About a flight

If anyone wonders about my linguistic schizofrenia: there's a scottish crowd...

I’m an odd ball magnet. I don’t know why, but I am. Often it starts with my ugly and rude habit of smiling at strangers, who then think it’s perfectly in order to approach me with all their wisdom and troubles. This happened to me again on the plane the other day. Out of all the empty seats I could to choose from, I had to pick the one which came with a lunatic. (Maybe it’s the odd balls that attract me.) As I sat down on my seat, made for a pygmy by the way, I smiled at the thin haired man next to me. I smiled as to say “hello”, nothing more, nothing less. Well, I regret I did.

The man was a crazy man who somehow miraculously had managed to board for Britain. For some reason he was upset with almost everything and without really taking very much notice whether I cared to listen or not, he started telling me his very personal perception of the universe, life and everything. He made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t at all impressed with the scientists and historians point of view. In fact, they were all wrong. He was especially displeased with two gentlemen from Boston, who in the late nineteenth century sat down together and simply decided, using only a pencil, what the atom should look like. From that day everyone accepted their scientific version as the truth. My neighbour, of whom I started to take a silent dislike, called the Boston born men things I can’t really translate into English. Fuckheads, maybe. He stated that the idea of an atom as protons and neutrons surrounded by spinning and fast moving electrons was as absurd as ridiculous. When he grabbed my hand and placed it on his arm in order to prove that nothing in there moved, at all, I just about had had enough. But how to get mad at a mad man? I also couldn’t escape the Dan Brownish feeling of the whole situation. Instead I pretended to be very busy solving a crossword puzzle (the one from SvD last Sunday, good luck succeeding in filling just one word in).

As Mr Goof laid eyes on the newspaper he got himself all worked up again, about journalists this time. If there’s a profession more odious than a scientist, it’s a journalist. Anthropology was the next subject for discussion. It turned out, evolution is an illusion. Darwin too was an idiot. Then my fellow traveler made an absolutely mind blowing pronouncement of great existentialistic proportion. The Earth, the Earth my friends, upon which we live and breathe, has always been here. Always. Not for thousands of years, not for ten billion years, but always. Time has never begun. The Big Bang? Blame the men from Boston.

I don’t know about the time statement though. When do things begin? When do they end? There are no hats and no scarves for the heart.