Lately, it seems to me that everything is becoming totally fucked up, for everyone I know. Everybody I know is losing their jobs, or having their relationships ripped apart, or are losing their houses. It seems so bizarre to me. In the wider sense, the credit crunch is royally screwing everyone on the planet, but it also seems that the little fragments of people's lives that I know are breaking apart, and the control over their own lives is being stolen from them. I have yet to meet a single person who has had good things happen to them this year. What's going on? Have the planets become unhinged in some grotesque cosmic ballet? Is God pissed at each and every one of us? Is this The Rapture? Can I hear the clip clip clop of the cloven hooves of the Four Horsemen cascading increasingly towards my door? In my own life, my dog has died, my cousin's wife has left him and has taken his kids with her, my step uncle has a sudden heart condition, my friends are separating from their girlfriends of considerable years, and other events too cataclysmic to mention. I often catch myself wondering 'what happened here? Where did everything go wrong?'
But perhaps, in some bizarre way, it's a good thing. The new-world great depression, the like not seen since 1939, is some sort of leveler. Everybody is in the shit, and yet everybody is in the same boat. The other day, when I was feeling pretty depressed, I was walking around Soho, and an old tramp asked me for my last cigarette. I gave it to him, hoping that it would somehow give him more pleasure than it would ever give me, and he started laughing. He looked up at me, and through his whisky-soaked toothless grin he hissed 'we're all the same now, eh?' And he was right! There must be some strange sense of togetherness that comes from all of this, there must be something pure and good that evolves from such feelings of misery, surely? There has to be! Maybe it is some other way of realigning the world, of centering the too-frequently-askew axes of the population. Maybe SOMETHING can come out of this?
It makes me think of other people, mortals in forgotten realms and distant souls in far away continents. It makes me think. In the dark cloisters of the night, I have started to dream about real people. Not people I know or recognise, but entities that strike you with the sense that they are forged from such smashing reality as to make the mind baulk as to its own absurd nature, that you are meeting them in the ether for the first time, through eyes which they could not possibly have seen. I can remember them clearly, and can later recount the smallest physiognomical detail with ease, yet I become so transfixed by them that the world behind them resembles only a blur, as empty as a glacier. They leave me with the impression that I would like to know them for a while, and that in some, far-off place that I will never visit, there are people that know me, and in some unfathomable way will recognise my eyes, the gait of my walk, the shape of my hands. I picture meeting them, on paving slabs drenched with memories in some future netherworld, our eyes flashing over each other's bodies in that invasive way that strangers' eyes meet, until a perfect decibel of recognition, clashing like a tubular bell, pierces us to the heart, to the very heart, and all that's needed is a smile, or a nod, or even just a gentle wave through a crowded metropolis on a wet afternoon which smashes against the defences of the world, for us each to know that the other is thinking the same thing, that the sacred moment is there, that the stumbling forward ache of humanity has not been in vain, because somehow there will always be days like today, and the entire world will have been worth it in the end.
But perhaps, in some bizarre way, it's a good thing. The new-world great depression, the like not seen since 1939, is some sort of leveler. Everybody is in the shit, and yet everybody is in the same boat. The other day, when I was feeling pretty depressed, I was walking around Soho, and an old tramp asked me for my last cigarette. I gave it to him, hoping that it would somehow give him more pleasure than it would ever give me, and he started laughing. He looked up at me, and through his whisky-soaked toothless grin he hissed 'we're all the same now, eh?' And he was right! There must be some strange sense of togetherness that comes from all of this, there must be something pure and good that evolves from such feelings of misery, surely? There has to be! Maybe it is some other way of realigning the world, of centering the too-frequently-askew axes of the population. Maybe SOMETHING can come out of this?
It makes me think of other people, mortals in forgotten realms and distant souls in far away continents. It makes me think. In the dark cloisters of the night, I have started to dream about real people. Not people I know or recognise, but entities that strike you with the sense that they are forged from such smashing reality as to make the mind baulk as to its own absurd nature, that you are meeting them in the ether for the first time, through eyes which they could not possibly have seen. I can remember them clearly, and can later recount the smallest physiognomical detail with ease, yet I become so transfixed by them that the world behind them resembles only a blur, as empty as a glacier. They leave me with the impression that I would like to know them for a while, and that in some, far-off place that I will never visit, there are people that know me, and in some unfathomable way will recognise my eyes, the gait of my walk, the shape of my hands. I picture meeting them, on paving slabs drenched with memories in some future netherworld, our eyes flashing over each other's bodies in that invasive way that strangers' eyes meet, until a perfect decibel of recognition, clashing like a tubular bell, pierces us to the heart, to the very heart, and all that's needed is a smile, or a nod, or even just a gentle wave through a crowded metropolis on a wet afternoon which smashes against the defences of the world, for us each to know that the other is thinking the same thing, that the sacred moment is there, that the stumbling forward ache of humanity has not been in vain, because somehow there will always be days like today, and the entire world will have been worth it in the end.
