MUSINGS

The select company that I would wish for today — in addition to a generous number of very attractive lecherous ladies –in celebration as my chronological age reaches a score, is not of the few distinguished personages that I have come to cherish in society (my family and friends), but it is of such votaries whose travails always inspire, and whose agonies resembled my own. Like Archimedes, immortalised by his mastery of Arithmetic (and the last man to dine with the venerable visitors from the skies); William Blake, who a midst forces bent to his assassination and amongst vile and industrious men conspiring to that end, learnt to savour the pernicious madness that plagued his mind and draw from it a pleasure which none but mad men know; and Nicholas Flamel, the Great sage, thorough in his mastery of the antiquated arts of alchemy and magic…. To draw such figures into conversation on their reminisces of times past, to elicit from such minds a few remarks on many matters, and descend into the uncharted domains of metaphysical science in a fiery argument that runs till dawn…aaaah, bliss! Usually, my moments are disbursed to my most loyal peers: classical music, chess, and a treasured collection of books that I quite prudently rescued from the ravenous rats that made home in my high school library. And with the firm hand of my late father’s instruction (apparent only as apparitions, false memories and scarcely as dreams) they have brought forth a man from a boy at the precipice of vanity. Through calamitous events and painful errors, they have cultured my little precocity into some wisdom. And by being a brilliant distraction from the vicissitudes of daily life, they have shielded my mind from the constant plagues of cyclothymia. If ever I have sinned, I pray, forgive me, and if i deserve some pain, do not punish me harshly, for mine were never sins of intention, but of inadvertence. All my life, I have put to mind naught but this: a man is only what he thinks he is…this is the truth. But, let me leave it at that. Besides, thought is the slave of life, and life, time’s fool…