H and T walked into the common area wondering why they weren’t being served. It had become a habit to expect a fawning drooling manservant appear at the drop of a hat. Was it just the other day, T thought, that I was thinking about Linda Lee and Cage? Was Cage really in love with her, I wonder. Who would actually know that, eh? Would Cage? Would Wintermute? Why form stars in the shape of a face, if it wasn’t reading the face out of the love that Cage felt? T had a bad habit of thinking of books the whole time. He would also think about thoughts and conjecture about the futility of a thought having a thought.
“X is actually quite fascinating.” T began to tell H, “He was talking to Y the other day and telling him about markets. I almost thought the whole story was coming alive in my head. Imagine a market as a living breathing structure – The market is the heart of the land, the road is its body, and the people are its blood. Markets grow and expand. Markets die and are buried. Sometimes, people dig them up and look at their bare bones and try to recreate the animal that once existed there. This isn’t what he told me or Y, by the way. This all something I dreamed up from his conversation as he stood there talking about markets.”
Ever the dreamer and great problem solver, H said “Shut up.” Oblivious to the pain that was supposed to be inflicted on him, T continued, “It reminds me of this story I once read…” and paused while the others entered the room. They were a motley bunch of people, dressed all in penguin attire while their minds were as different from each other as snowflakes in springtime (this would seem to indicate that snowflakes in winter are very similar to each other; however, that’s not the point the author wishes to make, which is to bring to the fertile mind of the reader a picture of snow melting in springtime, signaling not just the birth of a new season but the death of the old).
The conversation turned to the mundane – rooted in the world of brick and mortar, of which winners have actually quit and quitters who’ve seemingly won, of power politics and the correct time to launch a counter offensive in a game of tower desktop defense. Before long, T had sniffed a few glasses of an intoxicating red and began to think of his world of books again after the fumes had entered his nose. “I’ve often wondered whether we choose the books we read or whether the book chooses us. It is often said that the author had exactly you or me in mind when he/she wrote the book. Let me take this a step further, eh? What if he actually had you or me in mind at this particular point in time, endowing his book with power to reach out to you with ectoplasmic fingers to make you bury your head in its pages?”
H interrupted, “T, that’s why you’re s_____.”
This is that point in every H & T post, (do look back at the previous ones, I’m sure you’ve missed them all), when the blessed author forgets why in God’s name he was writing the post in the first place. (It’s true, in my case, that H has a whip by his side which he uses to, primarily, ensure that I blog on time and, secondarily, for his own pleasures (or is it the other way around?)) () (Those brackets were put in there to show you that I can) () ((((and will))))
To cut a long story short,
“She said yada, yada, yada. He said blah-blah-blah.”
-HOMM III
Story of my life, I would hope. H, that’s why I’m not.
Toodle-doo,
T
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