Dear Octopus,
Two months, since I last wrote to you. Two months. The profuseness and profundity of my apology need not be extolled - knowing me as well as you do - but please don't think my holiday from these pages in any way related to a diminished regard for your welfare. I worry about you as always; in all the incidental nooks and crannies of solitude (late-night tube carriages, supermarket queues, the long drunken stumble down Penwith Road of a now-warm Thursday evening). I suppose I've just been thinking of the right thing to say.
Sunday saw some chink of inspiration, if not actual enlightenment, so seems as good a place as any to snatch up the meandering thread of my existence.
I was wandering the aisles of a Chinese supermarket in the Hampstead-area, in the company of the Regal Tang (or 'Tango', for short) whose hankering for a steamed pork char siu bao bun was so great that she couldn't be dissuaded by the fact that all of the buns' packaging was in Chinese, rendering it impossible for us to decipher what was pork or otherwise. Muddling along as were, we didn't know our gyoza from our cheung fun, so just selected items seemingly on Tango's loose aesthetic whim. And this bothered me. We could have been picking anything. In fact rather than revelling in the rich culinary opportunism that the situation presented, the whole process was - I'm now happy to admit - deeply disconcerting. What if the buns we were picking contained cyanide, oestrogen, or crushed up brick mortar? What if Tango ended up choking violently to death on the spinal vertebrae of an actual Regal Tang, because I hadn't adequately protected her through being able to read Mandarin Chinese?
It was then that I realised an inviolable truth. I am incapable of being impulsive.
To be fair, I sort of knew already. My mother, the sage and omniscient Vino Squid, pointed this out to me only recently in fact. Even as a child (apparently), I was annoyed when plans would change at the last minute, and would ask what we were going to be doing after making the papier mache Tracy Island before Vino had even opened the first tub of glue and laid down the newspaper. And since developing into what I suppose is technically an adult, things have only got worse. A dull obsession with having a 'plan' pervades every part of my day. I've even written about my enslavement by the Evil Dowager Countess of Routine to you previously, now that I think about it. Even that is becoming habitual.
So that's that. Clearly I am the spontaneity black hole, the impulse vacuum. A grim and inflexible gargoyle attached to the lively church of life's wondrous diversity. So how to break the mould, and escape? Start taking ketamine on the District Line? Grow out my hair, learn to play guitar and starting trawling the youth hostels of Western Australia with a bumbag full of tedious, life-affirming anecdotes? Join a cult? Start a cult (even)?
Even those things seem quite conformist now.
I will mediate on this conundrum this evening, and report back. Rest assured that I won't make any major 'life decisions' without consulting you first. Maybe I just need to become better at rolling with the punches, to changes and amends as things come up. Be better at living life on the so-called 'fly'.
After all, a little bit of spontaneity is definitely a good thing. Our illegible dinner, for example, was not only wonderful to eat but all the more interesting for being an adventure.
Your loving friend,
Action Squid
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