I could let the simmering rage take over and with both hands jab with one finger rather than tap lightly as I'm doing with all digits as if I were playing a piano and a piece I knew by heart and therefore didn't need anybody sitting next to me or standing beside the instrument to turn the pages.
Huh, bluffing. Successfully. But I don't know this score. I know nothing. The keys, of course, are helpfully marked with their letter, yet I don't know in which order they are to be played. It's an improvisation, which will in all likelihood be about nothing. Except filling up space with perfumed words, rather than those that leave a stink or unease. An awkwardness pervading the room, of the sort where shoes are looked at with increasing interest and eye contact is avoided.
Duh. I've just described modern life. Though it's phones that are looked at for no reason other than because...An uncomfortable feeling such as that above unneeded; it would have gone unnoticed anyway. Because surgically attached to people's hands, their gaze is always down, and their expression stupefied. Nothing else around seen or heard, and if their attention is grabbed their heads only lift momentarily before returning to the mobile screens they carry in their palms, like vicars on Sunday services expounding the Bible from their pulpits.
Are there still Sunday services? They must be...even in this largely secular and multi-faith society and, dare I say (I do!), era of useless time-sucking technology worship?
Before you think ERROR like a computer program, I did not mean to instead pound out 'saving'.
Ha! The minions on planet Earth have been fooled. They're so zombie-like we can soon make our attack; they'll never see us coming and we'll be in control in no time.
System down. Internet Explorer has stopped working...
See what I mean. Anything can happen when your bubble is a screen rather than real living: the small part of world that surrounds you. For God's sake, notice it before all of us succumb to being cartoon alter egos. Oh wait, too late, it's already happened hasn't it? And where the rest have gone, the rest will surely follow. Was that a nursery rhyme? Mary had a little lamb...Google it...is it important? No. Though tender lambs are sacrificial, and there are many more lambs on this planet compared to mutton. The old can be lambs as can the middle-aged. Actual young lambs are much more belligerent (these days), their white as snow fleeces harbouring overly righteous hearts which, with confidence, they lend a voice to. Bleat, bleat, bleat...They may be right (not in every instance) but can be tough to listen to, whereas mutton, so I hear (and I'm finding to be the case) can be surprisingly tolerant, having reached that place where they don't have to care. It's all gravy, one way or another.
See what happens when you refuse to let rage lead and suffuse it instead into a stew. Thickened, to a chunky soup texture, it's developed bite and some astonishing exotic flavours. I cannot account for it (there's not room to), and anyway the thrown-in ingredients came of their own accord. A pot-luck, which if started over would be different (as is the point), for that same spirit with which, some might opine, spleen was vented, no longer influences my mind or my fingers. The latter, you might like to know, are hesitantly hovering over the keys as if afraid, once again, of hitting the wrong notes and being lost, permanently this time, in a misty land.
Picture credit: The Opium Smoker's Dream, 1918, Lajos Gulacsy
All posts published this year were penned during the last.
