… I said while sitting alone, far, far, from the woman in question, whom I have never met. But I said it out loud, and I think I could.
I think I could like this girl…
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Tag Archives: life
That’s me right there, the guy next to the guy.
I had a conversation with a friend tonight. She is terribly down-to-earth, considering that she is young and beautiful. She’s Czech, so that helps.
“Soup Boy’s having a birthday party,” I said, “do you want to come?”
“Who?”
“You know, the guy who was my roommate. All the girls like him.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I know who you mean. He is very good looking, but I don’t know him well enough to say I like him.” Emphasis on like. Significant pause. “But I like him. What time is the party?”
My whole life I’ve been the guy standing next to the guy that every woman in the room wants to be with. This theme has been so consistent that sometimes I wonder if perhaps my proximity imparts some magical quality upon my friends, but in the end I know that’s not it. The only answer I can figure is encouraging.
I hang with smart people (unless I hang with a collective delusion). Despite all the bad press women get for their questionable skills in choosing men, they will choose a smart hot guy over a stupid hot guy. I have no hotness myself, and I don’t know how I offended the gods, but for my entire adult life I’ve been the buddy of the Most Wanted Guy, the guy who’s not just good-looking but quick-witted and downright artistic. Soup Boy is all of the above, and my current platonic relationships with some really nice women began with their hope that I was the stepping-stone to his heart.
Before Soup Boy there was Vince, and Steve, and all the rest. Women have been taking me aside to ask me for the secret to win my buddy’s heart since I’ve known what ‘woman’ really meant.
I was about to take that statement back as an overstatement when I remembered something from a long time ago. I was in seventh grade, and my buddy was the object of a crush. He was an athlete, quick-witted, and creative. As the boy next to the boy of her dreams, I was interesting. Useful. Unspoken, unspeakable, was how I felt about her. In the intervening decades, nothing much has changed.
A Load of Carp
I’m heading to distant shores later today, and in my classic fashion I managed to completely squander yesterday. I plead extenuating circumstances — I was out with Soup Boy, Izzy, and Little John Friday night and while the night wasn’t excessive (at least for me it wasn’t), it did run late. After walking most of the way home I realized the day trams were running. So, yesterday I was pretty tired.
Rather than photograph sidewalk carp vendors and track down an electrical adapter so I can keep my array of battery-powered items running in the Islands of Misfit Electricity, or even do simple tasks like catch up with email, I watched cartoons. (For those keeping score at home, I watched Chobits, an anime that fails to have the weight of a serious show or the charm of a silly one. It does involve a robot with special powers, which of course looks like a teenage girl (rhymes with Japanese). The story is pretty much the same as Pinoccio, but instead of a marionette the main character is a robot who wants to become a Little Girl Superweapon.)
In the late afternoon I took a nap that lasted until this morning. Now I feel pretty good, but there’s a lot to do between now and departure.
Speaking of carp, my landlord knocked on my door yesterday and gave me a big chunk of the stuff. “Kapr,” he said, as I hefted the plastic bag. “Ryba,” he expanded in my moment of confusion. Then the light turned on and I realized he had just handed me several pounds of frozen, not-very-tasty fish. Still, it was a nice gesture. I thanked him with enthusiasm that lasted for about fifteen seconds. What the hell am I going to do with this? I asked myself as opened up the fridge, and then made things more complicated by breaking the handle to the freezer compartment. There’s a lot of carp in there now. It’s frozen, but they might be working on the wiring while I’m gone, which leads to nightmare scenario #48, freezer filled with rotting animal when returning from Christmas travels. That hasn’t happened to me since I was in college, but the memory of that incident has left me scarred for life.
So, anyone want some carp?
A Hundred Little Things
I was supposed to go down to Moravia this weekend for a birthday party, but as the time approached to leave I was getting progressively more stressed out. The big pile of things I had put off in November was looming over me, and the flood added a new list of its own. Even just taking a shower was a hassle; there were sodden floor mats piled in the shower, and I had no towels even remotely clean.
I had no dry shoes that didn’t tear up my feet, rent was due, I had no telephone or Internet access, the list goes on and on. On top of everything else I had been eagerly awaiting the chance come December to get back to work on my “real” writing projects. Thanks to the flood that hadn’t happened yet.
MaK really wanted me to come, and I fell into the trap of listing some of the reasons I was bailing. Any individual reason sounds pretty weak, it’s only when you can see the avalanche that you stop saying, “those are just snowflakes.”
It did not promise to be a relaxing trip, either. It was for a birthday celebration, and there were events planned that stretched from the moment we arrived until we left, and I knew that more things would be added. And, like MaK trying to convince me I should go, there would be no saying “no”. If I boarded that train, there would be no getting off, and there would be no getting any work done. (I suspect my in-laws don’t consider what I do to be work. I have heard them say (in czech, assuming I don’t understand) that my language skills are weak because I go to cafés but I don’t talk to anyone, I just sit and write. Well, that’s my job. It’s a good job, but it’s not one that involves talking.) It became a lot easier to say no when MaK said they were ready to go and they she thought they should pick me up. I was so laughably far from being ready to walk out the door (see shower and shoes above, add clean clothes and painfully stiff legs from bailing out the kitchen), that at that point I wouldn’t have been able to join them even if I wanted to. So I just said, “I have to work. I can’t work right now and I’ll be crazy until I can.”
I could go on talking about all the things I need to do, but I think I’d better get back to doing them.
Tý Voda!
I learned this morning that my new neighbors are pretty cool. When the Polish family downstairs moved out, I idly hoped that a bunch of single women would move in. Alas, my wish fell one ‘wo’ short. I had seen a couple of the guys coming and going, in the last few days, but I had not had a chance to say more than ‘hello’.
Early, early this morning, before the sky had even begun to turn light, I slowly emerged from deep slumber, gradually becoming aware that someone was banging on my door. It did not occur to me right away that there might be a good reason someone was knocking. “Oh, great,” I thought. “The new guys are getting home from a bar and they’re drunk and they want to share the joy.” That thought didn’t last long. Other sounds were starting to register, but I was still a bit surprised when someone opened my front door. I stood up and — splash.
I thought of several different titles for this episode over the course of the morning, from “The great flood of ’06” to “Bad day for dust bunnies.” The title I chose is a cross between the most common phrase I heard this morning, tý vole, which is a not-very-polite word, and voda, czech for “water”. (Tý vole translates literally as “you ox”, but over the last few decades has for whatever reason become the default curse.)
Water. Lots of water. I stood in the kitchen, water covering the tops of my feet. It was dark; the only light came from the hall. The main breaker for my flat had popped. I was annoyed at that moment, not considering that my feet were in water than also had power strips floating in it. Yes, overall it’s a good thing that circuit breakers break circuits now and then. (There was little danger of me being electrocuted; the wiring would have caught on fire before I got up.)
Voda, Voda, everywhere, but not a drop of čaj. I really wanted a cup of tea at that moment.
I live on the top floor, and water, being composed mostly of matter, responds readily to the call of gravity. It is crafty in the number of paths it can find to make its way downhill. The water was flowing out my front door in waves, cascading down the stairs and pouring in delicate little waterfalls from one flight to the next. I could see paint lying on the treads of lower flights; as the water sought the center of the earth it paused to work its polar molecule magic on whatever substances it encountered, and paint and plaster were the biggest victims. Water doesn’t necessarily have to go over things to get where it wants to go; it can go through as well. By the time my landlord woke up this morning, water was dripping from his ceiling. That can’t be good.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m a big fan of water; everybody should have some. But when you just let it run loose, nothing good can come of it.
As I stood in shock, awe, and tea deprivation, the new neighbors had already sprung into action; and before long we discovered that shutting off the main to the water heater stopped the flow. About then I looked at the clock. 5:45 am. The downstairs neighbors had been getting ready to go to work when they noticed that something was amiss. I set to trying to get as much of the water down a drain, as opposed to letting it soak through the floor and into my landlord’s apartment. As I used a dustpan as a surprisingly effective water scooper, I began to appreciate the acre-foot. (For those still mired in the metric system, an acre-foot is a unit of volume — the amount of water it would take to cover an acre of land to the depth of one foot.) I was dealing with an apartment-inch. I scooped and scooped, then the neighbors hauled in towels and buckets and eventually (after emptying the large buckets several times), we got the situation under control. The bucket team headed downstairs, where the basement was getting deep. I stayed upstairs and commenced mopping-up operations.
Incidentally, when you’re dealing with a major flood, it’s a good idea to keep one towel dry through the first phase of operations. It was purely accidental in my case, but having a towel that wasn’t saturated made a big difference at the end.) By 7:30 the worst was over and a nice lady arrived to help me clean up. She chased puddles in the corners while I tipped up the furniture to see how things were underneath. The plumbers arrived at 8:00, and by 8:30 they were gone, the electricity was back on, and I had my tea.
I have yet to try any device whose power adapter was on the floor (luckily I have a spare for the laptop), and my WiFi thingie was on the floor as well. Tomorrow, perhaps, we will learn the fate of those electronics. The insurance guy comes on Tuesday.
Well, THAT didn’t work…
I’m just coming out of a self-imposed Internet blackout that was intended to let me get things done. Let’s go to the scorecard and see how I did:
- Refrigeratior: emptier
- Cabinets: barer
- Pile of dishes in sink: taller
- Laundry: still out of detergent
- Database in Jer’s Novel Writer: guts still hanging out
- Work table: cluttered
- The half of lliving room unusable because it’s full of furniture: unchanged.
The contents of my refrigerator as I write this are: 2 bottles of water, soy sauce, mustard, whipped cream, an open packet of paprika, and a plastic lemon filled with juice. If there’s anything in the freezer, I don’t want to know about it. Last night the cabinets surrendered the last solid food – a box of slovenské halušky mix. I was expecting something that made the meal you get in restaurants when you order slovenské halušky, but this was just the base dumpling part. My results did not match the picture on the box at all. Breakfast this morning was leftover slovenské halušky. I thought of putting soy sauce on it, but decided against it.
On the plus side, I think I’ve reached the point where I must do something or I will starve to death.
An unusually ordinary day
I’m not a shopper. I’m especially not a big-store shopper. It’s not so much that I consciously avoid the giant department stores, I just don’t like lugging the booty home with me when there are neighborhood stores I would walk past on my way. I’ve been in a couple of the big department stores around here, but always as a spectator. Today, it was time. I needed a few things that the local stores don’t seem to carry (emphasis on ‘seem’), and I’ve lived in my apartment long enough that it’s time I went out and got those little things that make a house a home. A year and a half is long enough without a can opener. If I waited any longer people might accuse me of procrastinating.
I hadn’t realized it until I saw a billboard, but one metro stop away from me is one of the giant department stores. It is in the direction away from the city, and in my time here I had never gone past my stop. So on the one hand all I did was hop on the metro to go shopping at a giant store. On the other hand I went to a new place to shop at a store I’d never been to before.
It was entirely like every other giant department store on the planet, with just a couple of exceptions. The goods were arranged with czech sensibilites, matching the way smaller stores categorize themselves. For instance, every shopping district in Prague has a store that sells electric things. If you want something that runs off electricity, for whatever purpose, you go to the electric thing store. Perfectly sensible. I found my beard trimmer between the digital cameras and the microwave ovens. Because it’s electric. Once I walked through the store once, I had no trouble finding anything I needed.
I now have knives that cut, a nice stainless-steel frying pan, a can opener, and a hair trimmer (not one of those pathetic pieces of junk they sell as beard trimmers). Five more years and I’ll be moved in!
Don’t Die
The new-new bartender warmly greeted a bunch of her friends an hour ago — two women and one guy, and things seemed casual and friendly. Then the thin girl with the large breasts arrived. His attention shifted to her, and so did mine. Anorexic Boob-Job Girl, I dubbed her. I started composing an episode about her charms, but then I looked closer. Her upper arms are about the size of my wrists, and I have my mother’s wrists. What I started to write as a joke is in fact a horror, and while I admired her I was shoveling dirt on her grave.
She is anorexic boob-job girl. I’m looking at someone committing one of the most horrific slow suicides imaginable, and I haven’t the slightest idea what to do about it. It’s an American impulse, I suppose, thinking that there is a solution, and that I am the guy to apply it. I feel guilty, now, thinking “Dang! She’s hot!” when I first saw her, before I saw what wasn’t there.
I don’t know what to say to anyone reading this who is shooting for weight zero. Don’t? Stop? You’re beautiful now, just as you are, and no number on a scale will ever change that? There is nothing I can say that hasn’t been said before.
Except maybe don’t die. Don’t die. We need you on this side, sensitive and frightened, honest and hurt. In this big brutal world, we need you more than ever.
I need you. I need to believe that you exist. I need to hope that I can meet you someday, by chance, and you’ll never know that I was the guy who wrote this, and I’ll never know that this helped you, but we’ll bump someday, on the A train in New York or the tram in Prague, just by accident, a little embarrassing incident, something minor we’ll chuckle over for the rest of our time, and we will both discover happiness. Chances are it won’t be me you bump, but some other lonely soul. That doesn’t matter, but it won’t happen if you’re dead.
Words, words, words. Useless futile hopeless words. Sinuous vipers that twist themselves to the tune of the piper. In the end, they are nothing, but they are all I have. Words, and when a life is at stake I know just how useless words can be. There is nothing I can say, nothing I can write, that will stop the woman in front of me from killing herself. There’s nothing I can do to stop anyone from starving herself to death, except ask. Please, don’t. For me. I use the smoke as an excuse, but I can’t get away with crying in a crowded bar too often.
De Brug – echoes
A couple of days later I was talking with Soup Boy. Soup Boy is certainly popular with the ladies, and has a healthy and active social life. He was bugging me about working fourteen hours every day and not getting out and meeting people. In my own defense I mentioned my encounter at De Brug. I started to describe her, but I didn’t get far.
“Black hair down to her butt?” Soup Boy asked.
“Yeah, ” I said.
“I know her. Damn, it’s a small town. She’s a trip. And she’s hot.”
“She just broke up with her boyfriend,” I said.
“Reeealy…”
“Yeah, we spent the afternoon disparaging North Carolina. He sounded like a real goober.”
“I never could figure out what she saw in that guy.”
“Well, she’s not seeing it any more.”
The conversation continued like that for a while, mostly at Goober’s expense. I wondered if I would hear from her again about her writing. She had said her life could fill ten books, and from what I heard from Soup Boy, she might not have been exaggerating.
Two days later Soup Boy and I were on a tram, and he says, “I have some gossip for you. It’s about Cleo.” It took me a moment to figure out who Cleo was, but then I was all ears. “I was at a party last night,” he said, “and I thought she might be there. I asked about her and they said she was in the hospital.”
“Holy cow.”
“Not the hospital, really, the psycho ward. I guess she’s kind of freaking out about her boyfriend.” She had seemed sad when I met her, but hardly freaking out. Still, people keep things inside. Then Soup Boy dropped the bomb. “Apparently she stabbed herself pretty seriously, a couple of times.”
Not even ‘holy cow’ could convey what I felt then, so I didn’t say anything at first. Eventually conversation turned to the futility of grand gestures of desperation, the fleeting nature of life, Soup Boy’s ex-girlfriends, and what a goober Goober was.
I understand her stay in the hospital was brief, but I have not heard from her since. I hope she does write her ten volumes, and I hope writing them brings her peace.
What I Did Today
… or at least that’s what I would have done had I made the effort.
The day started innocently enough, the sun peeking in through the window and shining in my eyes. “Usually you’re up by now,” the Day said.
“Sod off. I punched out of that world of alarm clocks and books on tape and other nefarious devices designed to enslave humankind. I’m a free agent now.”
The Day laughed nervously. It had only been on the job a little while itself, and was very much tied to a schedule. This wasn’t how previous days had said I’d act. “But,” and here a sly grin stole across the day’s face, “what about the voices?”
They’re not really voices per se, of course. There’s no little Jimminy Cricket up in my head saying, “Oooh! Hop to it, Chumley! Today’s going to be a cracking fine day!” There’s nothing like that. It’s just that, lying in bed in the morning, most days I start getting excited about all the things I’m going to be doing. I get ideas starting to fizz away up there, things to write, insights on that annoying bug in Jer’s Novel Writer, that kind off stuff. Most mornings I feel like a kid who’s been promised an outing to the zoo. I get up because I want to get up.
Most mornings. This morning things inside my cranium were still and quiet. Not the quiet before the storm quiet, not the “Quiet… too quiet” quiet, not even the sigh of the wind over the dunes quiet. With nothing going on up there, I rolled over, and left the day uncertain and disoriented.
Eventually, of course, biology demanded that I rise and drink tea. While the tea brewed I stood scratching myself. And that set the tone for the rest of the day. By the end, the Day crept away, weeping and broken.
I think I’ll go to bed early.
I wrote a story once
It was an odd tale; it started as sleep-deprived ravings but grew on me. It was an odd world, an agrarian culture, but without horses. Giraffes were the beast of burden.
There was a man in the village who no one liked. He had a bad temper, and sprayed saliva when he talked. No one mentioned that to him. He was out working his fields one day when his giraffe had a heart attack. That must be common among the swift ones; the heart has to maintain enormous pressure to keep the head nourished, perched way up there.
The man’s giraffe died and he sat there, out in his field, next to his dead animal, for three days. Then he packed what he could carry and left the village forever. The story was not about him.
In this world of odd mammals and random blinding rainstorms, metaphors had a disquieting concreteness. Promises were trees, and lies were death. I was big on the truth back then. Wombats would pursue their victims relentlessly across the grassland, but neither hunter nor hunted would voluntarily enter the forest. I think they were wombats. They sound more dangerous than platypuses. The plainsmen raised them to be particularly nasty.
I’m thinking of that story now, wistfully hoping to recapture its unfettered randomness and heavy symbolism. Fifteen years later, I seem to recall some good prose as well. Tonight I have been sitting, groping for some of that silliness, my prose prosaic. There are only so many hours you can spend editing your own work before you turn into a pile of dependent clauses and dangling participles, with nary an idea in sight.
It’s time for action! It’s time to recapture that old-school mild schizophrenia. All nighter! Yeah! Rock on!
She was a writer, part 2
I was in a nostalgic mood the other day, thinking about the meaningless encounters in my life that, had things gone differently, would have meant something. I wrote about a woman in an airport bar in Cincinnati. I’ve thought of her off and on for more than three years; I even occasionally tried to dig up an email address for her through her publisher. I didn’t try very hard, I admit, but for me she was always out there, a person I had hit it off with but had not had time to alienate. Even as I wrote that bit I wondered if she would stumble across it.
She died in 2002.
You may have read John’s comment to the previous piece informing me of the case, and you may have read my reply. I’m embarrassed by my reaction; I tried to make light of it and ended up making her early death to be about me. I knew the moment I posted the comment I would want to delete it, but in the interest of honesty I will let it stand. You’ve all read it by now anyway. I have not seen any other replies, as I am in Slovakia and Al Gore hasn’t been here yet. (George Bush is in the capital right now, but I think he still expects someone to hand him a sandwich when he says ‘Bratislava’.)
During the drive down here I thought of her. I wonder what ended her life. I wonder if the cancer came back or if she lost her long struggle with her own self-image. Probably neither of those things. Perhaps it was a car crash. Maybe she was struck by lightning. She was thirty-nine, give or take. My memory, not the best, had munged the name of her book; for the record, her name was Lucy Grealy and the name of her book is Autobiography of a Face.
In the end it doesn’t matter. For a few hours I sat on a barstool next to a bright light. I checked out her ass. We had a nice chat. Did she already know she was dying? As we sat there was she facing her own mortality and chasing the inevitable with Chivas and Beer? Could I have made a difference? What if she died of loneliness, while I was thinking of her all along? Then again, for all I know she was happily married, and I was just some guy in a bar during a particularly tedious layover. I’ll never know what that encounter meant to her, and she’ll never know what it meant to me.
I wish now she could know I still think of her, but I have no way to tell her. Her striking eyes are dust, her figure is lost, even her deformed jaw is just a playground for the worms. And I still sit alone in airport bars.
The Deterioriation of Jerry
I had Folly out the other night. In general, I’m not a namer of things. Only one car I’ve ever had earned a name (The Heap), and never have I felt the urge to name my computers or other durable goods. My big, fancy camera, however, has a name. Folly. It’s a much bigger, fancier camera than I should be bothering with, and I still have issues with taking my photos through photoshop before I can post them (and usually photoshop resets the time and day info, so they don’t sort out right with the snaps from my little camera). Overall, labor per picture is about ten times the effort for my little fuji/iPhoto/gallery routine. In the online galleries, there are still many more shots taken with my little camera than with the monster. Granted, the results with Folly are better. Sometimes much better. On those occasions I pat myself on the back for having enough faith in my abilities to spring for the damn thing.
Not that it was a difficult decision at the time. I had borrowed my cousin John’s camera for a trip to Yellowstone. I took about 150 pictures and had a lot of fun. Being able to change lenses makes a huge difference over even a respectable zoom feature on a digicam. So I was looking over the results from the day’s excursion while having a few beers with John because that’s what we do, and I was really happy with the results. Really, really, happy. I’m squealing with delight like a schoolgirl, sipping suds, and occasionally sharing my success with John while he’s on his laptop pulgging away. Finally he says, “OK, here’s what I have for you,” and he lists off a camera, three lenses, and a few accessories. I thought of a couple more accessories and told him to make the purchase.
John likes to spend money on cool toys. At the time, his money/toy ratio was a little thin, so I think he had fun working on mine. I knew that I was making a poor decision, and if I waited and thought about it carefully reason would prevail and I’d chicken out. That’s the beauty of the Internet.
So anyway, that’s not what this episode was supposed to be about. I was goofing around with Folly, taking self-portraits. Amateur photographer, amateur model, extreme light conditions. It was a long night. In the process I discovered a camera setting that would have improved my pictures of Amy immeasurably. Next time I’m hanging around with her while she’s in her little nightie I’ll be ready. But that’s another digression. This episode is all about me.
I noticed something when looking back at previous self-portraits. First, the ones taken with Folly were way better (granted, I shot about 400 frames the other night and never got the perfect one), and second, I look different now. A lot of it is hair, of course. Is that the only difference? You be the judge. In fairness (and, um… vanity) I have posted the most flattering pics from each era.
Exhibit A: May 2nd, 2004, San Jose, California. This is the earliest picture of me while on the road trip, exactly one month after it began, and moments before scampering back into the shade. Those lily-white shoulders don’t see the sun if I can help it.
Exhibit B: May 30th, 2004. Crater Lake, about a month later. Beard is getting full, hair is still in the “respectable” range. (Hair covers rather pronounced forehead tan line.)
Exhibit C: July 22, 2004. Drinking Buffalo Milk, Two Harbors, Catalina. Things are definitely not moving in the direction of “pretty”. Desert and ocean have done their work on my skin.
Exhibit D: July 31, 2004. The beard is gone! Still not looking exactly clean-cut, but I was wearing shoes while in the Pacific Beach Library.
Exhibit E: October 9, 2004. After some attempts to stay clean-shaven, I had given up. Hair is becoming a nuisance when driving at highway speeds with the top down.
Exhibit F: December 10, 2004. Shaggy, with two-level beard. (I had started to shave it off, but stopped at a goatee, and now it’s been growing in on the sides.) As I mentioned before, this picture is one of the best of the hundreds of shots I took. I got so close so many times, but never nailed it. This wasn’t my first night shooting myself, but it was the first session with Folly. You won’t be seeing any of those previous results. I got a heck of a lot closer this time than I ever had before. This shot would simply not have been possible with my little digicam.
Looking at the first and last pictures tells me I’ve covered more than just miles. Time has passed, obviously, months of not having my own bed, of quiet solitude punctuated with raucous good times with my friends and family. Months of wearing the same clothes, of living with only what fits in a suitcase. Months of restaurants and bars and of not showering as often as I would have liked. Months of worry, fatigue, peace, and inspiration.
Damn, I’ve got a good life.
I Love the Road
Somewhere between Hoover and Glen Canyon, on the stretch of road where I took this picture, it hit me. Not for the first time, not for the last. You know the feeling. You look at your lover/spouse/significant other over breakfast and the face you see just blows you away. “Wow!” you think to yourself. “I’m so damn in love!” It never gets old. Her face, his face, whoever’s face it is, strikes you as new and completely beautiful. It’s the first time you’ve ever really seen that face. There’s something about it that strikes your soul.
Yesterday I saw the face of the road again. I was blasting down a two-laner, sun baking the land, when I passed under a vulture catching a draft off the blacktop. I went directly under the raptor, and praised the sweet lord of the open skies for the ragtop as I looked up into the huge bird, its great wings aglow from the sun above. I shot past and nearly locked up my brakes for a doe and her fawn crossing the road. Sublime to rush. Love.
A couple hundred feet later I saw a deer dead at the side of the road. I think about death out there. Every rain-slicked curve at the edge of a cliff could be my last. Every time a semi hurtles past on a small highway, knocking my hat loose, I pass within feet of death. One sneeze, one seizure, and my tiny car is crushed beneath the juggernaut. A swift, unexpected way to go. That’s death on the highway. A matter of moments.
Out there, there are crosses by the road, marking places where people have died. I look at the contours of the road, trying to reconstruct the events that led to the tragedy. Sometimes it’s obvious, other times it’s a mystery. Some unholy and unfair convergence of the world, or just asleep at the wheel. I have passed my fair share of twisted metal, surrounded by flashing lights and solemn policemen, shattered coffins spilling blood onto the road. Move on, the officers say, waving emphatically. My presence can only compound the harm. I stare ahead and resolutely do not add to the slowdown, riding the bumper of the car in front of me.
But you can’t have death without life, and you can’t have life without love. The road is the perfect lover. There is the yellow stripe shooting down the middle of the asphalt, stretching out into the future, always there, varying but never ending. The road itself is constant, an uninterrupted ribbon connecting here with everywhere so well that there is no here and there anymore. The road itself is the only remaining place. To the sides of the road, above it and under it, is constant change. Even the same stretch is different every time. Seasons pass. Stripmalls appear. Towns wither and die. The road is still there.
Today I drove through the Chama Valley in all it’s autumn splendor. I chased rainbows on the plains. I got cold, I got wet, I shouted into the roaring wind. I was on the road.
Entropy’s Little Helpers
I put the punch line in the title, but it’s a phrase I really like and want to remember.
I was in the car with my family heading down to White Rock via the truck route (Pajarito Road is closed to keep us all safe) and I noticed at the tops of the cliffs on both sides of the road many, many precariously balanced rocks. I was filled with my boyhood urge to watch those rocks crash with great energy and dust into the canyon below. Just look at them. They’re about to let go. It’s only a matter of time.
There used to be rocks like that hovering over the cliffs behind my house and the houses of all my friends. No longer. By the time I was ten, tipping big rocks off the edge was a hobby. Some required muscle, some required leverage, some even required cleverness. Eventually, with a rumble and a boom, the rock would fall. The rock would have fallen sooner or later; entropy demands it. We were entropy’s little helpers.
All I can figure is that the Anasazi weren’t such big fans of crashing rocks, or they wouldn’t have left any for us. Makes them seem… inhuman.