Crispin (Working Title) Part 2

...For around two months now Crispin has been going on his outings, and he doesn't always just stand, or sit on benches, an unseen spectator watching these foreign worlds go by. Sometimes he walks their streets for hours at a time, so much so that it is not unusual for him to walk until his footwear falls apart. In fact, when purchasing new footwear, whether casual trainers, pumps, smart shoes or winter boots, he must bear in mind the fate that awaits his traveling companions. Is he to buy expensive footwear that may withstand, for a time at least, the scrapes and knocks, the bangs and scuffs, that the man-made and natural terrains before him will surely inflict? Or, conversely, is he to purchase lower quality, inexpensive alternatives, accepting the fact that such degenerative effects are inevitable, and therefore lessening his financial expenditure? Such considerations cannot be taken lightly. Sometimes Crispin visits the local charity shops to his chosen location and purchases old - though not old enough to be of any monetary value - editions of classic novels. Some he remembers from school: Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, others: Candide, Walden, Don Quixote, The Catcher in the Rye, Hard Times, he became aware of through unknown sources, as if they are so much a part of his mind that he knew of them instantly the moment he was born. Crispin is human and, often to his irritation, has to eat. And so he sometimes restores his energy with a pasty from Gregg's or a sandwich from Subway. The latter he will order with all possible choices of vegetables and salad, so as to maximise his investment. 

But these seemingly mundane activities are just a part of a far less mundane whole, for this is not Crispin's life, and the person he is when in these foreign worlds only vaguely resembles the person he is when in his own world. It is Crispin's own world that is mundane, that is ordinary. The casual observer would conclude that Crispin is a customer service advisor at the Brighton branch of Ryman's, stands five feet nine inches tall, has fine black hair and a short, patchy black beard which harbours small, irregular plots of grey, and lives in a modest, rented, one bedroom flat with a damp problem and a small community of slugs in the bathroom. It is perhaps the insipidity, the dull colourlessness of his own world, that lead Crispin to find himself engaged in a new pastime, referred hereto as his outings. Every chance Crispin gets he detaches himself from the life he knows and places himself into the life of another. The greatest passion in his existence is to exist at once both as himself and as someone else, thus creating a sort of super-self that is as entangled with its memories, dreams, fears and perceptions as it is free from them. On his outings Crispin has the chance to become anyone or no one, tangible or transcendent, alive or non existent. He is exhilarated at the prospect of being the creator of his own self; free from the self imposed on him by the people that know him in his everyday life, and free also from the behaviour he must carry out, the thoughts he must think and the feelings his must feel to keep that life intact.