2004-01-09 6:57 pm

Daughter And A Doctor On My Death Bed

I don't seem to be able to talk very much anymore. When I do I stutter, stammer and trip myself up. My 'sentences' are riddled with pauses so long in duration that they end up embarrassing people. What's going on?

Maybe I'm being crippled by some kind of creeping relativism, by some conviction that there is no making sense of anything, that all systems, even one as practical as a grammar, lead us into a false faith in reason. Faith in reason - haha.

Hahahaha.

Hahaha.

Ha.

Hmmm.

Well, there we are. Read! You know what? It'll do you good. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky presents us with what has to be one of the most formidable arguments against God ever constructed. And he was arguing contrary to his own beliefs.

Apropos of nothing....

I have an idea for a story - it popped into my head the other night - about a strange little man in a grey overcoat that begins to appear regularly at the foot of a man's bed each night. He stands there and says nothing, he just stands there looking. It takes a long time for the man in the bed to work up the courage to look back, but right from the start he knows the little man is there. He can feel him, you know? He can hear him rustling about, and all that. Anyway, the story is called The Grave Soldier. I'm not sure what happens after that yet, not sure at all.

This is a New Year ... arbitrary, some people say; but woe betide them who call down that argument! There is a great deal in life that is arbitrary. Too much, it seems. Goodness; Evil; do these questions really apply to people anymore? I don't trust systems; but sometimes I think Ivan's Inquisitor was right: people do not really want freedom, they just want to be controlled. Freedom only leaves you wondering where to turn, doesn't it? Or expiring at a railway station, with your daughter and a doctor for company.

Jesus, maybe I'll end up running a gulag or something.

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