IF YOU DON"T LIKE THE MUSTARD...

IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE MUSTARD, DON”T BLAME THE HOT-DOG…

And should be beware of Latin scholars disguised as Greeks bearing galdioli disguised as fake roses?

there’s a woman sells flowers on the street, individual roses, for whatever you can afford. I spoke to her once. She told me she was abducted as a child, long before she went to Oxford. Sometimes she feels she was never really brought back to earth, if in fact she ever really left. She has no memory of being taken up into space. One alienating rite of passage is as traumatic as any other. For many people meeting somebody who doesn’t speak the same language can be a life-changer.

To this day she’s not sure what they seemed to be was really what they looked like. But they obviously were niot human, given her experience of what humans looked like. And they didn’t seem to breathe for a living. There were no bright lights, no white coats, and though she knew she was being touched she never felt anything, They had no hands and there was no pain. She wasn’t kept in a cage or strapped down on a gurney. She was perfectly free to leave if she chose. She knew she was being studied, but she never saw their eyes. She knew she was at their mercy but she felt no fear. And since then she has never struggled to explain anything. Not even how she was accepted into Oxford when she has no memory of passing any exams or attending any interviews. She’s never taken drugs or behaved promiscuously. But now she lives in state-subsidized housing and has to sleep with her door locked every night, as if everybody is afraid that something will happen that will never happen.

If you buy a flower, she will recite you a poem, always the same poem : “the moon hangs full and low and heavy / to be afraid of the dark is to be afraid of nothing.” I asked her where she gets the flowers from, she replied that she would never lie to me. I forgot to ask her if she ever graduated Oxford. Though by no stretch of the imagination do I consider going to Oxford as an abduction. Further education can probe and prod you into directions many immigrants on this planet would never have dreamed possible, be it Westminster, MI6, or selling flowers on the street and spouting flawed haikus. Places you might seem to appear nothing like what you really looked like. Just another alienated abductee soul going about their daily business.

But who am I to judge somebody else’s traumatic response to being born? Nothing should be the theory held in evidence against your right to be something or anything you never really chose to be. I rest my case and throw myself on the mercy of whatever might be found inside it…