:: creation
:: slipstream
:: big idea
:: the mute
:: suburbia
:: the myriad confusions in life
"Following our recent spate of communication, variously through the gifts of the telephone, email, sms and indeed, my most treasured connexions – being those personal encounters so well lubricated by the intoxicating properties of alcohol; I felt inspired to put virtual pen to equally virtual paper. The result is, I earnestly desire, not so much a virtual letter, but a virtuous correspondence on matters broad in scope and pressing in nature. Of course, the correspondence you now hold in your hand is somewhat more palpable than the image of the same that I now see before me.
Before proceeding with my earnest and varied dissertation, I should wish at this early juncture to turn briefly to matters distressingly corporeal. I met an American colleague today during a wholly unpleasant discourse on matters commercial. During our somewhat heated exchange of words, he suggested that we, “needed to model the financials against the target and ascertain the betas (sic).” I confess Sir, that not motivated entirely by my own need for clarification on the statement, I suggested that what he had meant was to communicate the need to model the current financial outlook against the outcomes most desired in order to identify the delta between the two. “Whatever, you’re the finance guy”, was his somewhat dismissive retort. I tell you now in all sincerity my friend, I enjoy the polemic arts as much as anyone, but I refuse to be drawn by someone who does not know his gamma from his epsilon. Instead, I offered him a modest portion of humble pi, which he consumed with gusto and without a trace of compunction for his transatlantic faux pas. He was an arse - like so many in this fucking corporation.
My existence there is not an altogether happy one. Although I find the occasional polemic most edifying, I find my myself drifting too frequently and too easily into that world of sugar sleep and entropy to convince myself that my future lies here in the daily grind. It is most definitely time to properly account for my life and what remains of it. I long too for a modest quota of belief in something wonderful, or more properly, that something is going to happen, something wonderful."
From a letter to my most trusted friend. Two years later in 2005, I would finally begin to believe that despite man's emotional frailties engendered by the various and many chronic disappointments and heartbreaking moments in life, brought about by ourselves and others in roughly equal measure, something wonderful indeed is going to happen. As we wander abound what at times seems like a moribund planet, a little hope, belief and courage begets some measure of happiness. And with that the appropriate state of mind to know that something wonderful is oft the little things in life.
Darkness is the inevitable bedfellow of light. The two states are not merely juxtaposed they are one and the same and it is inconceivable that they can exist independently, and if you care to look, you will find both here.
all words and picture (c) 2005 stephen thomas