Monday 23 July 2012

Menage a trois

It was the three of us. In the old man's pub on the Botley Road. We went straight for the cheap spirits. Neither of you was even old enough to be there. But we got served. And on what was a very ordinary Sunday afternoon in West Oxford, we necked the spirits and hugged each other as a grinning, careless trinity, and that was as fulsome a threesome as we ever were.

If I had special powers, I'd have enormous sex with 7,000 girls at the same time. But second to that, I would be in that pub with you two, necking cheap spirits, linked arm by arm, with the uncomprehending eyes of the barman flitting over us.

To thine own self be true

Wake up and expect it will go on for ever when the reality is very, very different. Wake up, go to work. Lots of little disappointments. In headaches and in worries vaguely life leaks away. Keep telling yourself, it will get better and it is worth the ever so regal patience.

What do you live for? In what does your hope consist? Unclear. How shit of you not to be able to put it into words, and how boring to do that anyway. It is happening, it is happening, and it is so tiring, so often trying. It should be clear. You should have it emblazoned over your desk, tattooed on your forehead. Is it something to do with love, with looking upon your beloved and saying calmly, I don't want any more than this?

Some abandon thinking. Others never thought. Still others strive for justice, solidarity, to pass on knowledge and wisdom. I live by the heart, by the selfish heart that wills to hear a broken plea answered. And that is a vague way to live. Empty accusatory days. There is plenty of time for it though, isn't there? Plenty of time to ask oneself the question: am I living in full awareness of the quiddity of being alive? And to answer: Hell no.