September 08th, 2016

SUBURBAN TOURS EXCERPT NINE

It was clear that a lot of the battle was how to deal with tiredness. People fought pain until they got tired of it, bored with the fight, secretly relieved that in not resisting, there might be change, even if it was non-permanence, non-being.

If you wanted to stay alive, you had to alter your definition of ‘tired’. You had to pretend you hadn’t noticed, that you hadn’t heard the warning siren. Then you had to ask ‘what is being tired, anyway?’ A stupid enough question that took too long to answer, and with endless ploys like this, you might fluke it through to the next patch of rest.

You had to list every person you had known, and remember the last thing they had said to you, and the result of every footy game you had been to, and remember every kiss.

One tried to remember every big night he had ever indulged, as if they had all been training runs for this ultimate battle to stay awake. To stay alive in the game. Ha ha. He tried to list every time he had forced himself to not fall asleep. If he forgot what was at number 35 on any such list, he just had to start again. Perfectionism had to be useful in these mortal battles. Surely, umpire?

You had to be silly in the service of this serious task, unless you were a spiritual colossus, sanguine and at peace with all of everything. If you were young and ignorant and greedy for life, you had to fool your body, and keep your mind believing it was playing a game that could eventually be won. Oblivion was a Big-Arsed Fact, no good coming at it with arguments. This was not a job for lawyers and journos. Send in the Clowns, baby, bring on the flakes and raconteurs, the idiots and visionaries, everyone who didn’t do the usual. Beneath its benches confuse the bastard with every flashy, tawdry gimmick, stay unreachable, undefined, amorphous. Non-linear. We refuse to go into the dock to listen to the charges. We refuse to accept that the earth is roundish, that gravity is credible, that the stars won’t all go out in the next instant, that the world’s next genius may not already be known to us, that we will not win Tattslotto tonight. The facts of the universe are all amazing, why should we submit to trendy modernisms which could be as wide of the mark as the ancients were about the future of jetpacks?