Hair Tomorrow

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Awesome Dude is a forum for gay writers, and seeing as I'm gay when I get the chance and a writer when I'm not busy being gay, I joined. I posted a very short story here.

There's some good writers there, so have a nose around.

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I have been attempting to study the subjunctive. "What is the subjunctive, uncle Kap?", I hear you ask. Well...

In the present form (which need not indicate the present time), it's when verbs revert to their base form (or "bare infinitive"), producing senteces like these:

She asked that he go away
This is for everyone, wherever they be
A man shall not lose the things that he buy

Nowadays in English, it's used for mainly for rhetorical effect, but different languages use it in different times for all sorts of wierd things. But there's also a past form (which may or may not refer to the actual past), that looks like this:

If she were lying, I could tell
Were I invisible, I could still make noise

And there's a past-perfect form, viz:

If I had known, I would have prepared
I wouldn't be writing if you hadn't encouraged me (=had you not encouraged)

So what's the common theme between these three forms? None that I can see, except they're all called subjunctive. And the second two are in fact irrealis conditionals, used for talking about things that might have been, but aren't or weren't.

So why lump them together? I've no idea. But I suppose it makes as much sense as describing "My" and "Your" as pronouns instead of adjectives.

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I'm due to get my first paycheque tomorrow. Though knowing how the banks around here work it'll be (a) cash and (b) late.

It is possible to do business by having cheques chase each other through the system, but it winds up being more practical to get the cash out of the hole in the wall, take the twenty minute walk to the other side of town, and hand over the wad in person. Or if the recipient is in another town, stuff the cash into an envelope, and it'll get there in four days instead of twelve.

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I'm not lonely, which is surprising. Well obviously I do get lonely sometimes, but there's none of the terrible lonliness that I feared. Not the kind that makes you stare at the wall wondering whether to do anything about the impulse to hit your head against it.

I've had almost no conversation - except with myself - and have essentially sat here, waiting for something to happen and sometimes trying to understand English grammar.

What? Yes I do talk to myself. But I've been doing it since I was four years old. One day I was bored in the playground and I wondered what it would be like. I haven't stopped since - it's a good way to work things out when there's no one else to bounce ideas off.

I'd been told that only mad people talked to themselves, and I wondered whether I would go mad by doing it, and whether I would be okay to go only slightly mad and then stop. A bit like children who're told masturbation makes their hands hairy, so they decide they'll continute doing it until they start to see stubble.

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