For as long as I can remember I have tried to exist in the real world for as little time as possible
Had I followed the news closely over the past week rather than spent my time imagining getting a call from Roy Hodgson telling me that I'd made the England squad (a gamble that paid off for Roy when I scored a last-minute winning goal that clinched the 2012 Euros … an overhead kick, too!), then I would surely have noticed earlier that Walter Mitty has been making a few appearances.
Mitty, as you probably know, is the daydreaming character created by James Thurber for a New Yorker short story (it was made into a film in 1947, and will be again next year in a remake starring Ben Stiller). His is a mundane life of little achievement, yet in his wildest imagination he would often be fighting wars or performing life-saving surgery. I recount all this because last week it was revealed that a group of disgruntled servicemen have apparently set up a website, WalterMittyHunt.com, to track down anyone caught pretending to be a war veteran, or exaggerating their own combat achievements (in order to – according to the site, at least – "scam money from charity or falsely impress status in the eyes of 'certain females'"). Commentators listening to Frédéric Michel's testimony at the Leveson inquiry have also wondered if he is a bit of a Walter Mitty.
Yet it's something of an abused term. People accused of being Walter Mittys often aren't alleged to be crafting tall tales out of a love of escapism and wild fantasy. They're just being accused of fibbing. It's like when I'm asked why my latest article is six hours late and I say: "Oh, did you not get it? How strange, must be something up with my email!" I don't consider this to be a laudable act of Mitty-esque invention, in which I have conjured up a vivid alternative world where everything is exactly the same only email sometimes doesn't work. I'm just lying because I haven't started it yet.
I am, however, definitely one of life's Walter Mitty types. For as long as I can remember I have tried to exist in the real world for as little time as possible. It's something that maybe I should have grown out of. At 16 it seemed entirely reasonable to make an eight-hour shift on a supermarket checkout more bearable by imagining becoming the world's first English middle-class hip-hop star. But at 32 I can accept why it might be infuriating that I didn't listen attentively to how my wife's day was because I was single-handedly hauling the England team back from 3-0 down to the Germans (Steven Gerrard was injured – someone had to step up). Of course, with age the fantasies take on a wistful tinge – the realisation that many of the people you dream of emulating are now facing retirement. Not that new fantasies can't take their place ("Colleagues may have mocked your daydream column, Mr Jonze, but we have decided to award it the Pulitzer prize, even overlooking our own rule that it needed to appear in an American publication ...") but it's the teenage ones that remain most vivid.
A recent holiday driving across Arizona and Nevada became one long extended daydream for me, a restaging of Kerouac's On the Road that only wobbled when I caught a glimpse of our battered Hudson and it looked suspiciously like a fully air-conditioned five-door Kia Soul. The satnav also had a habit of bringing me back to earth – On the Road would have been significantly less romantic had it featured the words "Recalculating … please make a U-turn at the next junction then drive 12 miles before arriving at a dilapidated brothel" every time Dean Moriarty went off-piste.
Technology in general is the enemy of the daydreamer. It promises to make your life so much more fantastical but so often delivers the opposite – leading you to correct destinations, capturing the grim reality in high resolution and filling your time with reminders, updates, alerts. Things to do rather than things to think.
It's a shame. My love of pop music was accentuated by the hours I'd spent dreaming about it – pop, after all, is one big fantasy project – and surely all these hours can now, technically, be considered as job training. Had I spent these "wasted hours" studying the history of music, I doubt I'd have ever come as close to working out what made it so special to me.
Yet nowadays this space to daydream seems to be getting narrower. We are bombarded by so many distractions that we have little time to dream up big ideas. But for me, daydreaming has less to do with career benefits and more to do with injecting joy, triumph and even heroic failure in to my life (in truth my Walter Mitty definition is faulty too – Mitty never succeeded even in his wildest dreams, whereas my fantasies often involve egotistical victory). The world is often grey and rainy, and involves way too many meetings. Surely it's only natural to spice them up with something more exciting such as, say, headlining the first concert on the moon, even at the risk of having your fantasy rudely interrupted by that dreaded question: "So what are your thoughts on this matter?" A question that you will barely hear for the roar of the crowd as you step up to the microphone, or hoist that hard-won trophy into the air.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/27/real-walter-mitty-type
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