The following fragment was written for my Summer of a Doormouse project. I wasn’t quite sure where it would be placed in relation to the rest of the narrative, though the scene is mentioned in passing in the draft of Chapter II I posted on this blog as one of Jack’s reaccuring dreams, though the nature and relative reality of these dreams is not addressed within the chapters that have been written and posted thus far.

All my life everything seemed to be building up to something. Something special. Something that I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to participate in. I had been expecting something on the order of Christ’s passion, or at the very least something similar to what had happened to Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. In the end it all seems somewhat anti-climatic. Nothing happened. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe life has no point to it after all.

Leaning on this small stone wall, I look down as the waves of the Pacific rhythmically throw themselves at the rocks below. There was a time when I wondered why Pete Townshend had built so much of Quadrophenia around the sea. I no longer wonder. I know. At one time I also wondered what life was all about and expected that someday I would find out. Now I wonder the same thing, but I expect that no one will ever really know. Is there really any point to life at all? Did God have a reason for all of this, or was he just bored one evening and went out and created the Universe for the Hell of it. For that matter, does God exist at all, or was all of this just the by-product of some chemical reaction that occurred 3,461,100 years ago? Or maybe God does exist and I’ve just done something to piss Him off. I don’t know what I could have possibly done to upset Him so much though. Angie would probably say it was something I’d done in an earlier life. Maybe that’s it, maybe it all comes down to a chronic case of bad Karma.

After a bit, I shift my gaze from the suicidal waves to the small cotton-ball clouds that are wandering lazily across the sky. Despite everything else I guess I’m still waiting for something to happen, or rather hoping something will happen. Hoping that God, Allah, or the senile Author who’s writing this tragic story of my life would appear on one of those clouds and explain just what the fuck was going on. And while I’m hoping, the intellectual pessimism that lurks in my frontal lobe alerts me to the fact that nothing is likely to appear anywhere, let alone on a cloud. I suppose its this combination of hope and despair that’s made me the successful poet I am today. Its also led to more hangovers to which any one man should be subjected. It also led me here.

In imitation of Jimmy’s desperate pilgrimage to Brighton and eventually epiphany on the rock in Quadrophenia, I came here to the ocean where, like Jimmy, many of the happiest moments of my life have taken place.