Kat Out of the Bag Chapter One By Steve Rudd

Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Above all else it was ignorance and arrogance that helped me pack my bags. The ignorance and arrogance of myself, that was, and everyone else. I was only interested in people and past-times that furthered humanity. And what was wrong with that?

Still, I would be the first to admit in retrospect that it was wholly arrogant of me to just presume that my friends would be there for me when I needed them the most. For the past 22 years I had given, given, given. Seemingly, to everyone. And in return I'd been offered the smallest bedroom in the house, in which my grand aspirations and nightmarish day dreams had no choice but to fester. I wanted out ASAP and was prepared to go AWOL if need be. Though indecision was my bestest buddy and stalled any free-flowing thoughts or plans I ever made to make the break, quit the day job and carpe diem, I did want to die a happy man, when surely nobody has ever been happy as they metaphorically lie there waiting for the inevitable to occur on their so-called death-beds. The solid, albeit sheltered, upbringing I had had given me a flair for words. Not that my parents, who were both English lecturers in and around various Yorkshire Universities, articulated their feelings for each other or for me with any real sense of sincerity. It was all an act, like a scene in a play, an American Beauty - captured bag in the wind, a speck in the eye, a household of lives with seemingly nothing worthwhile to do other than to fussily and naively time-keep then die.

Work and TV provided the be-all and end-all of my parents' routine-rutted lives, despite them both being highly educated to the nth degree of zest. They should have striven to make the most of their lives more than any middle-aged, working-class husband and wife. Wife and husband. A couple of ordinary, down-to-earth people who had once been wildly in love and who'd conceived a visual reference to such toiling feelings towards each other in the form of myself. Me .. me, me.

But I still can't believe that they ever loved anyone or anything other than themselves, or their pettiness when it came to being ruthlessly obsessed with disciplining their whiny Uni. students who couldn't honestly have given 2 backward flying fistings half of the time if Shakespeare might, just might have been gay - or that if there was no Latin language. Then they wouldn't have sat there, dozing off through their English lectures today, pretending to be interested in The Taming of The Shrew as they slyly concentrated their sparky imaginations whole-heartedly into their fingers that whacked off their mobile phone keypads. Text message alerts bleated, under the table, all in the head, round the back of the bikesheds (under-graduates at their age should have grown up) - but nothing was said. Other than, yeh, sure.. ever-so-casual sex round your place tonight sounds good to me, cya later xxx But was it good for you? And was it good enough?

I didn't like to say because it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Still, on that note of chronic isolation and mis-involvement with all those people I should have held dear and close and blah blah blah - due to the human condition simply expecting me to love and respect my family and friends based solely on the fact that we interact - the umbilical cord that tied me irrevocably to the past resisted cutting remarks.

Truth be bold, I had then - and have now - nothing in common with them. I am, as I said, my own man. The hell with pomposity, the rat race of an alien face, human nature's sad preoccupation with status and anti-spontaneity routine. I was hell-bent on going all out of my way and their fairways to prove it. I didn't think I was deaf or dumb. No. In fact my flight to Kathmandu was calling.

© Steve Rudd 2004

Continued on www.thisisUll.com...... Chapter 2

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