What comes before...

Here I am again, sitting at the Café Ankh. The smell of beer permeates the atmosphere like the morning mist over the canal by the side. Beer so bitter and black that Guiness looked like white wine. I was thinking again; the Café Ankh always brings out the best in my thinking, the raucous crowd hollering along the latest about what the lady wished to do to her man, the buxom waitresses hinting at darker secrets, the mysterious, cowled patrons sitting off to a side by themselves and the harsh liquor squatting on my table in front of me, all contribute to the deadening of my brain enough to actually start thinking.

What comes before. What comes before. What comes before determines what comes after. I wonder if it’s that simple. To determine how a person would react to anything that you do or say, do we just need to understand the circumstances that come before? I was reading a book by a very good author, named Scott Bakker, and he seems to think so. The beer goes flat and I gulp it down to the chorus of `My mother was a farmer’s daughter’. Excellent stuff. The song. Not the singer. Not the beer. This is the Ankh, after all.

What I’ve also come to learn is that there are different types of people and that those types determine what they do. What comes before. Ah! very insightful stuff indeed. There are different people. And they do different things. Quite. There’s a brawl starting in front of the stage; looks like two of the sailors in here want to know more about the farmer’s grand-daughter. So, as I was saying, there are different types and if one wishes, one could provide a more grandiose name to it and call them arch-types and each of these arch-types has a core need to that they ache for with their very soul. There is a void that they wish to fill up, as it were and it determines every move they make. Freedom, Duty, Power or Knowledge and Self.

Who’s this I see? It’s the Hermit coming to sit at my table. Young, of marriageable age and, to my knowledge, seeking knowledge, the Hermit has fascinated many of the regulars of our little coffee shop. He drinks more than he can pee, he talks more than he can breathe and he thinks more than he can sleep. It doesn’t make sense to me either. As he drinks his beer down, I think about this latest trend he’s showing. Memory, sorrow and thorn. Clinging on, like Klingons, to the past. Is it to see what comes before? Is there some answer that this miserable creature in front of me sees in his ravings for the past? Or is he trying to clutch onto it instead.

I know not. He drinks on without lifting his head. The piano has begun playing in the background. The music is clear and lilting. This is the part most of us come for. After the beer has sunk has pirates, after the ruffians have been rounded down, after, for what comes after. The chords play slowly out reminding one happy times, of hopes and fears and of my sassy girl. The Hermit looks up and looks out of the window. He sees something in the distance and his eyes light up once again. The music soothes the storms in our souls and places them in tea cups. This is not profound any longer. I am jaded.

ADaSK