A Play on Thirds

I was writing a column in my office (actually I was staring out the window, scratching) when I suddenly felt the presence of a third person in the room.  This was strange because there wasn’t a second person first. 

He stopped writing and looked around.  The hinky feeling continued so he got up and looked in the closet.  Not seeing a third person, I came out of the closet, slipped back into my chair, and continued to scratch out my column. 

Funny thing about third people – they come and go, I thought.  Sometimes they won’t appear for days, other times the writer will sit back, stare at the ceiling, and feel an omniscient presence in his work, he wrote.

In an attempt to deliberately confuse the reader, he continued writing this way until I decided to switch from my newspaper column to my one act play-on-words titled ‘A Play on Words.’  I felt that the play had started to sound like an English lesson in the use of third person omniscient writing style and needed some work, so when he switched back to myself I decided to knock it off for the day. 

Entering the living room, he noticed his wife was watching TV – a show he didn’t particularly enjoy.   

Knowing he would try to change the channel, she gave him a withering stare, as if to say “I’m watching American Idol and you can go downstairs if you want to watch hockey, Buster.”  The writer, on hearing this unspoken command, decided to switch back to first person, so I went to the kitchen for a snack, then downstairs to watch the hockey game. 

In a further attempt to confuse the reader, one then switched to speaking like royalty, where one speaks in what is, one supposes, the Third Person Blueblood or some such “La-De-Dah” language.  One tends to use this third person oneness until such time as it gets boring, then I switch back to first person and “get on with my life,” I said to himself.

As he continued writing the obscure essay about various writing voices in his head, hoping it was in some way illuminating or humourous, he discovered it was neither.  I stopped typing and stared at my screen.  It was as blank as his brain at the moment. 

‘To be continued…,” I wrote, not knowing if you use quotation marks around a thought you’ve just typed.

“Well, that was odd,” he thought.

“The End,” he wrote.

“Thank God,” all three voices thought.

“Well plop on you guys!” he thought back.  “Who are you anyway?” I wondered psychotically.

I stopped typing.  This was getting too weird.