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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Of stories and those who tell them.


It's been a while,hasn't it? A while since I have done......well , anything really. What was fresh and exciting becomes drudgery. What was fun becomes a Russian play's 3rd act. What was refreshing is now stale, like the hunk of cheese in my fridge that neither me nor my roommate wants to finish off (I wonder why ???).

The closest I have come to reading Kafka might be reading the blurb in a collection that the aforementioned reading the other day, but existential angst is really the best way to describe what's happening right now. The world seems a drab, a little out of focus, like one of those old colour photograph that you discover in your mother's drawer. OK perhaps angst is too strong a word, maybe existential boredom sums it up better.

Sometimes it seems like there is never enough too do, and never enough time to do it in. Strange, right. So what exactly is it I'm looking for? Peace? Love? Substance to abuse? Nah. I guess I am just looking for stories. Does anyone else feel like that? Like life is just a collection of stories, and you are living in far too many of them? And that none of them are very well written or make much sense? I guess I am just looking for the perfect story. MY story.

There is something incredibly romantic about minstrels. To move from town to town, just telling stories, the idea itself is so intoxicating. Oh sure, they would sing and dance and play an oddly shaped instrument or two, but what they were were storymen. They were never the heroes, or the villains. They didn't create legends, but they kept them alive. They were for all practical purposes inconsiquential, unimportant, and in their own way, the very basis of everything I hold dear. I feel a bit of kinship with those wandering verbal magicians of the middle ages. When I am gone I won't be missed, but perhaps the stories will be.