Glass

If I’ve learned anything over the years as a high-stakes financial advisor, it’s, uh… not much actually.

Turns out that the majority of my well-to-do clients were born into their money and did absolutely nothing to grow or even lose their vast wealth. They would pay me exorbitant sums to move their money around, but the truth of the matter is that I truly didn’t do very much – not that they would have ever noticed of course.

So I took their money and thanked them for it, typing up detailed explanations on expenditure and divestiture, none of which they read, and dutifully installed a brand new glass balustrade in my third home. 

I don’t know how they managed to pass the time, to be honest – I feel I’d get bored with nothing to do but spend my untold fortunes. But manage it, they do, ticking away the cents and the dollars as reliably as the sun sets and rises (although a private jet can outrun a sunset for a surprisingly long time). 

And now I’m retired, sitting in my beachfront chalet, sipping on hundred-year-old claret and thinking back on all the rich idiots I used to know. I once knew a woman who flew a man in from a small Mediterranean town just to consult on a glass repair in Melbourne – he didn’t even touch the thing, just leant over the actual glazier and occasionally grunted in approval!

It truly does baffle the mind.

My ex-wife called me recently from our timeshare – the yacht – telling me about a ridiculous billionaire that had just met up with her party and told her about his new business renting islands to wealthy tourists for the weekend. She laughed in his face, then snuck away to call her stockbroker and organise an island of her own. Lovely guy actually, he officiated my third and fifth weddings.

Anyway, the point is… what was the point? Eh, I guess it doesn’t matter. Ooh, my caviar is here!

How long, forsooth, does thou perceive this piece of string?

You cannot see the piece of string, you say? Does this matter in such things? Perception is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, ‘twixt a cosmic dance of known and unknown, the felt and the real. 

For what is the real? Can anything be real? I think, therefore I am… but what is it to think? To actually experience one’s thoughts, in chronological or fluid time? Pray, the brain in the jar – does he not think? Is he am? Of course, so goes the common thread. But what of the simple, affordable glazier near Melbourne? Could he build such a jar? Why would he do such a thing?

The maintenance of brains and jars is a fraught issue, that has caused many a philosophical row in the distant future – indeed, not far from the very spot where you are reading this today. Melbourne sheds its name, as do all things who live long enough to watch themselves die. An idea, however… and idea can never die. It can be moulded, twisted, forgotten and lost – but death? Death is as foreign to an idea as life is to a memory. 

Understood, replicated… but never approached.

Return, then, to our glazier, hard at work on an affordable stair balustrade repair, renovation, revivification. But isn’t he imaginary, to you? Real as he may be, somewhere, you have never laid thought on him – how so is he touchable? Provable.

Alive?

Such conversations are meaningless, of course, lacking in course and destination; but that doesn’t mean they’re useless. Why, the two terms are interlinked, inextricable, intertwined but… so distant. Never to touch. For if they were to touch, they would surely no longer be; separate.

And so too must we separate. The time for lurid words is behind and ahead, but here no longer. I leave you with but one thought:

Do you know anywhere to find an affordable glazier in Melbourne?

Think on it a while.