When Greg Evigan discovered gravity in 1999 people thought he was deluded, but the last thirteen years have shown his insane vision to be correct. And I bore witness to gravity's whorish power today.
This morning started badly enough. I was emptying our dishwasher and discovered that one of our continental style Stella Artois glasses had cracked and broken. We only had two of them and now we could no longer drink beer together pretending we were in a Brussels cafe (we have never done that - we tend to use them for Beroccas). These things happen. I didn't mourn too much. In any case the other day I had specifically kept a padded envelope in case some glass got broken. This is my top tip as it's much more efficient and safer than wrapping glass in newspaper. Save your padded envelopes and it's like you're posting your broken glasses to the dump. Or if you are so minded as to see your glasses as living entities it can also function as a designer coffin that will make the other broken bits of crockery at the tip feel jealous and/or respectful.
Moments later, when loading the dishwasher a different glass (a tumbler ironically enough) seemed to jump out of my hand and smashed into a billion diamond pieces on the floor. To break one glass in a morning can be seen as unfortunate, to smash two makes you seem like some kind of clown. I was standing in my bare feet, amongst this sprawling constellation of twinkling stars. They looked pretty, but if like Icarus you got too close they might destroy you (or cut your foot a bit). I negotiated my way out of danger, though this dusting of glassy snow had covered a surprisingly large section of the kitchen floor. I would never thought, when I looked at that solid glass that it could so easily transform into so many separate parts. Thanks to gravity it had changed from a useful vessel into an annoying booby trap. However hard I swept some tiny shard would survive to lodge itself in my skin in hours or days or weeks.
It seemed odd to have lost this second glass; almost as if, bereft at the loss of its true love it had decided it could not go on and ended it all. I would have assumed that if glasses had relationships with each other they remained within their own styles. You'd think that the Stella Artois glass would have been married to the other Stella Artois glass. But perhaps I am being disrespectful to glass culture. Maybe similar glasses are more like siblings than lovers.
Or maybe I am correct and the Stella Artois glasses had been forced into an unhappy union, like pandas at a zoo, pushed together because they were the only glasses of that species in the house. And maybe my dead Stella Artois glass had looked for comfort elsewhere in the arms (well not arms) of the tumbler. It must be hard to conduct a secret affair in the glass cupboard, but occasionally they might have found themselves together on a coffee table or in a sink or in the dishwasher and been able to enjoy some time together. I can imagine them frollicking in the suds of the washing up bowl without a care in the world (apart from the worry that any too vigourous interaction might destroy one of them).
I managed to get nearly all of the tumbler into the dustpan and then tipped it into the same envelope that the Stella glass was lying in. At least now they would spend eternity together, jumbled together in a sea of shattered dreams, in an envelope.
Though spare a thought for the other Stella glass, now sad and alone, with all the other glasses finally becoming aware of the sordid antics of its partner.
And a couple of successes on the 2 year aims. Tom Smith has succeeded in becoming a train driver - he started training this month and has already had a go at driving a train.
Former virgin Dave Warburton aim was "I really hope to still be travelling and writing, and have avoided being lured back into a rubbish normal job. (Hopefully doing an Asian girl too)."
He now writes "Two years later I'm still wandering on whims around (mostly) Asia, paying my way with freelance corporate writing and keeping myself sane with
compulsive blogging (I wonder where I learned that?) It's mostly a good life." And he has a girlfriend too. Nice!
