I didn’t have clue how to start, so I took some of the best opening lines in music history and used those instead. Thanks, Iggy.
It’s a bit misleading, though. Streetwalking Cheetah? Hardly. More like Panda-in-Captivity, except not as cute. Most of my ’streetwalking’ is done between this desk and the coffeeshop, which I don’t really think counts. The rest of the time I sit in my cage (read: 20th floor reception area), doing the corporate equivalent of lazing round, chewing bamboo and refusing to have sex with other Pandas (read: folding things, looking at the internet and refusing to photocopy).
I’m going to pretend I didn’t just descend into the use of office humour or tenuous metaphors; otherwise I’ll have to throw this whole adventure in before I’ve even begun.
And I probably should begin. As good a place to start as any, I suppose, is the reason for doing this thing at all. There are a few. First of all, I spend my weekdays sitting at a desk doing very, very little other than reading what other people put on the internet and refusing to have sex with other pandas. I think I’ve pretty much seen the internet now. Not all of it, but enough that I’m bored with it. So – Reason the First: Boredom.
Aside from that, and this is getting embarrassing – though if you know who I am by now you are either the man who makes my coffee every day and called me ‘Cappuccino Girl’ once, much to my horror, or my boss, and you are standing behind me and I am fucked – is the anxiety that when I go, I will have left nothing behind. This is more than a little pathetic, given that I am 21 and have no immediate plans for the hereafter, but nonetheless, I do have a great respect for all those lovely hardback volumes of various people’s Letters. There’s a gorgeous collection in my house of the compiled letter of Yeats that sits right next to a volume of WH Auden’s poetry, which for some bizarre reason led me to assume that they were lovers when I was younger. Just because Auden was gay doesn’t mean that he was fucking the author of whichever book happened to be on the shelf next to his at the time, otherwise he would’ve been far too busy to write any of my favourite poems and, assumedly, the inventor of the Time Machine, and we all know that was Dr Who, but thus was the working of my early-adolescent mind. Unfortunately, no-one writes letters any more unless they are in their 80s and still able to use their fingers. I can see how it would go if people still did:
“Dear Rachel,
I am writing to thank you for having a beer with me at the Builder’s Arms on Saturday May 17th. It was a pleasure and a privilege to discuss with you the pros and cons of casual sex, the episode of last night’s reality TV show and the chances of our prospective football teams winning the next day. While we disagreed on many things, I nonetheless relished the opportunity to engage your sharp mind debate…” etc etc etc.
So with no chance of writing any letters, never mind leaving any behind, it will be all things internet-based that will survive us now. At this point, I have a LiveJournal I wrote when I was sixteen, which would result in a legacy of poor punctuation and lead people to think that I was unable to discuss something amusing without writing ‘aaaahahhahahahaha’ before it and ‘lmao’ after, and possibly some emails to lecturers begging for extensions, which are if anything an even worse reflection of character.
Bringing us to Reason the Second: The Desire to Leave behind a Body of Writing for Posthumous Publication on the Assumption that I Will One Day Be Eminent Enough to Warrant a Published Legacy.
Lastly, my head is a noisy, incoherent and sometimes unpleasant place. It’s often hard for me to hear myself think over din. Reason the Third: In the Interest of Certain Thoughts Keeping Their Voice Down.
So there we have it. I wish I was a panda, Iggy Pop is far more rock n roll than me and, as far as I’m concerned, WH Auden invented the Time Machine so he could engage in sexual relations with dead authors. As good a place to start as any.
