THE DISORGANISED DAYDREAMER
This will sound strange to you, I know, but I have trouble sometimes remembering stuff. I’m not talking about important information of course, like where I was born, who my family is, where I work. That information is embedded in my consciousness even though the Anticlocks are doing their best to erase it. I don’t have any problem with technical or abstract information either. I’m quick on the uptake when it comes to learning languages and understanding complex problems. But when you get to know me well, you’ll realise that I’m a disorganised daydreamer at heart.
Frankly, the real difficulty I have is the everyday process of running my life. That’s the issue – my short-term memory and organisational skills. I suppose that it‘s because I spend a lot of time thinking about outer space and aliens. So I’m not sufficiently focused on what’s going on around me on a day to day basis. The result is that I don’t find it easy planning my everyday activities, remembering what I’m supposed to be doing next.
I’m having real problems right now for example trying to recall what I did this morning, yesterday or a couple of days ago. Daily events just slip through my mind. As for what I should be doing tomorrow, that generally remains a mystery to me. Diaries, calendars and schedules don’t really figure in my life.
That’s why this blog is so helpful. Just jotting down my ideas on a day to day basis provides me with some kind of record of what happened to me in the past. I can’t think of an other way of making sense of my existence. When I write things down, it’s like fixing everything that has happened to me in stone. It solidifies my past. When I read it again, it’s like discovering for the first time who I really am, who I used to be, even though I know that I live most of my life in a kind of fantasy.
Despite my serious shortcomings in the memory department, I’m good at producing something on my own, or interpreting or translating once I arrive at the right place. But getting there on time is more of a problem. So working at Infinity suits me fine. It’s the same pattern every day. The repetition helps. I know that I have to get up each evening and go to work. I don’t even have to remember when I have days off – because there aren’t any. The regularity of each day makes it easy to remember. But anything that doesn’t fit into a recurring pattern just slips out of my mind. Arranging the random activities of my life into some kind of planned sequence just isn’t one of my strengths.
So it’s just as well that I’m friends with Tia and Clancy, especially Tia. She keeps me on track. Working in the Globopolis post office she has to be extremely well organised to stay on top of all the administration. In fact, she’s quite the reverse to me. She’s so organised it’s frightening. Tia’s got a mind like a computer. I often joke with her about it. I call her Lady Mainframe. She gets her own back of course. Her pet name for me is `Dyslexic’. It’s strange that we get on so well considering how different we are.
About seven years ago, long before the Anticlocks arrived, I read a short story entitled The Disorganised Daydreamer written by Melvyn 
Shapes and published by the Globopolis Times. The Times was then owned by the Safron Press Media Group. Once the Anticlocks took over though, they were naturally very keen to close down independent publishing houses like Safron as quickly as possible, especially its fiction division which they considered frivolous and decadent. Censorship is the name of the game now.
I’ve kept The Disorganised Daydreamer hidden away from prying eyes and I read it from time to time. It makes me feel better about myself. I feel as if Melvyn Shapes wrote it specifically with me in mind. It’s a story about a man whose total lack of organisational skills and failing short-term memory keep landing him in terrible trouble at work. He constantly forgets to go to meetings and is always missing deadlines, just like me. The people whom Melvyn Shapes talks about in his fiction are perceived by the authorities either as incompetent time-wasters, or at worse subversive militants with a political agenda deliberately attempting to sabotage the system. They wouldn’t last five minutes here in Globopolis now that the Anticlocks are in charge.
The paradox at the heart of The Disorganised Daydreamer though, is that by forgetting to do something very specific the hero of the tale, Eli Lately, saves the corporation where he works from financial disaster. It’s his total lack of organisational ability that perversely comes to the rescue of the company at the most critical time in its development. At the end of the story, everyone is forced reluctantly to recognise that by forgetting to carry out his line manager’s orders, Eli’s absent-mindedness saved the company from a catastrophe. Without this unforeseen non-intervention, the firm would have gone to the wall. Eli’s inadequate filing systems and general disorganisation were the only reason that they all survived.
That’s why books like The Disorganised Daydreamer are banned in Anticlockwise. Unexpected events that contradict the planned order of things are viewed with suspicion. The unexpected is unwelcome. Everyone has to fit in and know their place. People like Eli Lately and me, we don’t. The Disorganised Daydreamer is my favourite bedtime read.
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