I’ve got a peg on a singular trust: that sequence is either everything
or a passable facsimile thereof, and that "correct" collisions of
matter and meaning and relative relevance will, in the sweetness of chance,
befriend this still-arcane saga.
Select any unit of time—it does not, evidently, matter what
the interval—and the chosen amount will amount to a single frame in a film
that is recklessly sluggish. I continue, as ever, to strive for improvement of
our fortunes, but it actually, well and truly, seems not to matter. A change of
perspective, or the addition of for-now-italicized perspicacity, has
been, and still is, the “thing” of it.
In response, I have come not only to realize, but also to
accept, that I'm fastened to the overarching/underpinning conviction that
there's a punchline somewhere. In frustrating proximity, probably. And furthermore,
I have observed—with more humiliation than humility—that the extent to which I’ve aggrieved myself may have, at the end of all of this, served
as my undoing. Like a scuba diver, surfacing with breath instinctively
bated, developing an embolism. That's grim.
It’s funnier than that, though. I have, in my rather-teensy
lifetime, gone from being a person whose “success” was never at issue—my
promise was such that I was regaled with hyperbole from all ilk of well-meaning
adulty types (themselves incapable of accommodating the fact that I was merely
biding my time with trifling muck until I could commit suicide)—to an adulty
type whose legion attempts at establishing the level of self-sufficiency
requisite to Life These Days have each and all met with ignominy of some sort
or another. It seems nasty, but is more accurate than not, to say that, in the
actualized primacy of this very-basic capacity, I am a failure.
But, dig this—what I’m saying is that that’s okay, because that definition of failure
was tailored for those in situations like mine (certainly befitting me, by
existing standards); it is seldom wielded publicly, because it’s divisive and
rotten, and I can see a real argument for the thinker’s self-serving
reluctance. Be that as it may, such discretion is not of any value to me—why
not be frank? To consider today’s underfoot underclass as having failed
is rather liberating, as it is not a treatise on anything but nomenclature,
honest self-appraisal, and the obsolete values of an amorphous capitalistic
thought virus. This process has been hell for untold numbers—sufferers and bystanders
alike—that it's devastating to comprehend, but seeing myself as a failure actually EMPOWERS me. It allows the punishing yoke
of boorish and reactive reeling to shift into revealing what life is rather
than what life isn’t.
“Well, that’s great and grand and groovy, Benb, and now we know that
you’re a frayed wick or something similarly screwy and ineffective,” says my
projected Peanut Gallery. “But,” I protest, with immediacy, verve, and aplomb,
“that’s the beauty of it—I haven't any choice but to forge forwardly! I've
exhausted my own elastic in response to the vagaries of whatever contortion of
my identity is demanded at a given moment. So, all that I can do is my best, in
the devout service of maintaining what little stability we've managed to eke
from the vast opacity of ."
(ABSTRACT NOUN)
I have always loved surprises, and ever have I shuddered at
the plodding and prosaic attrition that lurks with rattling ubiquity in pockets
and envelopes the world over. I can almost hear it breathe, slinking around me
when alone in my car, on the toilet, or in the kitchen watching the mercury
drop on a perfunctory thermometer. It was such an indelicate certainty that I had
identified time as the antipode to spontaneity.
Anyway, I know (and will someday-maybe accept) that I’m in
school, and I’ve had to acknowledge that the pervasive presence mentioned
above is THE SAME INGREDIENT that
- makes you so uncomfortable upon hearing
certain music that you HAVE TO DANCE.
- pushes swear words out your damn mouth at
the dinner table when the exquisite experience of the food that you’re eating unbinds
you and confiscates your manners.
- turns sentences into paragraphs, for no
reason other than that you are capsized with joy at being near the person with
whom you’re speaking.
And this fact—that the niggling currents in and out of a day
are the feckless eddies of a second, that it is not only a surprise, but the
surprise—is a gargantuan surprise. Which is a scorcher of a punchline.
