THE ILLUSION OF TUESDAY

And the language of the gelatinous blobs of planet Zarklezonk

I’m writing this very late on Thursday evening, in a mild panic, because it turns out that I have been wandering around for the past three days thinking it’s still only Tuesday, and I’ve got LOADS of time to write my substack post. This is what happens when you have any kind of a holiday. It totally throws you off. Never stop working, that’s my motto. Really, it just goes to show that the factory bosses back in the day were right and no one should ever have had more than one day off at a time, unless they dropped dead at their loom or whatever, in which case it couldn’t be helped. Clearly, relaxing just confuses people.

To be fair, I had noticed that time was being weirder than usual this week. During the illusion of the endless Tuesday I’ve done all sorts of stuff, including painting a kitchen and making a website for my new enterprise, Palette & Pentacles. I’m still waiting for a few more testimonials to add to the site, because apparently not everyone is living inside an endless Tuesday and they need actual time in which to do things. I understand this, but secretly I’m very impatient about it and I’m not sure why people couldn’t have anticipated this happening and had their testimonials ready prepared to whip out the moment I emailed my request. In my eagerness to get going, I even considered including a review of my services that reads, “Highly recommended if you need to be taken down a peg or two.” But in the end I thought it might attract the wrong kind of clientele, as in people who actually want to be taken down a peg or two.

Then again, I can also do that.

That review was of course meant as a joke (of course!) but sometimes people do see me in a certain way. For example, a few weeks ago a man attempted to make me a double espresso at the Premier Inn breakfast buffet, despite the fact that I did not want a double espresso and had told him that quite clearly. When he presented me with the unwanted beverage, and I smiled and said, “Oh well, erm…,” he responded by complaining to a staff member that I was “absolutely furious” with him.

Then again, weird things happen at the Premier Inn breakfast buffet. Case in point: a week or so later, in a different Premier Inn, I was presented with some one-sided toast. I asked a member of staff if she could get someone to fix it for me, and she responded, “Well, you should have said you wanted it toasted both sides. How was I supposed to know?”

She did have a point, I suppose. After all, we’re all guilty of making wrong assumptions about people from time to time. Indeed, making wrong assumptions about people is quite popular in general, I’d say. Making a lot of assumptions and just not really thinking very hard about things seems to be the general vibe so far this century. I don’t know about you, but I hate thinking hard about things, especially because it always seems to me that the more deeply and broadly and intensely I think about something, the more likely I am to come to conclusions that put me out of step with many of my peers, and I don’t like that, because I’ve always wanted to feel like I belong.

I do not feel like I belong. I also don’t have a great track record of belonging. So much so that even other people have noticed some of the ways in which I just don’t fit in. For example, a friend of mine sent me an article today (Thursday!) about the discovery of life on K2-18b, a tragically unimaginatively named planet some 700 trillion miles away. He said, “They found your home, Georgie,” which made me laugh and also feel a tiny bit sad.

Apparently K2-18b is looking likely to be teeming with life. Teeming! I hope so. I spent quite a good portion of my seemingly endless Tuesday imagining a huge lush world full of wildly beautiful alien creatures frolicking in the strange alien forests and seas. Imagine if we were somehow able to go there. We’d be looking for the human-type people, but how would we know which ones they were? All the animals there might be able to talk and laugh and do quadrilateral equations. I guess we’d look for the creatures with hands like ours. But maybe that’s wrong too. Maybe the top of the food chain is some kind of gelatinous blob people who communicate mainly through telepathy and a complex symbolic language of hats and fans that they move with their minds in a beautiful and subtle play of shapes and colours.

Then we’d be like, hey, how can we tell if you’re friends or enemies? And they’d be like, fans flutter through the air, and hats spin like planets. Very enigmatic for gelatinous blobs, you’d think. But then again, in a sense, isn’t every gelatinous blob something of a mystery?

It’s hard to imagine a completely different world, unless you’re a science fiction or fantasy author, in which case it’s actually your job and you should be getting on with it, if only because of the aforementioned perils of relaxing too much. Although these days, you can just get an AI to do all the imagining for you, while you get a proper job in a bank.

This is almost certainly a better idea than trying to do all that imagining yourself. You don’t want to end up like me, drifting through a seemingly endless Tuesday afternoon, trying to work out which one of millions of possible alien species would have made it to the top of the food chain on a planet which you’ve now renamed - for obvious reasons - Zarklezonk.

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The planet Zarklezonk before it was destroyed in a civil war between two tribes of gelatinous blobs, one of whose members had precipitated the violence by accidentally dropping a fan in the middle of an important diplomatic speech, thus inadvertenly calling the members of the other tribe “a bunch of useless wobbly gits.”

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P.S. I appreciate that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you think it might be yours, please do check out Palette & Pentacles and sign up to receive emails - I’ll be posting all sorts of stuff, including mad discounts for my subscribers, naturally!