I spent much of last week painting my sister’s garden shed, transforming it from a dull and dreary brown eyesore into an exciting and colourful work of art, if I do say so myself. As you can imagine, this was a lot of fun, except for the boring bits where I had to do several coats of paint over the rough untreated wood before I could get to the fancypants petals and tentacles, etcetera. The boring bits were so repetitious and tiresome that at one point I was reminded of the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom has to whitewash a fence while all his idiot friends are playing down by the creek in the sunshine.
I don’t have any idiot friends or a creek nearby. But I actually found myself enjoying the boring bits in the end, because there is something satisfying about doing useful work even when it’s not that interesting. Letting your mind roam around while you do something dull is pretty much the definition of meditation, isn’t it? So as well as a talented garden artist open to commissions from wealth-ridden eccentrics, I’m also basically a Zen master now.
It was no doubt all this mental roaming that brought Tom Sawyer to mind for the first time in decades. The truth is that I don’t usually like to talk about Mark Twain’s writing if I can help it. Partly because he’s predictably a target of the online bullying crowd, and oh em gee I’m so turned off by their insatiable drive to enforce ideological conformity upon writers alive and dead. Get over it, you boring, boring people. But the main reason I don’t like to talk about Mark Twain is because he’s my dad’s favourite author and mentioning his name invariably invokes a recitation of the plot of my dad’s favourite short story, and a dissertation on Twain’s brilliance as a humorist, truth-teller, and probable Gay. Dad likes to begin this disquisition by announcing, “I’ve probably told you this before…” which, funnily enough, does nothing to alleviate the pervasive sensation of deja vu that follows, or perhaps I should say, that envelops the experience in a fog of eternity. I’ve been here before, I find myself thinking. Am I experiencing the illusion of time or is time encountering the illusion of difference through me? Is this world merely a simulation in which I cycle through a million iterations of selfhood that dissolve seamlessly and meaninglessly into the aether? Or am I this world and within me encapsulate all iterations of its existence?
I get so lost in these meanderings that I can’t actually remember the plot of my dad’s favourite short story after all, so he probably should tell me again, and this time I should probably listen because I might learn something for once.
Maybe the real reason I don’t think about Mark Twain very much is because the world he wrote about is so over. All the normal parts of childhood – whitewashing fences, playing in a creek, running away on a raft with an escaped slave – have disappeared now. You’re probably expecting me to insert a complaint here about how kids these days are always locked up indoors, staring goggle-eyed at screens, and don’t even know what a fence is, let alone have any experience of painting one, falling off one, or squeezing through a broken one into the grounds of a haunted house where they have a terrifying encounter which traumatises them for the rest of their lives, until at last they reach their final days and lie in their bed in their isolated home, awaiting the relief of death, only to hear the whispers and scrapes of children squeezing in through the broken fence…
I would say something like that, but the fact is that the kids who live on my sister’s street are a gang of feral, lawless, and grubby beasts who run around all day kicking footballs over fences, falling off things, and accidentally invoking spirits into a dance of infinite dread. (Probably. Not sure about that last bit.) If there was a creek, they would definitely be playing in it. And if there was a chance to get on a raft with a runaway slave, they’d be on there before you could say Skibidy Toilet.
Seeing kids hanging around the streets, looking like a bunch of Huck Finns sharing a bottle of shoplifted Prime gives me hope for the future. These kids have a way better chance of growing up to be decent, interesting, and competent humans than many of the actual adults I know, who behave like infants plugged in to their screens and their social media, having meals brought to them, and posting lurid fan fiction of their favourite television show about Japanese girls who solve a murder mystery with the help of their psychic boobs.
The upside of being chronically online is that you never have to think for yourself. If someone comes along and starts chatting about Mark Twain (just for example; it could be literally any topic) you simply wait for a Guardian columnist to provide a script that you can copy and paste to your facebook wall, and then - for the fun part - you can berate anyone who isn’t reciting the same script. And that’s your whole culture. It’s being a child without any of the wild joy, drive for independence, risk taking, playfulness, or transcendence over boredom that made childhood fun and useful in the first place.
I’m not sure why adults have decided to hand their souls over to the internet, except it’s a lot easier than creating a life for yourself, I suppose. If only they had read Tom Sawyer and learned how to be creative with their time and the things they don’t want to do. Tom turns his fortunes around by pretending that whitewashing the fence is the most fun he’s ever had, and his friends soon start bribing him to let them take a turn. He amasses a small fortune while sitting in the sunshine, watching the fence get painted by all his dumbass friends who mistakenly think they’re having a great time. The secret is, they actually are. And you could be, too. Just come over here and hold this paintbrush for a second…
The real question is what’s inside the shed? Maybe some rusted bike parts, or maybe YOUR DESTINY
Mark Twain was one of my mom's favorite writers. I did not, however, realize that he has been posthumously cancelled though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
I absolutely loved this, btw. (And I swear I'm going to get around to calling my stupid bank and asking them why they keep rejecting my efforts to pay for more Substack subscriptions so I can get EVERYTHING you are writing here.)
Georgina, that was terrific. I smiled the entire time I was reading this. I grinned at the perfect mention you made of the repeated stories you've been told, just like the ones I've told my two grown daughters over a hundred times - and counting over the years. Always prefaced of course with 'I think I've told you this' and the extraordinary love they've shown in enduring the memory reruns I tell them. I smiled at the mentions of Twain that reminded me of how brilliant I thought he was, while also not giving a flying ---- about what the critics say about him and what an unabashed fan of his I am. The tie-and blending of painting that shed (what a great job you did) and whitewashing a fence was perfect. Really enjoyed this. - Jim