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Perhaps I spoke too soon? Not twenty minutes since I posted my last little musing, a grey sky has dragged itself across the city skyline. Still it’s a glass half-full/empty type question: What does the Peach need more at the moment – some sun, drinking peachy beers bathed in warm light or a solid bout of rain, to seep through the drought dry dirt and down to his roots? The first scenario suggests a ripened Peach, ready to fall off the tree and roll down the hill to SPC or whoever will take him. The latter, a distinctly unready Peach, still biding his time on the family stalk, drinking up the rain and waiting for a sunny day when he can fulfil his promise.
Not long now. In a couple of hours this peach will be free, out there under the faultless blue sky breathing easy for the first time in three years. It’s a landmark moment, a watershed in this young peach’s development and still the day has stumbled along as any other day at the office. A timely reminder of why the pattering of typing figures and glass-muffled conversations between solicitors evokes entrapment, even entombment.
Not that it’s hard work. Quite the opposite. This has been as cushy as it gets – slack supervision, access to the internet, a minimum of work and responsibility. Long lunch breaks, high pay. No questions asked, no performance levels to be met. But then again, every day making forced conversation, in the awkwardly long corridors, at the photocopier, in the elevator. Having to deftly parry questions about my assumed long tenure here (the questions being primarily based around, will you start straight away or take a year off after you graduate?). But no, those things aren’t difficult and other jobs will requires just as much social black holes.
The problem is in the very nature of the place, the way it’s geared. The colour schemes and the dress sense and the only real indication of the utter dreariness of the place – the complete confinement of legitimate horizons and trajectories. There are such a limited number of acceptable paths and choices that everyone comes across as cookie-cutterish. It’s easier for some rather than others – some were just born ‘normal’, with parents who cultivated that sort of thing. Others adapted at school. And for some it just doesn’t work. Square pegs, round holes, etc. etc. etc. But it’s not as simply adolescent as ‘I don’t fit in here’.
Instead, it’s just that the most exhilarating feeling I can conceive of is the one you get when you imagine yourself capable and big enough for anything, and everything, not over time but all at once, in the same instant. As if all your life’s myriad of different trajectories could be lived and experienced and swallowed up whole just in the second it takes you to think it. And not just forwards trajectories either but backwards ones too – all of the them. The feeling that you don’t sit on some apex of time splitting past from future but instead that you inhabit an eternal present – all choices are open to you and have always been open to you and rather than choosing one and closing off the rest you chose them all and choose them all and not only is everything possible it already is.
And working in a law firm is pretty much the opposite of that feeling. Things open up when I’m reading a really great novel – somehow a good book can make the world seem simple in its complexity and so my own life too seems to be laid out flat on the page in every direction, not linear (and therefore limited in open possibilities) because I can read backwards or traverse the page up instead of down. Writers like Hunter S. make me feel that way, and D.F.W. too. The ones that play with the language, rather than let Grammar dictate their writing.
So coming down to it all freedom really is (for me at least) a matter of words. Of being able to choose them and chew them up and twist them around and make them ugly or beautiful. Not drafting and redrafting Amended Statement of Claims to remove insinuation A or implication B. So this Peach is going to try and cut loose a little bit, relax when at the helm and let the current tug him along a little bit. Who knows where it leads? Funnily enough the naïve little Peach opined some weeks back that the economic crisis was unreal – what financial markets? – and then he got his termination email and things started to spiral. But maybe I was right after all – this economic crisis hasn’t affected me, at least not detrimentally. It’s slipped off one of the shackles holding me back and though godonlyknows how many shackles remain (I’ve a fair inkling of the whereabouts and M.O.’s of a couple) at least one unmanacled wrist can stretch out a little bit and start trying to write something a little different.
