“Am I here at all?” I wondered as I sat there in Mr Waffle, waiting for my fruit scone to arrive. “Is there any enduring sense in which any of this might actually be said to be happening?” No answer was forthcoming, needless to say. The universe always remains quite inscrutable when subjected to interrogation of this sort. As I knew well. Any hint of an answer would of course dignify the question with some sort of … some sort of…
The word eluded me and my thought process ran out of steam. I lost my thread. Why did everything have to turn into some kind of giant question mark, I asked myself. Why did reality have to be so slippery? How was it possible to simply get on with life in the face of such a thoroughly intractable existential conundrum? These thoughts and many similar thoughts arose in my mind, confounding and perplexing me, and then disappeared again, leaving me none the wiser.
I sat there looking out of the window, watching people going by on the street, waiting on my scone. Which seemed to be a long time coming. “Well such existential dilemmas certainly didn’t seem to bother the man in the street”, it occurred to me after a while. “Or the woman in the street, for that matter”. People continued to walk by. It had started to rain. “Am I missing something?” I wondered. My scone arrived and I ate it absent-mindedly.
“Maybe everyone knows something that I don’t?” This certainly seemed to be a possibility. An endless stream of people kept on walking by, intent upon their own business. “Aren’t people always intent upon their own business anyway?” I commented wryly to myself. “Unless they’re intent on someone else’s business, that is…”
This, I realized, was me commentating on my own thoughts, which made it a metacommentary. And the fact that I was now thinking about my own metacommentary was clearly a meta-meta-commentary. This line of thinking was clearly getting me nowhere so I stopped it, with an effort, before it got too far. Before it got out of hand. “Are ANY of these thoughts actually getting me anywhere?” I wondered then, getting disillusioned. “Do ANY of my thoughts actually mean anything, when it comes right down to it?”
No answer came, and I knew this was the universe refusing to play ball again.
