Friday afternoon was lost. It just disappeared. I don't know how it happened, but I think it was sucked up in an anomaly that is best described by pure mathematics.
You see, a journey last week that was supposed to take only two and a half hours took an overnight in a grubby hotel and nine hours the following day. One could put it down to the astonishingly poor state of the trans-Africa highway, a key trading route to the interior markets, but perhaps this was just like one of those times one ends up trying to divide something by zero. One gets answers like this: the breakdown tow-truck will definitely be in a worse condition than you are; it's engine will overheat and require frequent stoppages for cooling; it will run out of fuel; the recovery package will involve oral transfer of petrol from towed to tower (errrrr....gulp); modern baboons drink milk out of milk cartons near petrol stations.... and so on and so forth.
The road to nowhere led to the flicks on the Friday evening after the afternoon that never existed. And just when I thought I was well shot of equations, the solution was once again impossible. I turned round to my fellow audience members and had to ask: "dear rafikis, have we not just seen the same advert for a fine Samsung mobile phone (involving a tango in a railway station) six times already?"
Now where is this all going? Well, "everything that has a beginning has an end" and all this weirdness during the week (without any extra-sensory stimulation, I might add), I could handle. The thing that really really really made me lose all shards of a sense of humour was the film I had gone to see. Matrix 3. My recommendation is that you don't. I know some of you are still going to, so don't say that I didn't warn you.
The only bit in it I liked was a 30 second sequence when Neo somehow finds himself in one of those odd "in-between" sort of situations. Call it an anomaly. He's in a subway station. he tries to get away from it by running into the tunnel and following the tracks, only to emerge back at the same station. Funnily enough, that was something I could easily relate to.
Have a great week. Tell me about it sometime.
11 October, 2003
