OBLIVION

Last night I dreamt of oblivion again.

As I lay in my bed, my mind drifted out into an endless silver sea and I was tempted to stay there forever, and I knew that I wasn’t scared and I really didn’t mind and nothing else really mattered. There might be sadness left behind, of course, but not from many minds, and being able to painlessly slip away from the world like that did feel ever so appealing, if not really much of an awfully big adventure.

Maybe it was the early beginnings of a cold coming on, I don’t know, but, on a day which promised so much, I ended up achieving very little. I just managed to slot in a visit to the cinema, a swift rattle around a supermarket, the delivery of some of the purchased food to my mother’s flat, and replacing a bolt which had lost its nut on her walker before headed home for a late lunchtime sandwich. Once there I put on another edition of “Horizon” to learn something about the latest in telescope technology, or at least the “latest” as it was back whenever it was we first set the machine to record it, and started dozing off.

So I went back to bed at four-thirty in the afternoon and slept, and slept, and slept… and dreamt of oblivion…

I had been for an early morning showing of the latest blockbuster movie on the vague understanding that it might be a “quiet” time to turn up. As I stood in the vast queue of early birds with a sea of ankle-biters to wade through, I began to think that this may have been a bit of a mistake, especially because, as is usual at these “quiet” times, there was only one till being used and, when I did get to the front of the queue, the person in front of me was only in the queue to explain the problem she’d had with the automatic ticket machine a few minutes earlier, which turned into another of those “typical” moments which suddenly draws the attention of the entire staff and which I am always, always, standing right behind.

Several hours later (or at least it seemed that way) with my tickets grasped firmly in my grateful paw, I swam my way towards the cinema for more anxiety. The place was completely empty except for two people who were, almost unbelievably, sitting in precisely the two seats which the computer had allocated to us.

So, a dilemma. Do we make the ridiculous point of asking them to move in an otherwise empty theatre or do we just take two nearby seats and let things lie…?

Naturally, I took the second option, the path of least resistance and the one which involved no actual confrontation of any kind. This meant an anxious half hour as the place started to fill up, and fill up with the kind of people who were prepared to ask people to move despite the vast availability of empty seats in the place, although happily, because the place never got exactly brimful, no-one tried asking me to get out of their seats, as that way other madnesses would have had to unfold.

I paid the price anyway, as two young lads slid into the seats to the right of me and spent the entire length of the feature film sucking the very last of their ice-water from their supersized cola drink cartons and rustling the rustliest popcorn packaging in the history of popcorn packaging to get the very last crumbs out of there, most especially during the quiet bits. The bloke sitting in front of them did turn around at one point and ask them to “F***ing stop doing that…!” which seemed to bewilder them, but I knew where he was coming from even though I was far too polite to actually mention it…

Cinema can be a funny old beast. I always leave with a bit of a headache, and I always leave with my views on humanity and desires of spending any time in a room with any of them feeling severely diminished. Sometime I wish that they could afford to cut out the “cinema release” part and go straight to my TV set at home, but then, I’m old fashioned enough to want the “cinema experience” just as long as everyone else stays at home.

The “surprise” ending of my movie hadn’t turned out to be that big a surprise, to be perfectly honest, given the fact that people only want to keep the story secret when it seems that they know it’s going to be a “game-changer” but then you realise that it is going to be a “game-changer” and there aren’t that many things that could be considered to be that significant, so you can narrow it down and probably you’d be right.

But then I mull over many things as I drift off and dream of oblivion. Like films which are specifically designed to be about Halloween or Christmas… Once those “significant” dates in the calendar have passed, do those films then feel like the presence of an awkward house guest who’s far outstayed his welcome…? Films about Santa Claus are all well and good in the exciting run up to Chrimbletide itself, but do they suddenly feel massively inappropriate on a wet Wednesday in mid-January…? After all, the “Panto Season” used to stretch as far as March in some cases, but watching “A Christmas Carol” on St Valentine’s Day might seem to be a little bit “odd…”

Ah, well… So many questions, and always so very few of them are ever getting answered.

Perhaps oblivion really does sometimes seem to be the far better option.