I just got into an argument with my co-worker Trese about the exact definition of the word “pedantic.”

You’re not even remotely surprised, are you.

As filler material, the stuff we work on when we don’t have important stuff to work on, we’ve started to caption the “baby blue” softcore movies that air on SexTv: The Channel. Yeah. Much hilarity and good-natured banter has ensued in the department. Sentences I never thought I’d utter at work: “Hardcore is pumping, softcore is writhing.” “Any more work that needs to be done tonight? No? Oh, good, then I can find out if the naked cop solves all those naked murders.”

I’m not offended by them at all, which you might find surprising, or, since I’m a heterosexual male aged 18-35 and will be, weather permitting, for the next 14 months, you might not.

After all, there’s so much else out there to get offended about.

The Spirit of John Lennon is going to air on Bravo! sometime next month. Watch! as mediums from around the world, or what they think of as the world, attempt to contact the dearly departed Beatle. Watch! as spiritual something-or-other Joe Power treads the streets of Liverpool, following a mysterious psychic scent to what turns out to be the location of John Lennon’s childhood school. Watch! as the redoubtable Power stands in the middle of the Cavern Club, “getting” an impression of a name: “McFall, McF, Mc, Mc, Fall, McF, McFall, McFall? Is it McFall? And I’m getting, it’s Rory, is it Rory, it’s an R, is it Roy?” Lo and behold, when he asks the bartender if there was ever a Rory or Ray McFall, the bartender just so happens to have a pamphlet detailing the history of the Cavern Club, and hey! How about that! The second owner of the Cavern Club was named Ray McFall! The amazing psychic has amazingly tuned in to the Other Side and divined knowledge that would be unobtainable to us mere mortals, unless of course we happened to have, say, a biography of John Lennon and a map!

If there’s an afterlife, if, then please by all that’s sacred let it be more than a second-rate search engine. Joe Power, spiritual key to Google Afterlife.

People: I know why you’re watching this. I know what you want. I do get it, I do understand, I really, truly do. Tragedy tears out part of your soul and leaves nothing in its place. Literally nothing. All the clichés are true — the emptiness inside, the hollow gaping hole, the way your whole body twinges when your thoughts hit the absence and fall into the nothingness. It’s like you’re forever taking the 25th step up a staircase with only 24 stairs on it. The void gnaws at you, like teeth.

Faced with that nothing, people will turn to anything that gives them something. And there are always, always, always going to be those who, in exchange for your wasting the rest of your life on their behalf, in exchange for your wilfully turning your eyes from anything that might be real, will be more than happy to give you the appearance of that something — because it’s so easy to give, when it’s just more nothing dressed up.

I’m walking home after finishing the captions for my half of the programme, I’m listening to the radio, and I’m swearing a baby-blue streak under my breath, and possibly over my breath at times, because it’s after midnight and there’s nobody out on the streets for me to offend with my choice of adjectives. I’m torn between shaking, hysterical laughter and utter blinding rage at those who would play on the desperation and gullibility of people who need answers for the unanswerable. And I’m walking faster and I’m taking shallower breaths until I force myself to slow down and breathe deeply, and I calm myself down, or at least try not to think about it; because that’s all I can do, really, apart from set fire to the master tapes, which my boss would probably not regard as a political statement.

Let it go. Or, rather, let it be. If there is an afterlife, if there is something out there more than what we have here, then the answers will come eventually. I don’t have faith, but I do have hope. Let it go; deal with the here and the now as best you can; keep watching the skies, and hope that there’s something bigger than us, something more than the petty, banal prancings of those self-aggrandizing so-called unhappy mediums.

I keep walking, and half a block later Strawberry Fields starts to play on the radio. For fuck’s sake.