Friday 13 October 2017

The Diurnal Jekyll and Hyde Problem.

All my life I’ve been subject to an odd phenomenon: the person who wakes up in my body in the morning isn’t the same person who went to sleep in it the night before. The waking person usually holds shift all through the day and into the evening, and sometimes carries on until quite late at night. But at some point he undergoes a curious metamorphosis.

He stops being sensible, preferring instead to adopt a mixture of subversion and silliness. He hates all expressions of earnestness with a passion. He acknowledges the fact that moths are really fairies in disguise, rates aardvarks above academics, and would rather talk about the positive aspects of insanity than the State of the Union. (Neither of them understands how the hell Trump got to be President, but that’s pretty universal.)

Take the last post, for example, the one about hedonism. It was written yesterday, partly through the daylight hours and partly in early evening. When I came to post it later, the other guy had come on shift.

‘What the hell is this pile of shite?’ he asked sardonically. ‘It’s too serious, too rational, too grey; it stinks of earnestness, for heaven’s sake. It makes you look like the sort of person who went to school and wears a necktie sometimes. Do you? Wear a necktie, that is? No? No. So do not post the bloody thing. It’s bilge.’

And so I didn’t. The problem was that the current incumbent had nothing particular to say about anything that was either subversive or silly, and that’s why there were no blog posts last night. I watched another Japanese horror movie instead.

(Actually, I only watched half of it because the night shift operative has a very short attention span. As for the movie, it’s called Kaidan and I’m very much enjoying it. The only problem is that the male protagonist is uncannily like me in attitude and behaviour, so I’m finding him lacking credibility and somewhat dislikeable. The women are good, though, and mostly pretty.)

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