How to Espress Life into a Very Small Cup
A reading of Western Philosophy while making coffee
Michael Durrand
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Michael Durrand
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For green lounges that are stronger than Hendrix; for terracotta lounges that totally match the green carpet; for trading with egg beaters, irons and toasters; for lentil glue and dodgy home brew; for trying to write our own language; for a hat that may not have always known the way home; for just going to the needle; for prima donna, semi-literate academics that demand so much of my time; for idiots from Idaho who have clearly never made ten Chinese lanterns that spell out ‘I love you’ as they float across Pumicestone Passage, and for all the other dagudas, I am truly sorry.
Contents
1.Eight days after...
2.Today...
3.Ten days before...
4.Twenty years before...
5.Thirty-two seconds after ten days before...
6.Twelve days after...
7.Twenty minutes after ten days before...
8.Ten days after...
9.12 Days, a trip across the river, a trip up the river and a bad cup of coffee after...
10.Ten days and twenty-seven minutes after....
11.Ten years after...
12.Ten days and forty-one minutes after....
13.12 Days, a trip across the river, a trip up the river and two bad cups of coffee after...
14.Five days after...
15.Twenty year before...
16.Tomorrow...
17.Twelve days, twelve minutes and two phone calls after...
18.Eleven days after...
19.Twenty seven days after...
20.Twenty eight days after...
1
Eight days after...
Daniel and Nadia were still deep in conversation long after the shop should have closed. A few customers had nervously left, due to their adventurous ability to transgress their normal daily routine running out. After the last customer left, Nadia closed the door and turned the jukebox up fairly loud, but not to the point of being annoying or ostentatious. She then poured two glasses of Butterscotch Schnapps and turned off the menagerie of equipment that the coffee shop possessed.
The hum and groan of a few machines, normally unnoticeable to any person there for a time was suddenly very noticeable on being abruptly absent.
Earlier that day, Nadia had served an old university flame of hers, who had purposely gone out of his way to get lunch at Hugh’s coffee shop after learning of Nadia’s position there. Nadia at first didn’t recognise him; he had deliberately dressed himself differently to create the appearance of change and progression since he last saw her. In truth, he hadn’t done anything. While he wore a nice suit and looked wealthy and important, it was all borrowed from his brother’s house that morning, where he had been given full access to a room from the fraternal charity and guilt of a highly successful younger brother.
He and Nadia had shared a brief reminiscence of the ‘good old days’, whatever that was. For some reason Nadia had allowed the conversation to live well past the point of awkwardness, a conversation that was held up on life support by all the ogling others involved. This had paid off later on as Nadia had been tipped with two bright yellow pills that held a promise of ‘something to open your mind’. Nadia had also been warned to only take this pill with a true friend.
Nadia was bored, really bored. Her boredom had taken on a life of its own, past the yesterday was terrible, but tomorrow may hold promise stage. It had passed the there is nothing good on TV stage, extinguished the flame of promise that the local video shop pretends to hold, through the eBay and facebook phase and now was approaching a boredom that could easily be given the name that sounds like a psychological disease, a Latin sounding name; Adhocergo prostichocus, the causality disease.
Given the past few weeks, the idea that two bright yellow pills that would open her mind, yet should only be taken with a true friend presented some great promise. She didn’t really even think that much about it; it would at the very least be something to fill in an evening and perhaps a cause for a sick day the next day. At best it could open new doors and a new level of a relationship with Daniel, not that she was that overly keen on him in that way, she was just really bored.
Nadia had purposely steered the conversation into the various arguments surrounding drug use and different perspectives of a person experimenting with narcotics. She had not been able to persuade Daniel to impart a subjective viewpoint on the topic. Daniel had only related a few stories from his days as a solicitor relating to drugs getting people into and out of trouble.
Daniel’s favourite narcotics related memory occurred while defending a heroin harlot against her millionth charge for theft and property offences. During a quick recess in the committal hearing the courtroom had been vacated by people keen on using their mobile phones to show all and sundry how important the person on the other end of the line thought their thoughts were, except for the magistrate and Daniel.
The magistrate had boisterously remarked “Gees that client of yours has a fine pair on her, someone should tell her I think.” Daniel, ever quick on his feet in a courtroom immediately faked an embarrassed blush, then anger. “You just told her yourself Your Worship. She is sitting down just there,” Daniel retorted while pointing to the part of the courtroom obscured from the view of the bench by the clerk’s computer monitor and the woodwork partition behind it. The magistrate, after quickly slithering out in embarrassment, returned the court to find that there simply wasn’t enough evidence from the police for him to be happy granting a trial.
Then there was the story about a major drug case that Daniel had been involved with. This was before the days of real music mobile phones with which we can now define our souls, during that brief and exceptionally daggy phase where the effluent in society had polytones. One of the team from the Crown had accidentally left her mobile phone on in court. During an especially tense examination of one witness, the polytonal, computerised version of the Skyhook’s Jukebox in Siberia rang out loud and proud for all to hear.
This same case landed Daniel in gaol for contempt. Daniel grinned uncontrollably as he retold the story to Nadia. The QC for the Crown was being badgered by the bench on an issue of common law, the bench wanting the QC to state a precedent already known to the bench. The Crown QC, while unable to remember the case law, blundering and slurring for time was thankful when Daniel handed him a piece of paper with ‘Iva Sewell v Johnson 122 CLR 33’ scribbled on it, then immediately declared “With thanks to my learned colleagues, it has been brought to my attention that your honour wishes to hear I’ve a swollen johnson.” How can one put a price on a joke like that? Apparently it was easy for a District Court Judge to do.
In truth, Daniel had had very little experience with drugs on a personal level. It was not that he was against it; it’s just that the life that he had led had mostly been devoid of any connection to certain types of people. He had seen many people’s lives ruined by drugs, or so the catchy slogans and the like go, but had never believed that to be the whole truth. He had seen some people whose lives had been ruined by drugs and regarded drugs as the effect of a different cause. People who were stupid and boring would have achieved very little and been disregarded by all as stupid and boring if it were not for drugs. Drugs allowed these people a great mystique to their lives as well as the freedom to externalise the cause of their life’s worries and improprieties into the seemingly true understanding that if only they could get the monkey off their back, everything would be alright.
In Daniel’s eyes they were simply too brainless and unimaginative to not choose a certain path. After a while of heavy drug use, the drugs started to be regarded as the cause of this, not the solution, albeit a bad one. Daniel’s perception then understood a certain weakness and pathetic element to heavy drug users and especially alcoholics later on. When all other avenues had been spent, they started blaming all their bad behaviour on their relationship to using drugs, and now that this was no longer the case and the demon had been removed, apparently all of what was left was a good and pure person. This story just didn’t sit right with Daniel. Daniel did however distinguish between people who use narcotics on a seldom and recreation type of setting, people who get blazed at the odd party, as opposed to those who spend their entire life half-baked. The former were perhaps OK, the latter were not.
After speaking on various points of conversation that were both appropriate and current, Daniel let out a big sigh. “I have been so out of sorts lately” Daniel explained, “I ran into this girl I knew from uni yesterday morning. She had gotten really fat and quite unattractive, not that you could ever say that she was good-looking, she had an alright figure, but a mongy face, but seeing her, it just really depressed me. When I was a grumpy and unhappy solicitor, I never had any trouble with this type of situation, always being the person who had such an ability to appear successful and rushed in situations where you only have two thirds of a sentence to summarise your entire being and existence. Now days, I am really happy and enjoying life, yet when people inevitably ask me what I am up to, I really don’t have an answer. That just kind of really depressed me.”
“So I have spent three hours on facebook this afternoon and looked around at all these guys and gals that I went to high school with, then old colleagues from law school and no one is really doing anything much, but some people can really talk up a success story on paper, well, on-line anyway. But you look at their profiles and they have spent forever on them, trying to make it perfect. One guy’s status update was ‘having a great time on holidays’...What is up with that, what kind of great holiday are you having if you are sitting on facebook wanting everyone to know how much of a great time you are having telling everyone what a great time you are having? Then I got this friend request from this girl I went to high school with, and who I am pretty sure was my first, well, you know. But I can’t really be sure.”
“People always say that you remember that sort of thing, and don’t get me wrong, I remember almost everything about it, and am almost certain that it was with this girl, but we weren’t really friends to speak of and haven’t seen each other in many years. The message she wrote was just the usual ‘how-are-you?-I-am-fine-but-too-busy-but-will-quite-happily-sit-on-facebook-for-two-hours-and-tell-everyone-that’. It’s not like I can message her and explain what I am up to and just kind of steer the conversation in that way.”
“Yeah like ‘hot enough for you? And oh, been down on anyone lately?” Nadia smirked
“Then there are all these people that I sort of knew so long ago that thanks to facebook I am apparently friends with again. They have for some reason stayed friends in the same circle that was there when I was a kid, way back in the good old days. They haven’t moved or done anything, just gone from school to working in a steel mill or on welfare, and are still talking about me. What’s up with that? I didn’t think I was that interesting, especially after all these years.”
The jukebox was randomly playing the anthem of Nadia’s generation way too quietly given the song as Nadia started to sway and think about distant memories;
“Will you stand above me, look my way...never love me, rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling down ...down...down.”
“Well, you are very intelligent, have always been an old soul, have a flair for the alternate side and have a certain arrogance about you.” comforted Nadia.
“Will you recognise me, call my name or walk on by?...rain keeps falling,rain keeps falling down...down...down...down”
“Oh, piss of with that rubbish, I am not that memorable. For some reason, laughing at the dreary lives of people that you always thought were dreary sort of helps when you’re a bit down, but in a black kind of way. It's like I feel guilty for being right about them all along. Or perhaps I was dead wrong about them all along and it is the meaninglessness of the whole thing that is depressing. Especially given that now that I am happy and having some fun, going somewhere, my life looks terrible on facebook. So are they in the same situation? Wouldn’t that mean that there really isn’t anything about my life that can’t be achieved by anyone and everyone else, providing they have the guts, or perhaps stupidity to make the same decisions, or similar decisions in similar situations? But that can’t be the case, cause if it were, I would cease to be, there would be nothing more to who I am than a series of choices of varying degrees of significance that may have been made by anyone, but there is no ‘me’.”
“Well” Nadia muttered, getting a build up of some Dutch courage while putting the two bright yellow pills on the counter, “an old friend of mine gave me these, said that they would open my mind and that I should only take them with a true friend. Seeing as how our Kev is against all this type of behaviour nowadays, Beattie’s pissed off to the US and Gordon’s in gaol, I thought of you being my good friend.”
Going to take you apart, I’ll put us back together at heart...baby
With a look of surprise and excitement, Daniel asked “I didn’t think that our friendship had grown to the ‘taking a pill when the door is locked cause we are really bored stage’. Did I miss that?”
“You don’t think that we are at that stage?” asked Nadia.
“No, No, if you think so, I’ll agree with you, I may have missed that and you are usually right about these type of things.” Daniel rebuked.
“But would you know it if I sent you a ‘taking-a-pill-when-the-door-is-locked-cause-we-are-really-bored’ friend request on facebook ?”
As you walk on by, will you call my name... and you walk away...or will you walk away...will you walk on by, come on call my name, will you call my name...
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Around ten minutes later, Nadia only wanted to do one thing; and Daniel only wanted to do one thing. Sadly, these were not the same thing, not even close. Daniel really wanted to hide under one of the lounges and see if he could find, and then taste yesterday’s dust, but being the sharpshooter that he was, realised that he couldn’t just go and do this without looking like a featherweight. So he started to talk Nadia into a game of hide and seek.
Nadia, starting her own progression of ideas so as not to make it look as if she were a featherweight, agreed but told Daniel that hide and seek while wearing only underwear was much more fun. Daniel’s joyous thoughts at getting his way and playing hide and seek completely overshadowed any analysis of what Nadia was thinking and doing.
Some five years ago, Nadia had been truly in love. He was an older man, but seemed younger than most of the men Nadia’s age, or at least on par. It had ended quite badly for him, but Nadia held memories of their relationship with fondness and romanticism. At the time, the ‘eject’ button on the CD player in Nadia’s bedroom didn’t work. It didn’t really matter, she only used that stereo to listen to the radio when falling asleep or waking up, and for listening to a CD while making love. It didn’t occur to her at the time, but certain behaviour, human physiology and psychology can be conditioned in quite strange ways with the repetition of sounds or songs at specific points in one’s life. She had, as a result, become a Pavlov’s dog when it came to making love. She really needed to hear a particular CD.
Daniel hid under the lounge, thinking that he had found a fantastic hiding place yet to anyone looking on, it could easily be seen that two of the lounge’s legs were off the ground and the whole thing was being held up on an angle by something underneath. Something that was also emitting a strange, giggling sound. Nadia smirked and went over to the Jukebox to see if the CD she needed to hear about now was in there somewhere. She smiled with sheer joy at the simple, fifties copy font that spelled out the words she wanted to see. She put in twenty cents and went to find some more Butterscotch Schnapps on the way to ‘seeking ‘ Daniel.
“Hi, Hoe, Hi...ha, ha, ha...one...two...three...four...”
Nadia found the two empty glasses on the counter, having to deal offhandedly with an ever-increasing lure to lick the shininess of the counter to see what reflections tasted like.
“...I was born in a house with a television on inside...grew up too fast...forgot my name”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Hugh Woodman generally taught a class in the local PCYC on Tuesday nights. He had left his coffee shop two hours earlier without any inclination that term had finished last week and everyone was on holidays. He really should pay a lot more attention to these sorts of details; where he had to be and when. Argh, details details. On seeing the empty rooms and hallways, it had taken quite a while for him to realise exactly what had happened. It wasn’t until he saw a flyer for an end of term party at ‘davos’ house dated the previous weekend that his fears were completely realised. He thought it a good chance to get to know the newer pubs in the mall, of ever increasing Irishness for some unknown reason. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to introduce a pub with Irish theme to it must have been reaching; drunken Irishmen are right up there with skinheads as far as people you would want to spend with on a night out.
After paying a fortune for a ridiculously large glass of beer, Hugh looked around and was disgusted with the state of the place, made to look like an English ship galley basically, and filled with drunken American teenagers endlessly repeating stories about what beer is like back home, and slurring almost incoherently about how good at drinking it they are.
Hugh was depressed and sober. The kind of sober that beer doesn’t solve, even if it is in stupidly big glasses. Beer with a dash of Stones is what he needed, straight on to the ginger freeway, none of this transit lane shit.
Half an hour later he decided that as the evening was already wasted, he may as well go back to his coffee shop to do some paperwork and make a dent in a bottle of schnapps. As he opened the back door, he stumbled with the sudden realisation that he was a lot less sober than he though. Where would this ginger freeway lead?
On entering from the back room, he was absolutely dazed to find Nadia in only her underwear, dancing and pouring two drinks. Looking around, Hugh had never regarded Nadia in that way before, given the age difference and circumstance. As Nadia walked over to him with a brazen smile on her face, Hugh had a sudden realisation that he wasn’t nearly as old as he thought he was.
“Come here and kiss me already Daniel,” Nadia said to Hugh.
Hugh stumbled for words “But...um...I...am....just...”
“Oh shut up.” Nadia said while embracing Hugh and pushing her hand go up inside his shirt.
“I wrestle with your conscience, you wrestle, with your partner, sitting on a windowsill and he spends his time behind closed doors now, check out mr business man uh-a-oh ...”
Daniel walked around the back of the counter to find some water to soothe his dry mouth after licking most of the dust from what he thought tasted like yesterday’s late morning. To his surprise all he really noticed, apart from the tap that was his goal, was a nice pair of legs and a really saggy old-man arse. In Daniel’s state, that was a very confusing thing until his rational mind kicked back in with the realisation of what it was.
Breakin’ up as he opens the door uh-a-oh...
2
Today...
“Of all the things that separate us all as people, the one thing that everyone has in common, is that we all think that we are above average drivers” proclaimed one of the ever-too-young accountants, that today had been beaten out of that forever sort after corner booth by a gaggle of lawyers fresh from some sort of quazi-humorous victory.
‘Wankers’ muttered Daniel.
Daniel was leaning up against a red lanolin counter with highly polished, rounded chrome edging. Looking up around the array of eclectic memorabilia from a life well examined, his gaze focused on a purple and black embroidered wall-hanging that read
‘Be the change that you want to see in the world.’
Daniel was, at present, nothing more than a hung over customer trying desperately to overcome that certain depression that too many consecutive nights of mediocre drinking, attempting to avoid mediocre problems, indeed mediocrity itself, that will be bearing in before too long. Still, he cut a very good image against the endless array of accountants, lawyers and anonymous professionals that mulled over their coffees all pretending to be well versed in meaningful social justice issues and why the current government were incorrect in their various policies, before it was time to quickly run off to fight against those damn poor people who were giving them so much trouble by not being able to pay their rent or those clients who didn’t really deserve the good treatment that they received, because they simply didn’t go to the right schools or weren’t pretty enough.
Daniel hated this time of day. The overpowering drive of the meaningless by an avalanche of polyester and imitation CK One, but not in a good way. These former trust fund brats, these kids that had never lived a day of their life. They had been to school and then university and done quite well. It is quite easy to when you don’t have to work to support yourself and also have private tutors all the way through, many of who do the assessment tasks and all the work for their students.
‘...Even then,’ thought Daniel, ‘...most of these guys have to trade on the father’s reputation to get their foot in the door of whatever firm they end up dedicating their whole lives and existence to. Not that that was usually much of a big deal.’“People who are able to suppress their desires only do so because they have very weak desires.”
‘Shit, I am acting like one of them’ it occurred to Daniel. He was badly quoting poetry in a scoffing and arrogant tone, but the bookmark of his Definitive William Blake had not moved from page seventeen since the day it was bought, and Daniel had no real knowledge of Blake that extended past a bad Brian Brown movie. ‘Actually, come to think of it, it was quite a good Brian Brown movie...it was a really good one....I like his movies... but regardless, that is what they would do.’
At the time of leaving his chosen profession, Daniel had been absolutely infatuated with Nadia, a waitress at the point of her life where she was starting to notice time passing her by. Daniel was still infatuated with her, but this infatuation had changed over the years from a want of ownership and sexual lust to a more attentive, friendly attraction and affection as the two had gotten to know each other.
As a schoolgirl, Nadia had naturally been assigned the role of the alternative chick that everyone wanted to be considered cool enough to be considered by. That this didn’t translate into the real existence of friendship or mutual consideration was an observation that Nadia realised very quickly, saving her the embarrassment and labelling of so many who had gone before her, and since. She had started to get involved with university studies into sociology and politics, but was also very quick at noticing how much that this was just the other side to the coin of upholding the status quo. She had dropped out and landed herself an interim job as a coffee shop waitress some six years ago.
Nadia’s ability to understand the ways of the world in more complex scenarios and overtones sadly did not usually translate into the more mundane features of her own life. She could never get through a month without forgetting about one bill or more, and as a result was constantly paying out late fees.
It's not that she couldn’t manage her affairs properly she continually told herself, it's just that she chose not to regard money as that important. She didn’t see money as an evil, like so many people who come across God or Jesus or Krishna at a supposedly convenient and opportune time in their lives. She saw them as just as bad. Hating money is the same as loving it. She didn’t want to love money, but the opposite of love isn’t hate, it's indifference. Greed is the opposite of hatred; it is collecting the pleasant and repelling the unpleasant. Finally indifference is the opposite of greed, which completes the spiral.
A virtue always sits on a point halfway between two vices.
So Nadia was indifferent to money, which at the end of the day, doesn’t cost nearly as much as hating money. Hating money involves much more. Chanting that materialism is wrong and that it is only one’s true inner worth that should be of concern for value, not outward appearance or the opinion of others. This becomes very expensive at times like when one sees a groovy eastern-looking statue that they know will look fabulous on their Duchamp-want-to-be shelves and annoy the bugger out of all their friends for not owning anything nearly as transcendental.
Nadia’s ability to understand the ways of the world in more complex scenarios and overtones did, however, extend to the ability to see this in other people. So many people claim this quality as their own, but few genuinely have it. Lucky for Daniel, Nadia could easily steer him away from going and buying a really large Buddha statue to put in his front yard to inform everyone of how spiritual he was. Daniel’s generation had their Buddhas and anti-materialist sayings were the equivalent of the baby boomer’s Strelitzias. It proves that one is effluent ...affluent...something...whatever. That and being able to talk about interest rates or house prices or inflation for longer than it takes for someone like Nadia to make a macchiato with a twist to go.
Daniel had left his chosen profession because his want to help out his fellow man, to fight the good fight, had led him to the ultimate and inevitable conclusion; he really didn’t like his fellow man.
This realisation had, fortunately for Daniel, occurred to him as Nadia was making him his mocha decafe latte, or whatever it was that he used to drink. It had become not only the focus of the pair’s first real conversation, but also the start of a new project that Nadia saw for herself: to fix this guy.
Less than three years ago, Daniel had been one of them; having the right clothes, image and abilities. It never seemed to sit properly with him though. He always wanted to see himself as one of them, but he always knew that there was something else there, something that just didn’t sit properly. Every once in a while he found himself so lonely in a roomful of them and all too often he found himself scoffing at them, looking down on them at times where their ability to present the facade of intelligence and learned cosmopolitanism failed, and their abject stupidity shone through without diffusion.
Still, the feeling that he was not completely accepted by them presented a paradox, on the one hand he was better than them in every way, but shouldn’t that mean that he should get to choose to not accept them, not them choosing to accept him?
Once, as a workplace prank, Daniel had noticed a sign on a colleague’s office wall quoting five or six lines of Foucault on multicultural governance. In what he thought was an attempt to fit in with the guys, but upon reflection was probably more a rare flex of intellectual muscles, or perhaps just a love of the insubordinate, Daniel had copied the style and font, then replaced the text. The replacement text was considerably more in line with the academic level of the office as it used Heman’s oppression of Skelator as the main analogy.
It was several weeks before the change was noticed The office manager, one always building empires with claims of greatness of skill, commitment and ability, provided a short monologue about how it takes all sorts for the world to turn, and that everyone’s opinions should be respected and encouraged no matter how strange.
There really was nothing to be said about that. Much later it became a source of great antagonism when the office manager realised that he had presented himself as an idiot. Actually, he had to be told this by his wife, twice.
For some reason, the memory of this type of event now brought with it just as much angst as joy now that Daniel had left. In short, after struggling for many years with the idea that being a lawyer, helping out the little guy, the person that society, with its broad and violent swings and turns had completely left out, Daniel had just one day given up.
He was sitting in the seat now next to him. A seat that he usually loved. It was his favourite mainly because it was the one seat in the coffee shop from where one could see right through into the back room, but without being too far exposed to the notice of customers paying their bill at the register. The seat where one gets to see the fishbowl, but not be in it.
Daniel’s favourite seat was now being occupied by what may be our next chief justice, or maybe we’ll be luckier and he’ll die before that. But then there are another thousand guys like him that would then take his place.
“Still, with that Mabo guy, it was really good that those people got their land back” pontificated our next chief justice. His college, ever the small business supporter, rejected this by claiming that because farmers provide our food, they can’t be expected to bear the cost of past injustices.
‘Wankers’ thought Daniel, ‘...just because their hearts are in the right place doesn’t make up for the fact that they are stupid and lazy’. But then this is the claim that may be laid against so many quite successful solicitors and legal writers. At one stage, it could have been very true of Daniel, until he realised that, which in turn logically negated it.
It was towards the end of August, not yet fully spring, with only a hint of the intensity that summer brings to put people in touch with their souls for a fleeting moment. Most times, people just treat this in a proclamation to lose weight and then look like the guy or gal in the Myer catalogue in their knickers, but every so often the thought comes through: new year coming, new hope, same story, another chance to get it together, to get it right.
Perhaps it was for this reason that on this day, Daniel decided to flex some grey matter against this crowd. But then the thought occurred to him that it may be that he still wanted Nadia to think of him that which he knew wasn’t true.
The conversation at the sort after corner booth had floated in and out of in-crowd conversations and back again. The new girlfriend of one of the more senior members of the group, Jason, was now the focus of some conversational review. The seniority of Jason was probably not formalised in any way, people didn’t fear him in a that way, but there was certainly an uneasiness to any attempt of tongue-in-cheek ridicule that is the conversational meat and three veg of those who have not grown too much socially since high school. Perhaps one would only notice the smallest changes in these people; farts were no longer quite as funny as they once were, or maybe the social acceptability of admitting an admiration of a fart had greatly declined. Jason was probably just good at what he did and his colleagues respected him for that.
There were generalist comments about his lack of commitment in previous relationships, and Jason’s seeming inability to put up with second-best were made in a more vulgar way. Then the inevitable comment from that twitchy guy on the end that corrects any bystanders who may have been of the opinion that the conversation was already in the gutter and had nowhere further to go. That guy who for whatever reason seems to never understand the motif of a conversation, even one as low brow as this. He is always in this group though.
Jason, appearing to live up to the respect endeared upon him by the others at the booth, saved the conversation by releasing it out of its in-crowd nature. “She and I have very similar taste in art and music, which I believe is very important in a relationship.”
Jason was one who believed that people were born with good taste, or they weren’t, which is a terrible quality for a lawyer to have. This belief all too easily translates into a class based, positivist understanding of life. Crime is committed by criminals, who are born that way. Even worse, the concept that God likes rich people...why else would they be rich? Not that it mattered to Jason, he had a very large Buddha in his Ascot home, so that all can easily see how spiritual he is.
“I have such a wide-ranging appreciation of music...a very highly developed taste for different sources of rhythm, melody, harmony...and she is on the same page...” boasted Jason.
‘...such a wide-ranging appreciation of music, what does that mean?” asked Nadia under her breath.
Daniel pondered, “...that he likes Tom Jones AND Metallica most likely.”
That was about it. Daniel couldn’t stand to sit by any longer and not take part in a conversation that was clearly meant for all to hear and awe. Ever the protagonist, he sauntered over closer to the booth. “My parents” he started, “simply don’t have any taste in music at all. It’s not that they have bad taste, or good taste, they have no taste. Their record and CD collection has some great albums, some not so great and some truly terrible ones, but there is no discernable thread, no control perceivable in it.”
A few of the gaggle of lawyers were a little put out, upset about the influx of a different thinker coming into their conversation. Perhaps they were just afraid of being inevitably pushed down yet another rung in the order of things. There was nothing to be done about it however as Jason immediately relished the input from a clearly different mind. Jason clearly understood that if you are fighting the good fight, you cannot hide at all. The good guys don’t hide.
What were the lawyers to do? Jason lifted his cup of mocca decaf latte with a twist of lemon, more to cover his face from the slight wave of shyness that came over him than because he liked the taste or found the experience refreshing. With a smile on his face, he non-verbally welcomed the new input into the booth’s conversation and with a half nod, implored Daniel to continue his thought.
“The way I see it, if you could teach an old dog new tricks, you should be able to teach someone to have good taste in music and art.” Daniel provided. “Say you have a person, absolutely no taste in music, but unlike my parents, is quite aware of this and not overly worried about it.”
“But taste is such to a person so as if one didn’t have taste, one would not be a truly developed person,” protested Jason.
Undeterred, Daniel continued along his thought experiment “He has a decent income, decent friends, many of who have good, yet differing tastes in music. He has a good life in essence.”
“Then one day, taste in music becomes important to him, perhaps, um, let's say he meets a girl that he instantly adores, and very quickly realises that he needs to be the whole thing to be considered by her.” Daniel used that vague, just coming up with things on the spot that so many philosophers use to lord it over others, as if the thought hasn’t occurred to them many times and has been refined to the point that any contrary point will fail. Yet any contrary point will come from a thinker who is of the opinion that the protagonist is thinking all this up on the run as well, and as such is phenomenally smarter.
“Part of being ‘all that’ is having an at least developing sense of what is good music.”
“So he goes out and buys the top twenty CDs of all time, according to Rolling Stone magazine...listens to them over and over...studies them...reads all about why they are so good...listens to his friends that supposedly have good taste in music and their opinions and insights...”
“Then it happens. At one particular moment, what he hears and what he is reading become a part of who he is. Then one day he listens to music not in those CDs, J.S. Bach is playing in a store somewhere and he notices that it is great music, it has features, atomic qualities of some of the music that are in the top twenty CDs. Maybe it’s the powercords that he recognises from the Sexpistols’ ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ or maybe it is the backing harmonies of Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’ or perhaps the crescendos, dissonance and resolution of Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ or Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’.”
“But just because he is now using the specific criteria of the music to listen to in a new context, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything” interrupted Jason, “he may have simply learnt how to do that from a book as well and just be parroting the method.”
“Perhaps, but it will very quickly reach a point upon which no one could tell, especially not about oneself. His understanding of good music will no longer be conditional on good music actually existing. His understanding has been idealised. Then the ultimate experience happens, he transcends the list, he agrees with one of his friends when they say that what Rolling Stone mag thinks is rubbish. “How could the Sexpistols be number two when Led Zeppelin II, which is a considerably better album, comes in at number 83? The Dark Side of the Moon only makes it to 35” he would state.”
“And he would have valid reasons. What is it that makes a great rock album? Musical qualities? Popularity? Johnny Rotten could never hold a candle to Robert Plant, let alone Steve Jones against Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin IV alone is the second highest selling album of all time and Pink Floyd was still in the charts ten years after the album was released?”
“He has tapped into the maxims, the higher order understanding as to what makes good music”
Jason pointed out the obvious “But, someone could easily come along, with good reason and rightly point out that the Sexpistols are terrible. They could even state that Sgt Peppers shouldn’t be number one, it isn’t even the best Beatles’ album.”
“Well, what is?” interrupted one of the gaggle of junior solicitors, now all trying desperately to at least present an image that they were keeping up with the flow of thoughts.
“Abbey Road” stated almost all the people in the coffee shop; however a family of three sitting out by the courtyard and a seemingly homeless man by the register all said “The White Album”.
“In fact, someone” continued Jason, “many people in actual fact would agree with your example talking about J.S. Bach, but state that absolutely no rock and roll music contains these qualities. So what your example has only taught us is that one may only learn what constitutes good music, good taste for them.”
Daniel almost fell off his stool, he certainly fell of his soapbox with this totally unexpected counterclaim that showed a level of understanding neither foreseen nor expected, but as soon as the shock was over, joy at the discovery of a potential kindred soul set in.
“Then what this goes to say is that taste is only taste in someone’s experience, that I couldn’t explain to you what good music is universally, I could only explain to you what good music is for me,” continued Jason “..but what your example may have learnt is not what good music is, not what it sounds like but what the grammar of understanding it is. So once one can learn to speak in a language, one only knows how to talk, not what to say, and this is all universal taste may present. But what then is your point?”
“My point” concluded Daniel, “is that this is all anyone ever has, it will not be one experience, it may be many, it certainly will not be all conscious experiences and will not be all be positive, it will be many negative experiences along the way, but these choices are all there is, all we have that separates us from them. This is all we can ever hope to achieve, to get some sniff, some vague scent of the idealised form that we may become; the thing-in-itself”
“Exactly” pondered Nadia,
“Existence precedes essence.”
Nadia looked at Daniel quite coyly with a slight sense of shock. She always knew that he fancied her, and looked coyly at him because she had the knowledge that one of the main reasons for the outburst was to be considered by her. She was shocked because it was almost enough, but as always, she recognised this immediately.
3
Ten days before...
“Mannie” exclaimed Nadia.
Emmanuel Giddens had worked at the coffee shop in George Street almost as long as his elder sister Nadia. He was the original kid from beyond. He had asked his sister to find him work when he was leaving home at sixteen to fund a much-needed separation from his parents, who were never quite mature enough either emotionally or spiritually to be parents. They just didn’t get it and this had led to a complete failure in providing a platform from which Emmanuel could start his journey into the world.
So Emmanuel had left to find a new place to start his life like the Irish farmer having trouble giving directions to County Cook. “...The problem with me giving you directions is if I wanted to go to Cook County, I wouldn’t start from here.”
Nadia had easily convinced her boss Hugh that it was a good idea to employ Mannie and she found a room for him in a share house just around the corner from where she lived in Coorparoo.
Emmanuel was the opposite from Nadia in the perception that he received from most people. He gave a terrible first impression and it really took a lot for a person to realise the amount of substance and intelligence behind his usually thrown-together appearance. An unwillingness to sit and listen to pretentious, drawn-out monologues of what he already knew was usually perceived as a scatty attention span and follow through. This was coupled with a natural conversational dominance that together promoted dissonance in many people’s understanding of who he was.
During high school he had always been the kid into politically motivated causes and anti-status quo causes. He hated the status quo, although he quite liked the band. This had, in the last two and a bit years, led him to become immersed in conspiracy theories and quazi-scientific theories with slight religious undertones that seek to explain the seemingly unexplainable. Quite a natural response really, for someone devoid of emotional and spiritual support from his parents, to seek a world view outside the major religions and corporate sponsorship, but with still the key elements of the existence of an all powerful entity who is capable of providing the world with justice, but justice that appears too subjective and cruel in parts to be a true semantic representation of the concept.
So Mannie could disregard the needs and very existence of his parents, while at the same time being able to respect the institution of parenthood, a role he himself would play all too early in his life to exceptional levels. This is the view of a parental relativist, one who can completely see and access some sort of objective goodness in the institution without having any regard for his own parents due to a belief that they were the ones that were lacking this concept that existed all around him.
Mannie would probably completely disagree with this rationality though. For Mannie, truth and being is dependent on a lot more than facts and existence, it is always a choice. The choice usually occurs in placing your fictional view of the truth, as to perceive the world and one’s existence in it, one always has to put one’s viewpoint outside of reality.
From a young age, he had felt as if he had been forcibly chained to a desk at school, not just his hands and feet, but his head as well so that he was unable to do anything but observe what was in front of him.
Then one day he suddenly grew intellectually and spiritually to the point that he found himself suddenly free. He could turn around, he could stand up. He had been in school, in grade ten, listening to a teacher prattle on about Cartesian Geometry; mathematics solved by geometry. Mannie wondered whether Descartes had really invented this concept. He thought that he probably had. If he had been taught it, it probably would have been named after the teacher, the Cardinal Richelieu and would be Liean geometry. That’s just a crap name.
His freedom had allowed him to realise that what he was looking at was not actually a triangle. It was perhaps at best a representation or idea of a triangle, but more than likely it was something else. It didn’t exist, it had no qualities that allowed it to exist, no shape, no size, no consciousness. It was a triangle drawn in black OHP ink on a yellow light projected on to a white board, but its boundaries where limitless and at the same time nothing. It did not start and it never ended. Its boundary point didn’t contain it, so as a shape, it didn’t have a shape. If the boundaries of the shape did exist, they would have to be able to be seen, but to see something is colour and form. The points that try to contain the triangle couldn’t be seen as they had no colour. If they were black, they were part of the triangle and thus not the end of it, and if they were white, they were not part of the triangle, and thus not the limit. They must be mere representations of a real triangle. But where is the real triangle, and why was Mannie being taught geometry by someone who had probably never witnessed a real triangle?
We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control?
Then why does one assume that a thing has to have colour to be perceived? A toothache doesn’t have colour, yet it is easily perceived by its sufferer. If it persists, it can be perceived by all around, even when it strikes the most powerful and rich among us, we cannot stand up to the constant belittling that a toothache lets upon us. Either it exists, or we don’t.
So perhaps the idea of a triangle can exist. We can have an idea of a triangle in our head, with the assumption that it does not exist outside of our own mind, but still perceive the qualities of its nature. We can perform sums about its area and size, its functions in certain circumstances, and these are nothing more than ideas, but their correlation to the idealised and warranted understanding of a triangle is something that may replace our want of being.
The problem for Mannie, and for most in this predicament, is that while this is a kitschy game when speaking of a triangle, what does it do to our understanding of truth, value and similar concepts? The truth doesn’t have any colour, unless one is a Bolshevik, then it’s red. It can be nothing more than a representation, a perception of an idealised form of it.
However when there is more than one truth, who gets to decide which is right? How does our own existence become a being in the world that has any meaning? Truth may only be nothing more than a correlation of ideas, a bag of tricks that all seem to work properly. These tricks however do not necessarily highlight and negate an untruth when they happen upon one. If Mannie were to walk along with his bag of tricks and come across someone stating that the moon is made of gooey green cheese, he could only have his tricks about astronomy and the production methods in the dairy industry to prove it wrong, but this wouldn’t do. It would be an inconsistent statement, but not a contrary one.
Mannie had, to some degree, seen the light in all of this. The unbearable lightness of being, like the unbearable light from the overhead projector had blinded him and made him appear foolish to those still in the dark. Like so many others that had truly seen the light, the light had blinded him away from being able to see the un-reality that was still being presented to his contemporaries. To one who thinks a drawing on a projector screen can be, and indeed is a triangle, the truth of the matter is not only unbelievable and beyond conception, it looks silly. To one who has seen the truth of the matter, they appear blinded by the light of it to those lurking in the shadows, stumbling and falling in any attempt to get their colleagues to simply turn around.
The truth was then all the search for Mannie’s existence. Truth about politics and about life in general. Unlike Nadia, Mannie had a great respect for the groups that hung around political science departments at universities and protested about this that and the other. He had a natural ability in some of these groups to be the envied quazi-leader, which presented a great change from his normal life, certainly to that in school. His one problem and maybe the foundation of this centripetal force that compelled others to him in this setting is that he could never seem to say when. His stunts over the previous few years had become quite legendary. While the initial reaction to his change in direction was only taken by many as a sign of insubordination and rebellion, it had at first been a great setback for him. He was ousted from many different areas of his former life and eventually out of his high school and home. The lesson learnt from this, while quite expensive, was worth it.
Essentially the lesson learned was that there was a particular point in the relationship between people, where things had been allowed to disintegrate to the point when the truth, ethics and morality of the situation have evaporated. It is at this point in time where there is only one quality remaining to be gained: winning. Winning dirty was even more appropriate if it could be done. A point at which one’s motto should be ‘win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat’.
Mannie had learnt this lesson early on in life, as had Daniel. Mannie was suspended and then expelled out of high school for something he did not do. Not that there wasn’t plenty of stuff that he did do, most of which was considerably worse. There was a deputy headmaster; a Paul McCracken that Mannie felt had a personal mission to rain on his parade. In most cases this could be just put down to teenage paranoia, however in Mannie’s case there was a fair bit of truth behind it. Mannie was fairly sure that Paul McCracken had started a schoolyard rumour about Mannie being schizophrenic, and another about him being a heroin addict, which of course all the blessed dweebs were too eager to believe. Paul McCracken’s youngest son was attending the same school as Mannie and unlike Paul’s other two sons, who would beat Bill Gates at a dork contest, the youngest boy was pretty cool, or to put it another way, he was falling in with a bad crowd. In some bizarre twist of logic, Paul McCracken had blamed Mannie for this.
When Mannie was suspended for a stupid act that he was not guilty of, he pleaded and protested his case in a very calm and rational way. This led to no response at all. He was accused of daring a new kid at school into filling up the front of a teacher’s car, a ute, with water from a fire hose. This kid had been caught in the act by the ever-vigilant Paul McCracken who had, rather than dealing with the situation in a calm and appropriate way, led the new kid through a series of questions designed to lay blame squarely at Mannie’s feet.
Mannie had been miles away, but had previously been speaking about modifying a ute so that the back could be a swimming pool. In Mannie’s eyes, the idea of driving around town in a mobile swimming pool was a great one. Not half as great an idea however as swallowing the ever-increasing number of motion sickness pills at the bus stop on the way to school that morning. This was good in that it changed both Mannie’s perception of value on issues such as mobile swimming pools and his abilities to tolerate total chumps like Paul McCracken. It also made changing Paul McCracken’s name to Pat, or Phil behind his back all the more funny.
So Mannie saw the whole thing coming while he sat in Paul McCracken’s office listening to this stupid ‘all your friends have dobbed on you, so you may as well own up’ routine. Mannie wondered if that had ever worked. ‘With the dopes I go to school with...probably’ pondered Mannie. However the disrespect of it all made Mannie furious, he wasn’t anywhere near that stupid as to fall for that one, and he wasn’t anywhere near that dishonourable to have the kind of friends that would welch on him so easily. Mannie’s problem was that to reveal the truth of what he had been talking about would have gone a long way toward revealing the misuse of non-prescription drugs, a considerably heavier malfeasance.
It raised a distinct question in Mannie’s thoughts though. When is it ok for Paul McCracken to lie in such a way? Mannie refused to accept that it was ever ok. It was weak and dishonourable. But what if Paul McCracken were acting in good faith? Would that change the situation? Could someone lie, do something quite universally regarded as an immoral act to produce a good outcome? What if he had been protecting the new kid from a bad outcome? Mannie couldn’t really entertain this thought seriously. He was too angry. The good guys never hide.
His suspension and punishment from both the school and his parents had been compounded by his (correct) refusal to admit guilt. But a lesson had been learnt, a relationship can breakdown to the point where there is only one thing remaining to do: Win, Win dirty, destroy the other person without thought of the consequences. If one cannot attempt that, there is no point to fighting.
When Mannie’s next encounter with this ideal occurred, he was better prepared, but not quite enough to truly win outright. After school music tour news came to light of student ‘experimenting’ with alcohol and other drugs, Mannie and his friends were targeted as the instigators, the troublemakers. In reality it was Paul McCracken’s youngest son and a few of his friends that found themselves in considerable trouble as a result of drinking too much. Not that Mannie and his friends hadn’t taken cigarettes, beer, vodka, hash, carsickness pills and a bevy of multicoloured unnamed pills, but no one was the wiser. They knew how to deal with it. It was all about balance. Uppers and Downers; hanging in the balance between the two is where the fun lies.