The ripping yarn of a shirt

A paper chase cornered

There are times that the ability to glean a fascinating piece of detail from an innocuous narrative is itself interesting and well fascinating. We go about our daily lives trying to do one thing or the other and as we try to complete something we are called to attend to something unplanned.

You determine that you need to arrest the lethargy of a bureaucracy and by your presence on the premises interacting with the heretofore faceless apparatchiks totally oblivious of who you are having mishandled you by the interminable shuffling of papers that travel from the In to the Indifferent, to the Ignored trays and never reaching the Out tray where some action will terminate in the realisation of your request.

More often it is wasted in a bin somewhere, never to be retrieved until filthy lucre oils the wheels of distress rather than progress. Parsimony being a strategy adopted with the impression that you can do what you can pay others to do. The observer disarmed by forthrightness restrains themselves from suggesting futility.

Wheeling an identity

Then the whole melee against officialdom is interrupted by a request for your presence at another place as the chariot of conveyance had inadvertently acquired a depressed wheel, for which the helpless is quite helplessly unable to help themselves that you become the saviour of the day. The one in the moment of need that becomes the next of kin.

On arrival, you approach the ground to survey the state of the chariot and a means to replace the wheel and as your back arcs in whatever dimension it is extended, your shirt splits down the middle on your back and what we have is a long-held secret revealed at an importune moment. You, the observer will marvel at the realisation that who you once knew might well not be the fictional Incredible Hulk, but a real living Hulk ready to change your tyres.

No one finds out until me and my big mouth unawares blurts out something we had better keep to ourselves, but how can we help ourselves when we are totally unaware of how the information we share would be bother understood and comprehended? In any case, the knowledge is valuable, and it always comes in useful.