A local man has reacted to the reactions stimulated by a Spoof story he may or may not have written about the recent proliferation of stories being published in The Spoof that are about a Man doing things.
The man, 47, who lives in the middle of nowhere, reacted yesterday.
"Far be it from me to impugn the artistic, or other, validity of all these stories about a man doing various things", reacted the man, yesterday.
"The story that seems to have provoked all these reactions was itslef (sic) a mere story, a piece of whimsy, not to say a jeu de mots. An improvisation on a theme, such as Cannonball Adderley might have produced on his saxophone, once Miles Davis had finished another of his piercingly melancholy and defiantly self-absorbed trumpet solos.
"For me", the man continued to react, yesterday, shouting his words into the battering November wind, as he gathered firewood from an ever-dwindling stock, "for me, these stories are the work of exponents who are expounding their themes and jousting like the chivalric knights of yesteryear, exercising their abilities in healthy and creative pursuit.
"Or", he added, as the steely welkin heaved and the leafless sycamores wrestled with the hurling and horrible airs, "or, this is how, I feel, it should be."
"With particular respect to the story about stories about men doing things that has provoked all these reactions", the man addended, the knuckles of his frozen hands white as he clenched and gripped the firewood (it cannot be established with any authority whether he clenched and gripped as an expression of passion, or whether it was merely an effort to hold on to the wet logs), "with particular respect to the story about stories about men doing things that has provoked all these reactions, I can do no more than comment upon it. I did not write it. I have never written a story, much less one about stories about men doing things.
"I am a mere character in another story which is about reactions to reactions to a story about stories about men doing things.
"How can I, as it were, fight my way out of this meta-fictional existence in order to be able to lay claim to such a thing as writing a story in what might be termed a real world?
"I lay no claims to anything", the man concluded his rather lengthy addendum, taking off his filthy boots before entering the tiny hugger-mugger cottage on the edge of a vast and seemingly endless moor.
"I am not real, though I do exist. How can I lay any claim, or propound any dogma, or pass judgement on what might signify, or be insignificant, when I am myslef (sic) a mere figment, or wavelet in the heaving main of the human imagination. Let the imagination play on, I say, and pish! to those who would try to stay or freeze the roiling waves and take anything literally."
The man may have added the words in the above final paragraph, and they would have made a nice conclusion to his ultimately futile reaction, but we cannot be certain, such was the din of the gale that rived the bleak landscape. The man was gone. He had taken refuge from the moor and the storm. Indeed, all life seemed to have fled that blasted place.
As must we, whoever, or whatever, we are or are imagined to be.
