I should stay up until the very small hours in the morning a lot more often, as it seems this is the time when my fevered imagination starts to panic and jettison ideas in a desperate attempt to save itself. I caught one of these ideas, and it went like this. I don't lie enough on this website. Yes, it contains much that is untrue and unreasonable, but it's not systematic enough. I need to construct an elaborate fantasy in this medium. I have to give life to a fictional world which is presented as the truth. In short, I need to pretend I have a friend who's really cool.
It works like this. People reading my site need a character they can look up to, aspire to. At first you'd think I fit the bill. But apparently not. Sadly, when one devotes a website to how truly great and fabulous one is, a lot of people construe this as hubris. Miscontruage, of course. But still they construe.
Write exactly the same stuff about some fictional character you just made up, though, and the reaction is altogether different. "Hey!" people exclaim, possibly aloud. "This guy's cool! Man, I wish I was more like a figment of Jim's imagination!" Vicariously, the coolness passes to me. Because I must be a pretty amazing guy, right... to have dreamed all this.
And so I shall tell the saga of Jackston Tombola, the god of cool. I shall fade into the sidelines and assimilate myself into a nameless group of theoretical people whose purpose is to be less cool than the Jackstah. But still cool. Obviously. I mean, we exude cool. But I digress. Onward, ever onward!
The other day we ordered chips. And garlic bread. From a pizza place. They were understandably confused when they realised we didn't actually want any pizza at all, but eventually they were able to understand our order. Unfortunately, on this occasion our chips were horrendously late. We called them back. "Two minutes," they told us. Twenty minutes later, we called again again. "Two minutes," they said. We were getting agitated. Nobody likes to be kept waiting. Jackston wasn't showing the strain, of course. He was just leaning nonchalantly against an object. He looks like he's not doing anything even when he's digging a deep hole to hide a corpse, anyway, so he was in his element.
Finally, our chips arrived, waving in the air, clenched in the hand of a man with a dodgy accent who had just got out of a car. He didn't respond well to anger. "I just came by here five minutes ago." Even we could deconstruct this frankly pathetic lie. He changed tack. "I phoned and left a message." Jackston pointed out that our phone hadn't rung, and preempted any further argument by pointing out that the fact that it hadn't rung proved beyond doubt that the driver was a liar, and ugly. Even in the face of such a well-structured argument, Chip Bloke simply shrugged. "Not my problem. Is the company's problem."
Just because you're a cool guy doesn't mean you can't get cross now and again. "Not your problem? Not your problem!?" The Jackstah pushed the courier off balance, causing him to stumble backwards against his car and put his elbow slightly through the window. "You listen up, BITCH, I'm making it your problem. Now you give us our chips and stop lying, because you're fooling nobody but the otters." Even the takeaway man was impressed that Jackston was able to observe urban otters at night whilst wearing small sunglasses, and said so. "You think I care about that? You give us our chips, and our garlic breads. And let's get this straight: we are only paying for two of them, and that's final! And let's get another thing straight whilst we're getting that straight: considering we waited an hour for them chips, they'd better be really, really good! Like the divine ambrosia! If they're not made of solid gold or give me eternal life, I'm going to be extremely angry!"
We all broke into spontaneous applause at the Jackstah's expert use of the English language coupled with his ability to improvise comedic material within the confines of a fast food bargaining situation. Needless to say, the man gave us our chips and drove away. Success, you might think. But there's an epilogue to this little story. The chips were cold and had the consistency of polystyrene, even when warmed. The garlic bread was nothing to write home about, unless the folks at home like to hear about really bad garlic bread. We were angry with rage, but the Jackstah retained his cool. Did I mention he hadn't even ordered any chips himself? He just did all that stuff to help us out. He's that amazing. But he's not the fast food kind. In fact, I'm not sure anyone has actually seen him eat anything at all. I don't feel like dwelling on that irrelevant piece of trivia when there's a real story to be told, though. He just sat there whilst we picked at our chips, and pulled his enigmatic face. I don't know how to describe it. It's not a smile, or any other easily defined expression. It's just an arrangement of his facial muscles that makes him look very enigmatic. I can't do it myself, but I swear it looks really effortless when he does it. Which he did, for a long time.
The next day, I learned that the takeaway we ordered from had been burned to the ground, and the remains of the building burned to the ground again. Next time I saw Jackston I asked him if it had been him, and he just pulled his enigmatic face and made a weird humming sound. I don't know, maybe we'll never be sure.