A Place to Play

Scribbled in a school yearbook, I once read how in twenty years, we’ll regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. It’s probably true. You can drive about your whole life with the seatbelt on, clutching onto safety, statistics and your apparent faith in kevlar and interwoven nylon, but that journey won’t allow you to stick your head out of the sunroof, feeling a benevolent wind gushing past you, ratifying how alive you can be.

Regret, then, is the most powerful thing in the world. More powerful than hate and herpes.

I don’t think there’s any recovery from finding yourself on a balcony one evening, realising that the only dawns you see are in rear-view mirrors, that your days are a replaceable series of paper bags and paper clips, that you stand in corridors talking about percentages, that the sunsets you see are usually backdrops behind newscasters, that your whiskey soaked evenings all end in the warm embrace of the same keyboard or the same woman, or at the same corner table in the same restaurant with the same three people, talking about the next long weekend.

It would be an unmitigated tragedy if you found that you could relive your whole life in six weeks of important days, as if the moments you cherished weren’t neurological but physical, kept neatly sorted on a shelf, waiting for your perusal. You can’t live denouncing even the slightly out of the ordinary, seeking shelter under the law of averages until you find out that the vignettes of your life were just postcards from holidays you postponed and events you attended.

I guess this is just a verbose way of propagating daring, propagating courage, and most of all, propagating stupidity. Sanity and safety is for ordinary people, people who like all things normal, and those people are usually fucking bores.

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