Life & Wisdom Quote by George Murray

Paranoia is usually the province of governments and lovers; George Murray drags it into the kitchen, where it becomes both funnier and sharper. The line starts by inflating a familiar writerly anxiety: the fear that your work is being altered, betrayed, or cheapened when you turn your back. Making the fridge the culprit is an inspired demotion of the muse. It’s not an editor, not a rival, not even your own self-doubt, but a dumb appliance with a hum and a hidden interior. The joke lands because it takes the private superstition of the creative process (something is happening to the poem when I’m not watching) and literalizes it in domestic machinery.

Then Murray pivots to the fan, and the comedy tilts into unease. A fridge “doing something” to poetry is absurdly anthropomorphic, but a fan “thinking about me” implies a gaze, a judgment, a relationship. It’s also a sly pun: “fan” as appliance versus “fan” as audience. The speaker can tolerate the fantasy of sabotage; what rattles him is attention. Being thought about means being interpreted, misread, desired, dismissed. That’s the real paranoia of publishing: not that the poem changes in the dark, but that someone else’s mind changes it in public.

Contextually, it reads like a poet’s deadpan update of surveillance culture for the household: the internet of things, the quantified self, the sense that ordinary objects are quietly collecting, reflecting, and returning versions of us. Murray’s wit isn’t just whimsy; it’s a way to say the modern self is always half-performing, even to the furniture.