All I see is Edges

What is it with puzzles? And puzzles and old people? Puzzles are nothing more than a seemingly endless supply of identically shaped pieces of blue sky, or green grass, designed simply to distract the old folks as they wait to die. So I was a little perplexed when a friend bought a one thousand piece monster on holiday with us. And even more perplexed when I found myself, three days later, tipping the pieces out on to the table. Let me tell you something, starting a thousand piecer? Gee, that's a bitch. A bitch with cupcakes. Finding that first matching piece... hmm you're looking for a piece of blue sky among nine hundred and ninety eight other pieces of... blue sky! It was fair to say progress was slow to stationary, but after an hour or seven I had amassed the cloak of a man and the crotch of an angel. I thought it best to continue. Hours and hours in front of the table I sat, I got back ache, my long distance vision went all blurry, my insomnia took an impressively large turn for the worse. I started to dream I was doing the puzzle in my sleep, I'd shut my eyes and see nothing but pieces fitting one by one into the scene, and wake to find nothing had changed downstairs. Friends joined in, we came up with our own slang and puzzling terminology, we slapped pieces down with a twist and slam, we smacked edge after edge in the face, came up with systems and puzzley chaos theories. I would stand feet away and pounce on pieces in instinct, others would swear by large mugs of coffee to open the mind to 'the edges', innocent babies began to be wildly accused of missing piece consumption. Whisky and cigars became the mere fuel for our puzzle lust, and finally, with five of us crouched around the table, sleep-deprived, snapping and irritable, we approached the final pieces. We laid these like bodies into a grave and agreed to never speak of this again. But to perhaps form a monthly club, and perhaps next time we could do something from the renaissance period?