faerie bytes Musings on books, politics and life.

I was reminded of this piece today… I thought I’d lost it in a computer crash, but a little digging in my back up files uncovered it. Originally written in 1997, it shows that some things never change.

***
Lord Distractor’s beeper went off. He was needed. Again. Sometimes, he reflected, it would be nice to just take some time off, lay on the beach, perhaps read a trashy novel. But, there was work to be done. Someone was headed toward a cliff, and it was up to him to prevent them from going over it. Lord Distractor sympathized with his subjects, really he did, but he couldn’t just let them run off, willy-nilly chasing rainbows and doing whatever they damn well pleased. They’d be bound to get into trouble that way. Actually, he was doing them a service by preventing them from encountering the awful truth. He was a very enlightened despot, when you looked at it that way, insulating his subjects from any harm that pursuing silly dreams might cause them.

Nagging doubts about his character and mission thereby assuaged, he turned his attention to his latest project. The poor soul had gone and gotten herself into a pickle by starting a novel with no idea of the contents of the middle or the end. It was possible that it might work out, of course. But the plain fact was, it was more likely to simply dribble off into nothingness. The poor soul would be terribly embarrassed, hurt and otherwise emotionally injured! Lord Distractor knew what must be done, and he went to work with a will. He started building walls around his poor deluded subject.

First, the wall of obligations. He built in subtle (and some not so subtle) reminders of the gift she had offered to others and not yet finished, the time she had promised to spend on chores, the needs of the poor starving canines whimpering in the yard, waiting for just a morsel of dinner… no, wait, that would never work. There was no way those rotund little beasts could be seen as “starving,” even by this subject’s prodigious imagination. Ah, but a nice long walk… yes, the poor creatures could certainly use more exercise. Perfect. (Such attention to the details of his subjects’ lives was the hallmark of Lord Distractor’s artistry.)

There, that alone might hold. But, better safe than sorry, so he started on the next wall – the wall of gibberish. He rearranged words to make sentences nonsensical, incapable of conveying meaning. He took letters out of some words and put them into other words. Then, with a final, flamboyant flourish, he hooked words together in an orgy of oratoricalocclusion.

But Lord Distractor was not yet done. Not for nothing was he acknowledged a master of his art. The final wall was yet to be built — the flimsiest wall of all, yet still the hardest for his subjects to scale — the wall of doubt.

He framed the wall on a foundation of fear, then wove in whisperings of worry and bound them with the baneful cry of the banshees of banality. He sewed in the shadowy substance of insecurity with a thread of old dread and tied it off with a knot of noxious anxiety. Under his skillful hands, the wall became a paradox of awesome beauty; as impenetrable as it was transparent.

There. Lord Distractor had done his duty, the Great Work of his simple existence, though he took no pleasure in it. Well, maybe the tiniest bit of pleasure, but really, only that and no more.