking: This is okay.

It started quite quickly: after just a few minutes on the bus, I sensed that my body wanted to breathe too fast, and leave me helpless and embarrassed on the ground. Now here is where the water comes into it - the cold bottle of water I’d got at the newsagent. I drank some of it, of course. Two or three large refreshing mouthfuls. And then do you know what I did with the water? I poured a small amount down my shirt - deliberately, tweaking the collar forward, positioning the neck of the bottle near to my skin, and allowing cold water to trickle down my chest and along my belly. The shock of the water on my skin was sudden and sharp, and as ever had the effect of distracting me from my preoccupation with you-know-what. I have deployed this tactic rarely, so it still works (other tactics, such as simply pinching my forearm quite hard, stopped working ages ago). The obvious drawback is that it leaves you soaking wet if used too often. Several weeks ago I was sitting in a taxi and I had to pour nearly half a bottle of water down myself before coming out of a near-panic episode. By the time I got out of the taxi my shirt had a huge spreading damp patch across the front, and the driver looked at me dubiously, as if he thought I’d somehow pissed myself upwards. One of my many - well, several - ideas for novels that I like to think I’ll one day write, is for a novel called, simply, PANIC. It would be a comedy.

I stepped off the bus in town feeling all right. I had sent mobile phone messages to a few people, as another distraction tactic, and (to brutally dispose of the panic theme) I would be all right from now on. So I walked around town for a while, looking at things. The crowds appalled me: how can so many people exist all at the same time? I thought for the, oh, thirty-seventh time or something. I had with me a hundred pound’s-worth of gift vouchers that I got for Christmas and which I haven’t used yet. The vouchers were for the NEXT store (NEXT is a fashionable high street clothes store, for those in territories lacking NEXT’s debatable, er, fashions…). I headed for the nearest NEXT and went inside.

I never buy clothes. I have two older brothers who have always given me their rarely-worn cast-offs. Occasionally I have been known to go and buy a pair of trousers, or a t-shirt or something, but these events are roughly as frequent as appearances by that comet named after that Haley bloke. I moved among the racks of clothes - shirts, ties, jeans, trousers, footwear, overcoats - wondering what to buy. At least no sales assistants came up to me asking if I ‘needed any help’, as usually happens in most stores like this one. (What, do I look like a shoplifter or something?)

I picked up a pair of jeans, two shirts, and some comfortable black moccasin boots that could pass for shoes and so would be wearable to the office, if and when I make it back to the office. All together these items came to £115, so I had to add £15 of my own to the value of the gift vouchers. The girl at the sales desk (here we go again with the checkout-girl-type theme) was a very young and very pretty Asian girl, who packed up my stuff without making eye contact until she asked me: “Do you want to keep the hangars?” Ridiculously, I had to think about this one for a long couple of seconds. Then: “No,” I said. With a short nod the pretty Asian girl presented me with a bulging NEXT bag and, because I’d thought that my ‘No’ was rather curt and required explaining, I said: “I’ve got so many hangars at home already, see…” She stared right at me for another long couple of seconds, obviously wondering what I was talking about. “Hangars,” I said desperately. She smiled, professionally but prettily. I turned on my heel, lugging the door-sized NEXT bag, and left.

But what had I come into town specifically to get? That’s right, the novel by Haruki Murakami. I traipsed up to the nearest bookshop and found that he has a whole shelf to himself in the fiction section. This struck me as astonishing. Murakami has been celebrated by Western critics for a couple of years now, during which time he has become important enough to have his own shelf, and I had never heard of him until this week. I shook my head, looking at the long shelf of Murakami books, wondering if it was a good thing or a bad thing for me to have apparently fallen out of touch with ‘what’s happening’ in literature. (A good thing, really, I decided.)

So. From what I had read of this guy, his work was similar - in theme, in tone, in subject matter - to what I think I would like to do in writing. So we shall see, then, eh? I picked up the one I wanted, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and turned to the first page. The first sentence of the book is:

I have the book here now, and will read it very carefully. And I'll see him in court.