I am writing this from the public library. This eddifice is at best 15 houses, and one four lane boulevard, away from my home. Nerds engaging in role playing games have driven me from my home. These are games where crafting the characters can take longer than gameplay. When I walked in and saw what was happening I considered my options. With twenty-something year old bodies strewn about my house, neither could I watch television, nor could I play music on the big Harmon Kardon speaker in my kitchen. Thus, I took flight.
I had three choices. First, I could walk back to my office and work on my backlog of cases. Bag that. Second, I could walk to the community center and sit in an area what had been designed as a coffee shop but now serves as sort of an snack bar with a couple of junk food dispensing machines. Bag that. The last option was the public library. Hey, I had a movie I had to return by tonight anyway, so here I am.
One of the things I like most about libraries is perusing the titles of the new volumes set out to catch readers’ eyes. I will not read one percent of one percent of one percent of all the things printed in any given year. But ah how the titles intrigue me. Today I was struck by one title, “The Land of Lost Borders”. I don’t know what it is about. Really, I don’t care what it is about. If I wanted I could use the electronic search engines on my phone or on this iPad and I could get a rating and a synopsis. I don’t want that.
When I see a title like, “The Land of Lost Borders”, it sets my imagination off in a hundred directions. Assuming it is fiction, and it well may not be, I imagine it to be a book about a place that lies between two countries that has been fought over so many times and remapped so many times that the warring neighbors have simple left the place as a permeable free zone, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller. While there are towns with elected councils, the place is really a government by principles rather than laws. “We don’t do that here”, would be a phrase that has as much power as any codified statute in any “civilized” nation.
Or perhaps the tale could be one of dementia. The title might reference the mind of person that one day seems sharp and focused and on another totally lost. Or it could be a tale of two people wandering through the mountains of a friendly nation only to find out their map was out of date and they have trespassed into a land where they are by the very insignia on their passports spies.
Walking past book titles is such a starting point for these flights of my mental fancy. Some nights I will tease out the story I tied to the title into something that would almost qualify as a movie treatment if not an elevator pitch for a limited 6 episode Amazon Prime series starring Charles Dance and Kiera Knightly. If you don’t know Charles Dance watch The Widow on Amazon Prime.
My plan for my flight from the nerds was to bring my earbuds with me and listen to what is referred to on my iPhone as my Shazam playlist. There are a couple of hundred songs on this that I have identified from television soundtracks or coffee house speakers. The basic style of a song on this playlist is a solo vocal with an acoustic guitar, an electric bass and a song structure/lyric that is most likely a cryptic ballad. Damned if I didn’t forget my earbuds. Oyster crackers I brought. Pills that make me La-La so I can fly in aero planes I brought. And a crushed hard boiled egg in a ziplock back (of unknown vintage) I brought.
A break is taken here to dispose of said egg. If the bag were to open, the egg would become not just my problem.
....a short time passes....
The egg is gone into a recepticle hopefully not to open and thus not to offend any one. Where was I, oh yeah I was going to listen to music. Not happening, instead I am listening to squeals of kids in the kids’ books area, a place with soft furniture and fantastic imaginary creatures painted on the walls. I can also hear the coed near me shuffling books as she makes a vain attempt to do her work. One books slides out to the middle of the table as she pushes it away. She flips her phone up and swipes through a couple of screens. The phone then goes face down on the table. With her forefinger she flips through a few pages of a book, her other hand tapping on the table. The book closes and she flips through a few more screens on her smart phone. It is clear, maybe not to her, but to anyone around her, she is not in the right mental place to do intellectual work tonight. Perhaps my tapping away at this keyboard is distracting her. I doubt it.
The “Land of Lost Borders”, has sent me down another path, I am thinking of the short nature of my time upon this sphere. Once, not so long ago really, time seemed infinite and it seemed manageable. Time could be pushed back. Time could be tamed. There would be the occasional loss to time of someone to an accident or a rare and dread disease. But as long as one stayed relatively fit and did not hang glade or sleep with the spouses of very jealous and very well armed people, time could be ignored. Such is not the case now.
If things go as is planned I will walk away from work in 7 1/2 months. If things go as planned I will walk away from the place I have lived and loved for most of the last 40 years. (Right now I loathe this place, the leaders seem lost in a vision that is just not what made to this place attractive to large portions of the people who have opted to be permanent residents). But I won’t dwell on that. My country too is leaving me behind. It is time for me to go somewhere for a bit. Maybe I will go for all the time I have left. I just don’t know.
But the contemplation of these changes tells me that I may have as little as a day and maybe no more than eight years left here on this mortal coil. I am not thinking of this with dread but with an acceptance. Kind of in the old Buddhist frame of mind here. I have grown old but I have never grown up. Maybe that has been for the best. I don’t think I was really designed to be a mature adult, a person of gravitas and substance. Me, I am just filler. You know what I am okay with that.
