Looking up he commented that he’d got so much on his 'To-Do' List he didn’t know what to do. A man, not only with a to-do list, but one larger than average, doesn’t know what to do. Overwhelmed by order and identifiable tasks he now sits silently, drowning, tapping at the space-bar as his last struggle peters out. This is the pain and anguish forced upon us: the hellish imperative to consistently make sense.Those hundreds of monkeys bashing away at typewriters for an infinite amount of time write complete works of Shakespeare because they’re under no pressure to do so.
‘How long monkey, will it take you and your friends to type out the complete works of Shakespeare?’
‘It will take forever - an infinite amount of time.’
‘I don’t know if I have forever.’
‘We can negotiate on staffing levels, but I simply must insist on this timescale.’
At the quantum level of things, the entire universe is made up of little angry cats trying to scratch each other’s eyes out, so this pursuit of order and understanding is just horribly arbitrary. There’s Robert Preston on my television, moving his hands round frantically, eyes cold and dead, words throwing themselves forward like drunken rugby players. He’s trying to make sense of something to do with money. He says he’s explaining what it all means to you. And by ‘you’ he means me: for I am that second person. I know what it means to me Robert – I am me - it’s who I’ve always been. If you’re so bloody interested in how I’m affected, what matters to my life: why don’t you do the courtesy of phoning me, so I can explain that it’s really none of your business? If you have to ‘make sense of things’, why don’t you start with your own life Robert Preston? Tell us what something (anything) means to you. When was the first time you cried? Was it all those numbers when you first saw Ceefax?
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