The Purpose of Purposefulness

Ok. Brace yourselves. This first part could get a little bit deep. A brain is a dangerous thing to have when it has too much time to think. I want to start by talking a little bit about purposefulness; you know, the thing that you have when you have a purpose. For example (borrowing an incy bit of melodrama from the soapies) you might say, "Roger gave Miranda a purposeful look from across the room". The look had purpose. Roger gave Miranda that look for a purpose. Roger had a purpose. And by the sounds of it, that purpose just might have been to get Miranda into the sack with him. I'm getting off track...

Let me put this into context.

I was walking the streets of Tronts today completely without purpose. There was nowhere I had to be, there was noone I had to meet, there was nothing I even particularly set out to see when I left the house this morning. A moment of almost sheer panic ensued once I'd come to this realisation. After I'd spent a minute rationalising with myself I managed to turn my frown upside down. I began to understand what a truly unique position I was in. I don't think I can even count on one hand the number of times since I've become an adult (my state of adulthood may be debatable among some close friends and family members) that I haven't had some kind of purpose. So my prolific message for today is simply this: allow yourself to be purposeless sometimes. It can be scary as fuck, but it also allows a rare opportunity for pure spontaneity.

This is what happened to me today:

I walked to the subway. It was cold, around -9 degrees, and it was snowing. I held the palms of my hands out and let a few little snowflakes fall onto them so that I could see what they looked like close up, but they melted as soon as they met my warm skin. I boarded an eastbound train. I decided to get out at Spadina station because it sounded like 'vagina' when they said it over the loudspeaker. I didn't know where I was. I walked down Bloor Street. I passed through a suburb called 'the Annex', which I remember from the books I've read used to be the gay area. I kept walking even though my legs felt like iceblocks. I reached 'Korea Town' and found a park called Christie Pits Park. I trudged through the snow and sat on a park bench briefly. I walked back the way I came but on the opposite side of the road. I crossed back to the other side of the road when I saw a little cafe that I thought looked interesting: Snakes and Lattes.

This is what happened in the cafe:

IGOTADECENTFUCKINGCOFFEE!!! HALLELUJAH!!!

I also eavesdropped on a nearby conversation.

This is what I wrote in my journal while I was drinking my coffee:

"There's a girl at a table across from me talking about FMV games, which in context, isn't so strange considering this is a board game cafe. FMV stands for 'full motion video' according to the girl. She's describing one particular FMV game and I feel the need to chime in and tell her what the game's called, but I don't. I'll maintain my loner status for now. She's talking about 'Nightmare'. For anyone who wasn't born in the 80s, 'Nightmare' is the board game that has an accompanying VHS that you play along with. At a certain unknown point in time, 'the gatekeeper' appears on the screen and scares the shit out of you. The girl follows up her discussion of 'Nightmare' with an evaluation of FMV games: the biggest flaw of FMV games is that you can only ever really experience the game once; after that, you know what's going to happen."

Maybe life's a bit like an FMV game. I guess we've just got to make sure we keep changing the VHS that's playing.