The End of The Beginning...

Yossarian jumped. A sentence later, the novel ended and I found myself in a Catch22 situation in which I could not be sure whether I must start off on a novel so boring that I would fall asleep and thus be cured of my insomnia or whether I should pick up a thriller and read through the night and then try to catch up on some sleep during class tomorrow. Now class happens to be a hallowed zone where the normal insomnia rules do not apply. In an Asimov universe, I would say there was a steady stream of somnin flowing into the room through some of those miraculous vents which the occupants can never see, but unfortunately I was not in an Asimov universe but in a Lapierre universe which is real and now and not at all fictional and not at all fun either. A millennium and half a score binary months later, I picked up a book so boring that I promptly crashed before I could even pick a bookmark in the book, and then promptly missed the end of the beginning, the registration of the halfway point, the recording of the visual characteristics of AK66 for posterity. That I was unable to be a part of the recording causes no great torment, neither is there much sorrow at the fact that I missed the end of the beginning. But the end of the beginning is the point where the beginning ends and the end begins, thus the name. Alternately, I could have used the name “the beginning of the end”, but then I hoped to plagiarize on the words of the famous chap who contributed copious amounts of blood to his nation’s banks, sweat to its fields, tears to its dead and toil to its growth.

This however is not like the chap’s story the story of a turnaround. It is not even a story. It is a simple end where it ceases to begin. Fortunately, I failed to register the beginning till it ended. Consider the case of falling into a rapid river after perching in a nest on an overhanging branch for a couple of years and not moving at all, doing everything with the mind. And then you don’t know what is happening to you until you end up on the banks many miles away, and you cannot even bank on that happening with absolute certainty.

So there I was on an overhanging branch, in the imaginary plane if I may add, and then I decided to let the Earth fall on me, though it is so huge it appeared that I fell instead. Then Newton passed the baton to Bernoulli who took me off like a bullet from a gun, except that the trigger was invisible and interwoven into the giant fabric which is called nature.

CRASH!! I slam into rocks. I sense something break. It turns out be a Kit-Kat being eaten by an old sage on the rock. A direct current generator floats to me, and I get electrocuted. More crash. Slam. Bang. Wham. Now a waterfall comes up, rather, I go down to it. It doesn’t really matter either way, the key being that the waterfall and I run into each other. I am drifting so fast I shoot off the edge, and slam down onto spiky boulders below. Slimy, slithery snakes attack me and bring me close to death. But I live. I get a close shave from bears eager to eat some facial hare. I drift on and on. The river gets sluggish. Too sluggish in fact. I fall asleep. I hit a rock. I drift a while. It gets too calm. I sleep off again. I hit a rock again. I am almost devoured by a shrill voiced orangutan that seems to think I’ll enjoy being devoured but I somehow escape by raising my hand.

I wake up on the banks. Looking back, I can see the path I travelled in my mind, though it is now far behind me. The beginning has ended, and the end is beginning. It is now time for biryani. The rest is well deserved, and I am prepared for the rest. As for the rest, they have to wait.