THE EPICENTRE OF FRUSTRATION

I don’t want to go into details, but for a little while tonight I was the epicentre of frustration for a whole bunch of people in different locations, all at the same time.

It takes some doing. And two of them were police officers.

Anyway. It all worked out okay. I just can’t cope with multiple stressful things all at the same time - especially when the components have no idea about each other being in the equation! Imagine being on two different phone calls at the same time, each of which demand your full attention and response. That is a disaster for me - a sure-fire way to end up annoying everybody. I just freeze up.

But sometimes it just happens anyway. And then there you are, the epicentre - unable to process, and yet very able to make it all a little bit worse. Ah well.

What’s more, I’m getting the feeling that I’m generally on the edge of something I’ve been on the edge of before, and I’m a little nervous of history repeating itself. Actually two things. There’s an opportunity that turned into a mess last time I took it. What if I’m still the same, and the outcome is... inevitable? I’m nervous about both.

Those things weigh heavy on my mind, and add tension to the epicentre. I bet that carries over into the equation. I bet that’s detectable.

One of my friends believes that randomness makes it almost impossible for history to exactly repeat itself. He argues that God sprinkled the universe with enough random systems that no experiment is exactly repeatable, that time itself is unpredictable, and, not wishing to crash a Calvinist’s computer, a lot of stuff just happens by accident.

I don’t know if he’s right. If he is though, it makes it unlikely that I’ll mess up either moment. I have another friend who reminds me often that you can’t step into the same river twice. I like that thought. I am different to the me of ten years ago, and to the me of two. Maybe it’ll be okay.

Either way, I think I need to learn how to gently end competing situations so that I can deal with them better, one at a time. It’s that cool rationalising bit that I lack in the heat of those moments. It has to be possible, and it has to be possible to do it gracefully, like a traffic officer in the middle of a junction.

That reminds me. I’m not in trouble with the police. They just wanted to know if I’d seen a red transit van and I took too long to answer because I was on the phone to two other people but they couldn’t know that because I had my headphones in, under my hood, and so they sped off in pursuit, their radio blaring several sets of instructions at them.

I don’t think I could do that job. I’ll stick to one conversation at a time, in future.