I’ve been hearing a lot about being there lately “the right side of history.” It was as if I wasn’t feeling enough of the feeling of being in the wrong place, simply put. There is no story. For example, right now I think my right place would be the Seafood Festival in O Grove, but I walk towards the editorial office, where there will be no Albariño and there will be coffee, and maybe I will find it there. Some spider crabs who looked like an old boss of mine called for trouble. Don’t look at the crabs on us today, he would say, with his sleeves rolled up, a cigarette in his mouth and a cup of coffee on the table. Messy hair. A cup of cold coffee. Yes cold. Cups of “steaming coffee” are only found in novels. People write a novel and if Coffee It gives it the adjective smoky. In reality, if the coffee is smoking, that means you can’t drink it because it’s too hot and you’ll be jittery (and it’s still decaffeinated) and you’ll waste your time or get mad at the waiter. Or with your microwave. Microwaves are on the right side of history. So, at seven in the morning, they are there to fulfill the function of heating something, without longing to be somewhere else, without hesitation, if you have something to heat at seven in the morning. But at ten o’clock at night you go with pre-cooked cannelloni, and there is also a microwave, it bears witness to your daily story, accompanies you to write the story of a day without a date. A day that ends with exhaustion, cheap beer, tasteless cannelloni that fill my pajama bottoms, and a series that kills a lot of people and whose dialogue does not cloud the screenwriter’s brain. And you’re seeing it because one reviewer said you can’t miss it. Maybe if you miss it you’re on the wrong side of history. Okay yes, but maybe you could use your time better. The right side of history interests me more as a literary matter. In other words, it is more appealing to tell a story and tell it from which angle. And in what voice? That’s the gist of it.
Politicians talk a lot about whether we are in the right place in history, as if they know how history will judge all this, that if it has a place for us, we might be at the wrong time, and that’s why. Sometimes we messed up everything.