~ April 26, 2004 - 8:32 p.m. ~
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Holy hell, I�m bored. I�m also boring, at the moment. Sometimes I think I�m a pretty exciting person with exciting ideas, but today is not one of those times. I�ve spent most of the day in bed. Got up at 11. Watched some New York Ones news. Decided the fact that I was out of bed was a bad thing for my unreasonably shaky nerves, so I crawled right back in. Fancied a stiff drink, or tea, or both. Realized I was narrating my actions in my head again. Felt like a Douglas Adams character, and not for the first time this month. Picked up a Douglas Adams book. It was The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul , despite the fact that I am still not done re-reading the Hitchhiker�s Guide omnibus edition that Tim and I share. Took a two hour nap half way through the book, just when it was getting really exciting and climactic. Woke as a result of two successive phone calls from people who are, entertainingly yet uncoincidentally enough, siblings. Finished the book, only to look out the window, remembered the quote �Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon�, realized I�d picked the right book, and wondered if Douglas Adams was familiar with the same Susan Ertz quip I was. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is, without ruining the plot, about the pitfalls of immortality. It borrows the title character from Adams� previous novel Dirk Gently�s Holistic Detective Agency and the small blurb about immortality as it pertains to Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, a character from another previous novel entitled Life, the Universe, and Everything . Because I do not want to ruin the plot of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul , I will now recap what Mr. Adams said about Wowbagger that leads me to believe the celebrated author is familiar with that Susan Ertz quip.
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was � indeed, is � one of the Universe�s very small number of immortal beings.
Most of those who are born immortal instinctively kjnow how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.
Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship�s stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn�t been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have.
To begin with it was fun; he had a ball, living dangerous, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn�t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you�ve taken all the baths yuou can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o�clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people�s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this.
He would insult the Universe.
That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.
When people protested, as they sometimes had done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, �A man can dream, can�t he?�
Wowbaggger, Mr. Adams, dear readers, today I understand all that perfectly.
