I was going to write something about squirrels and public transport, about how I would recommend to our bushy-tailed mammalian comrades not to bother trying to sneak onto a bus because doing so would only delay their travel plans. I was going to tell you all about my intervention involving the little squirrel that ran out to catch my bus this morning: "Don't waste your time handsome rodent, you'd do better running to your destination in your inimitable frantic style, climbing a tree now and again to gauge the distances," I hollered. The squirrel probably thanked me in some incomprehensible way, and in doing so my own primitive intuitions caught its drift, and I nodded thanks in return for its thanks. With its opaque unblinking eyeballs staring into my own it would reveal to me its boundless gratitude for my unsolicited counsel, and would chirp or bleat back to his family and friends that their time would be wasted on public transport. If they wanted to reach the park in time to bother the magpies which lounge about the trees there, they should best get their tiny legs in motion. But this plan has fallen into decay and will not be written about.
The next thing I was going to write about would have referred to the pending arms agreement between Russia and the US. I saw a headline on the BBC, which caused me to choke and had I been eating I would have really choked, literally blocked the passage which thankfully passes the requisite gases into and from my organic vessel. So furious did the prospect of these former ideological foes smacking their hands in a sacred high-five make me, that I was about to scribe something withering and scathing about all sides. Then I realized that the article was really about disarmament! At once my scaffolding of ire and mockery collapsed to the ground, its hollow pieces bounding against the earth causing a faint echo, a feeble whisper of the mockery that might have been. After shutting down their vast military armadas, what criticism could possibly be aimed at the most weapons laden societies on earth? I tell you: none, no mockery is possible where the military might of Russia and the US are concerned. It's all peace and trade talks from now on.
My last option for writing involved the witty banter of some young men aboard the bus which dispatched me from work to my dwellings. To the elderly and enfeebled front section of the bus they confidently marched, deep in discussion about the literary offerings of a previous age. One critic was heard saying, "You could like write the point of Great Expectations in like 10 pages," to which a second pointed out, gathering to his power of insight all his vast learning, "In the nineteenth century that was just the style of those times. Crap." The final noun sunk into my eager ears like the apple into Kafka's insect. That's it! I have it! The style of nineteenth century literature is, where are my notes, ah yes... Crap! "All the literature of the world 209 to 109 years ago is crap!" This sentence rang through my mind and I almost embarrassingly blurted it out, before checking myself and sitting silently for the next pearl to be uncased. What foolishness to bark out a diluted plagiarism, when another casual aphorism might drop as randomly into my undeserving ear? "My liver is like suffering," said another mandarin, referring to the drunkenness that is the hallmark of all generous thinkers who, like superheroes with day jobs, pretend to be students when really they're literary heritage demolishers.
*title quoted from another crappy writer, but of the last and present century, Tom Stoppard.
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