No easy ride.
2002-02-14 || 1:50 p.m.

There's a Billy Bragg lyric on Talking with the Tax Man about Poetry. I can't remember which track but it goes like this:

'When she was a child she saw visions on the stairs'.

If this was my lyric it would say:

'When she was a child she saw coincidences everywhere'

Well in actual fact it would say 'meaningful coincidences' but this wouldn't actually scan and I suppose it shows I'm no lyric writer if I have to explain what I mean.

Well, I've thrown away childish things now and I know there is no such thing as meaningful coincidences. How do I know this? Through a strange mixture of personal experience. On the one hand my life seems filled with meaningful coincidences but as they always come to nothing they must just be masquerading as such. Or it could be that I see them as that whereas in actual fact they were never any such thing.

I would just like to categorically state that there is no synchronicity. No fate. No meaningful coincidences. Only a hotpotch of random happenings which actually could happen in any order and humans would still be able to read patterns into them and try to make sense of them. We are not fools but we are fooling ourselves.

If we rise above this will we be free? I don't know the answer to that one.

I never said this would be an easy ride.