George and Eternity and other short stories and fortune telling

George and Eternity

George Miller was an ordinary sort of name. Which was just as well, since George Miller was an ordinary sort of guy. He was a background person, one who faded and disappeared very well into the back streets of life. He was unmarried, indeed did not even currently have a spark of love in his life. At five feet eight he was of average height, or what was the average height a few years ago. Nowadays, one might say he was a trifle on the small side. He was not largely built, he had reasonably nondescript brownish hair, and the colour of his eyes... well, that was unknown, since nobody had ever bothered to look at him that closely.

He had an ordinary sort of job in an office, where he never excelled himself, nor gave any cause for reproach. Within the office, which was open plan, he was the solitary male amongst perhaps a dozen women, who were mostly preoccupied with their thoughts of husbands, boyfriends, cars, horses and various tittle-tattle. If they noticed him, it was not as a man. To most he was known only as a neutral voice at the end of the telephone. Perhaps we can say that he was a product of modern society. Or perhaps we can say that he wasted the enormous opportunities that modern society presents. Then again, perhaps we can say that he was no more than a number, a dice roll in the great, amusing game of life. It is unimportant. He existed, in whatever form you would ascribe.

He did the ordinary things most guys did, enjoyed a few pints down the pub, went to the occasional rock concert, took the odd walk, voiced his opinions with his few friends, eyed up the passing ladies and, occasionally, bought his lottery ticket in love for what he considered the best of them. He was not a great success at life, at love, at anything, as he sometimes bemoaned to himself when once again in his solitary room that he rented. But he was too much into his own mould to entertain any dynamic change.

His friends were mostly occasional, more mutual friends of his own closer friends, or of his brother's, apart from a small handful of mixed sex who frequented his local pub. He was part of the camaraderie, but only a minor one. He made no major contributions and received no major benefits. He was rather tolerated, humoured. Perhaps it was this that made George decide that maybe they weren't the right circle of people for him.

If he was ordinary in existence, that did not preclude him from thought, to which he devoted a very large part of his life. Perhaps it was all directed too inwardly, but who are we to judge? Think he did, and mostly about how he didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the world. His ideas and interests were perhaps anchored more in the late Sixties and early Seventies, rather than the nouveau mode of the Nineties. It was perhaps this feature that gave him his obscurity.

He was helped along his fatalistic and indecisive path by the fact that he had moved into a new job around a year before, and had also moved his abode, although only five miles or so from his old one.

Possibly the only aspect of his life that stood out, rather than fade into the background, was the fact that in his late twenties he still did not drive or own a car. It was almost modern heresy that he did not hold any designs in that direction. George was happy enough walking, travelling by bus or train, or more commonly by hitchhiking. He was not overly impressed with the disproportionate place that the four-wheeled metal boxes had come to occupy in the mind of modern man (and especially in modern, unattached woman).

Thus he was given, for it was almost this, an excuse for avoiding his small group of friends, when the reality was that he had had enough of them for the time being.
So it was often that he found himself wandering between the pubs in the town by himself of an evening, such as this particular Saturday evening. On the whole, George was not impressed with the quality of the pubs in the town, or even with the town itself, for he had hated it for many years even before he lived there. The town itself was indifferent, for like a thousand others it had no difficulty in anonymously swallowing up the likes of George and the other background people that graced its streets. It absorbed them with a large amount of indifference. After all, it is not a town's duty, nor indeed within its capabilities to absorb these non-entities; it just does so all the same, or rather such people dissolve into their surroundings whether they wish to or not. George had such a capability, perhaps without really being able to realise that it was so.