The Start

There’s a guy. I can’t write his story, only he can write his story. I’m too impatient for it, it’s one of those stories that demands patience and perspective in order to do it justice. And that in itself is funny because it’s all about justice. Kierkegaard wrote an entire book on the concept of irony, overdid it really, irony isn’t a concept, it’s a lived experience.

Anyway, I hope some day that this guy will write his story. I think he’d make a great writer, he has a certain style about him that’ll translate well into the written word. He likes to play with things, he’s like a cat. He smiles like a cat, talks with a smile, he knows he has the whole ball of twine and likes to let you know that he knows he has it. And it’s that, that ball of twine, that is his story and rather than letting it unfurl he still winding it in and winding it up. He loves a wind up.

To every thing there is another thing. We are born in opposition. Life, it seems to me, is all about finding that thing to which we are opposed, really opposed. It’s no good being against some thing, you need to want to push back, push into it, like a ball of glue. It takes a certain sort of cantankerous twit to live a live like this, opposed to everything around you, pushing back against everything in the hope that in pushing back, you push in and find a thing that sticks. Things are not, for the most part, sticky, they tend to glide, we let slide that which should most surely stick and in doing so we let life, real life, pass us by.

Anyway, this guy is in the fight. He’s in the fight of his life and, one day, I hope, he’s going to write it all down and it’ll start, like all the very best stories do, with what may well seem, like not very much at all.