Charged with Meaning

Charged With Meaning

I have just started writing and a lady has come and sat near me. She is talking to herself. She is angry. She is telling someone to shut up. Is it me? I never said anything. Is it the voices in her head? Most likely. She is troubled, clearly. Still remonstrating with herself. My first instinct was to get up and sit somewhere else. This is London after all. This is what we do in London. Then I realised I had typed the above title. I was going to write about how we prescribe meaning to things in our everyday lives. You know, “it’s a sign” and all that. Then this lady enters stage right.

She is getting a coffee now. She is arguing with no one at the moment. She can’t be completely mad if she successfully ordered and paid for a cup of coffee. Can she? Well she’s sitting down now. Just me and her here now. Is she going to begin arguing again? She has a bottle of what appear to be cough medicine. She has just bought it from the pharmacist next door. Is she addicted to cough syrup? I might not even be cough syrup. It looks like it though. She has another bottle of medicinal liquid. She is mixing it with the cough syrup. And another bottle of some medicine. Three different types of medicine together. She’s drinking it. I wonder what it is going to do to her? Maybe she will be cured.

I was hoping she would be crazy, that she would start jabbering at me and I would have something amazing to write about. She is on her iPhone now. You can’t be crazy if you have an iPhone right? Only normal people have them. She is apologising for overreacting at the chemists on the phone. As soon as she gets off the phone she begins arguing with herself again. She is trying to justify her behaviour in the chemists, saying “you obviously don’t understand”. She is not very well. It’s not funny. She’s just troubled. I may have gleaned three vampiric paragraphs from her entering the coffee shop but there is no meaning here. There are unwell people everywhere. She needs her medicine.

What I was thinking about was when we see things as a sign. A sign from God, a portent of good, or evil. Such an odd thing. I get them myself but as life goes on I realise they are just something we do to make ourselves feel a little bit better in that particular moment. Or convince ourselves we shouldn’t do something when we don’t want to do it deep down anyway. For example, sunrises and sunsets. They happen everyday. Is it really a sign of any kind? The only signposts there are the beginning and the end of a day. They can be particularly beautiful. Bearing in mind beauty is subjective. But where do you go from there? What meaning is there apart from the passing of days.

A good friend of mine, an Argentinean man who lives in London, recently travelled up to Liverpool. He is a big fan of the Beatles. The Beatles have brought a lot of people to Britain over the last forty or so years. They are a great advertisement for our country although they were four very unique people. There aren't many people like the Beatles anywhere, in fact. I imagine a lot of tourists are disappointed to find most Brits aren’t as witty as the Beatles were. I like the Beatles a lot too. I am from the North of England, like they were. It always tickles me to think that the biggest pop group there ever was and ever will be comes from the north of England. It’s charming. A happy accident.

Yes, my friend, he went to Liverpool, did the whole Beatles tour thing. He has a Japanese girlfriend too. And long hair. Doesn't have the glasses, yet. I am sure the people of Liverpool are quite used to seeing that now. They went to John Lennon’s childhood home. They were watching all the videos that accompany the tour. There was one in which Julian Lennon claimed John Lennon believed he was represented by a white feather, it was his spirit, or something. My friend, although he is an artist, is dismissive of this kind of thing, thought it was a load of old bollocks. After leaving the house, he decided he wanted to sneak around Lennon’s old garden, which is off limits. He broke into the garden, it wasn’t hard, put his hand through the gate and unlocked it from the inside. So, there he was, with his Japanese girlfriend, sneaking around John Lennon’s garden. The naughty boy.

What happened next is true. Take whatever you want from it. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, my mate needed to take a pee. His girlfriend pleaded with him not to pee in John Lennon’s bushes but he really needed to go. He sneaked through a bush to get a bit of cover, unzipped his flies and just as he was about to piss on Lennon’s shrubbery, what did he see? A white feather. I would love to end this little anecdote by saying he pissed all over it, but of course he didn’t. He stopped what he was doing, zipped himself up, and believed the whole white feather Lennon thing. Of course he did, I would. He has the feather in one of his guitars now. It is a good little story. I like it not because of the Lennon feather thing. I like it because I have a mate who is a cheeky bugger who broke into John Lennon’s garden and was going to wee in it. I wouldn't have.

You could add meaning to that if you want. You could say the feather was Lennon, commanding this dirty bugger to put his willy back and go and pee on Penny Lane, sometimes I imagine that feather is Lennon. Then other times I know it isn’t. What I really mean though is, what was the end result of the whole story? Nothing really. I don’t know if the feather in the guitar has helped my friend write a string of pop classics, I imagine he would have told me by now. Maybe the world would have ended if a man from Buenos Aries pisses in a Woolton bush? Maybe the ghost of Lennon is protective of his Aunt Mimi’s garden? The answer is none of them. There is nothing wrong with that either. The story is surely enough. The only meaning we need really. Something to talk about in the pub and everyone can go "ooh" then forget about it.

I was also thinking about how I could have used the old John Lennon was a rebel analogy. He would have been proud of this man for having the cheek to sneak around his garden and urinate wherever he pleased. He was a rebel, according to all the old stories. He was also a Hippie, a junkie, a singer, a father, a Beatle, I could go on. He was many things, and none of them have anything to do what happened on this day. Because he is dead. He was not there.

It is the meaningless of our lives, the unbearable lightness of being, tricking us into concocting these little moments. We live then we die, we are what we are. We have some time to do stuff, then we are gone. If we try and add significance to the everyday, the sunrises, the feathers, the Turin Shroud, we are cheating ourselves. We are trying to convince ourselves our time will come. That someone, or something will save us. You will keep on believing until you are dead. You can choose to be self indulgent and depressed about how pointless existence is, or you can use your time to do whatever the fuck you like, as it won't make a blind bit of difference anyway. That includes pissing in bushes.