06 October --Jamie gets lost in the gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Characters:

Jamie

Setting: next to stones, before the internet


Twenty nine is so often an invisible age. For many, it is merely "the year before thirty." For others, it is the age to which they cling, playfully claiming to be twenty nine until they can no longer keep it up, and finally conceed upond turning thirty nine--at which time it all begins again.

Jamie, slightly troubled by this notion, sat down to write something. Yet, with a freshly opened chardonnay beside him, he attention drifted to the impossible depth of the internet. The internet can be viewed as a manifestation of human-culture-meets-biology: age is conjecture--a site, or personality, exists for a matter of hours and is poignant, beautiful, and pure. A few people stumble upon it, try to understand, and then it is gone. Other sites remain for years and produce the internet equivalent of rust. Think of twenty nine as a metaphor for what lies between.

At once unable to regain youth's rapture and unwilling to approach the mundane corrosion of age, we don't realise it's all relatively new. During his lunch break, Jamie walked through the graveyard beside the highway, picked up a stone and held it in his hand. "I'm twenty nine," he said to it. And waited for a response.

Jamie became somewhat distracted later in the evening, spending hours pouring over the recent posts to the Flying Spaghetti Monster site, even adding one of his own to the end of this string. He became enthralled, even a little lost.