I’d decided that it was about time that I allowed my considerable resource of creative juices to flow in new and different directions. I had some serious choices to make and options to explore. It’s only at a certain time in a man’s life that he comes to this point. I was unsure as to whether I should savour the long moment or just, as I was tempted to do, drive a truck through it, for the hell and blind danger of it all.
I bit into the crisp croissant as if it was my last meal, set floating above me like a nourishing angel and my only answer to all those random dark questions that stir at the driven innards of a helpless man. I tasted only salted butter and stale bread. I was as hollow as the roll, as vacant as the French and still hungry for my future. Nausea and grief mixed in with the trifles that are discontent and discovery.
So here was the moment, my wonderful, edgy, unknown moment. There was a hot turmoil in my mind, I sensed it stretching and tapping inside my skull, gnawing like a rat, juggling and grinning like a mad clown. I had to make the beautiful pain of this looping moment stop and so become solid. Ideas were coming and going, blinking and sparking, swooping and dying, feeding in and feeding back. Then along came the Bakelite switch and my finger touched the tip and I pulled it down. There was a brief crackle in my cranium, a bright light in my soul and a jump in my heart which, considering that the heart is basically a pumping device was no surprise. It was a simple physical reaction to the metaphysical and spiritual reactions taking place in the very certain of my being and consciousness.
I was going to club seals, club the furry, helpless little bastards to death so that they wouldn’t grow into fully grown seals with huge relentless appetites hell bent on ruining the wild salmon industry. I was going to kill more miserable hungry pathetic seals than anybody and so save those silver, gleaming, jumping and dipping , delightfully tasty salmon. Out there on the ice, beyond the tundra and the forests, I’d stalk them, hide from them, observe them and then in the bloody fury of my redirected creative juices I’d batter those animals to a bleeding whimpering pulp. Well most of them anyway, I’d also shoot a few, maybe poison some and snare a few others. I would carry out a comprehensive and complete cull on the northern seal population so that they harmed no more wild fish. Their moment and doom was coming, I’d smite them like a bitter Old Testament God, no mercy, no remorse, just red death on the white snow, the frozen beaches and the salt ocean. It was my new destiny. A shiny golden and effective dawn.
Still my head spins, the moment and meaninglessness, the desperation, the horror and the feeling of clinging onto the edge of the highest cliff by your own bleeding fingernails. The horror of the potential drop, the sharp and dull stones waiting below and the awful silence of that final, stretched and hollow moment before death and dreaming. It seemed like I was hanging for a New York Eternity before the fall. Then I was gone, a new resident in a papier-mâché afterlife under the guidance of a neon god. The light of all dark dreams had gone out like battered, burnt out candle.
There comes a certain point in life when you’ve achieved all of your goals, you have arrived, you are in that perfect place but for all that and all that has passed you are still not happy. There is nothing left, no new horizon to explore, no silver lining to turn over, all you do is go out, out into some strange inner wilderness and club some more seals.
