Tor Ulven: Replacement

Man, you wish you had wrinkles. You want to be as old as possible.


It’s not the thought of death. No, that’s not the reason you ache in the springtime, like the chill you get by drinking water after you’ve sucked on a cough drop, although its not really an ache either, but a sorrow, a stab of worry, over what?, you wonder, and continue: over life unlived; not anger or angst about the fact that in the near future you won’t be experiencing anything at all (your fear of death actually decreases as you get older), but the nagging feeling that you haven’t experienced enough, that you’ve never really lived life, and even worse, that it’s too late to experience anything more, or rather, that the experiences you’ve had weren’t the experiences you were meant to have , that somewhere along the way you took a wrong turn, though you can’t say where exactly that was, and now it’s too late, and as a result your life has in one sense been wasted, like a losing game of blind man’s bluff.


The men who are starting their workday or continuing their workday even before the day’s really begun, down there in the scorching heat and metal fumes, you imagine them sweating, toiling away, protecting their eyes with glasses, their heads with helmets, their hands with asbestos gloves, their feet with steel-toed boots, their lungs with dust absorbent cloths, down there in blue-collar hell, clueless idiots tortured body and soul for every red cent, and the worst of it, you think, is that they can’t imagine doing anything else, they can’t even fantasize about living a life without work, they’d never accept a check for sitting on their asses…


What you’ve got to understand is that meaning can be found in meaninglessness, and that these meaningless words hold all that you need to know.