Dreaming of Retired Goldfish
I haven’t written in two days. And honestly, it’s worse than nicotine withdrawal, which I happen to be having as well, thank you very much.
Writing is about the only thing that keeps me sane, and it is the single biggest threat to my sanity, or at least, what my friends and family view as the last battered vestige of my sanity.
Because I’m starting to strongly suspect that I may, in fact, be quite insane. .
And why not. After all, no sane person spends almost every waking hour and every sleeping hour concocting tale after tale of misadventure and strife and hope and lost love. They have better things to do. Like feeding their goldfish. It may sound mundane, but I have it on good authority, that goldfish if not fed, die.
I don’t feed my goldfish. I write about feeding my goldfish, and they live happily and healthily in my imagination, but the bowl on my desk has turned brown, and there haven’t been any fish in it for ages. No wait, there haven’t been any live fish in it for ages. Tim and Tom are still in there somewhere though. Part of the matter of their goldfish universe now.
A lot of people live an imagined life. They dream of that amazing presentation that makes them a permanent partner in the company, those amazing words that sweep the woman of their dreams off her feet and into their arms and a marriage, mortgage and children, those great adventures on a yacht across the open sea with their best friends, the achievement, the adventure, the life. But they never live them. Instead they turn to people like me, who sell them cheap imitations of their dreams, which we steal from them as it leaks out of their ears when they snore. It’s pretty neat actually. You see it in print, in celluloid, on the net in a hundred different forms. The fictional adventure where the hero is daring and suave, or the scandalous article where the writer narrates an unspeakably immoral act and we lap it up with relish. Those are only two examples, I don’t have the attention span to think of any more.
It is impossible of course, to quest for the Holy Grail, when you are bogged down by mundane, but important, matters. Like goldfish. That’s why people like me find it for you, and hand it to you in a nice wrapping, so that you can open it, peruse it and throw it away when you don’t feel like playing with it anymore and want to buy a new great adventure.
But what would happen if I didn’t exist? What if Dan Brown had never written The Da Vinci Code? What if King and Wells and Shakespeare and Milton and Homer had all sold apples for a living?
Well, we’d be swimming in apples, that’s for sure.
But more importantly, would the world as we know it today exist?