So this is the next Monday of your life ...

I'm just about finished preparing committee meeting papers that have to be ready for distribution by Noon today. There's a sense in which this moment sums up my dumb ass life.

It's what? Two eighteen on a Monday morning and I'm at my desk in an empty apartment working on committee papers that almost no one will read and even fewer will remember in four days time. Simply Red's Holding Back The Years has just been been followed on my PC by Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars. It's a bit fucking much when your MP3 downloads comment more perceptively on your existence than you can. When I say "you", by the way, I mean me.

And in a typically unprofessional act of public servant preparation I've included T S Eliot in my introduction to this month's report of work. It's an extract from Four Quartets, which came to mind when I had to think about how to refer to Matt's death. These words:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Will I feel more hopeful when I wake? I certainly hope so. Do I believe that I will? Not really but we'll see. Besides, what other option presents itself? That's right. None. You get on with it because you lack the imagination to do anything more creative or courageous, which is sad in a way. A moment of less than triumphant self-awareness in a life capable of all kinds of mediocrity and under-achievement. Situation normal.
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