I refuse to believe it's February just because the calendar says it is, not only because it's bloody hot and freakin' sunny out, as it is all day, every day, but also because I'm convinced that time has sped up since I've graduated university, that the universe itself has undergone some radical shift in temporal distortions, unless it's only now, on the cusp of thirty, that I'm finally realizing how life works.
Kurt Vonnegut knows how life works. He's simultaneously the funniest writer I've ever read and also the most serious. Don't know how he does it, but he does, and in one of his older books I'm reading right now, Palm Sunday, he often returns to the idea of time, of how all of us are mere newcomers to this world, of how, when children accuse their parents of being screw-ups, the best one can say is, essentially: "What do you want from me? I just got here!"
It's true, isn't it? We all just got here. I'm (supposedly) going to be thirty this year, but I can't quite believe it, because last week I was in Grade Five, standing at the front of the class giving a stellar speech on why comic books are the greatest known things in the history of mankind, and just the other day I was graduating high school, chewing gum while I was up on stage the whole time before getting chewed out in turn by Mrs.Forgeron when I went to go pick up my coat at the end of the night: "Scott, you were chewing gum up on stage the whole time!"
(The moral is: Don't chew gum during really important events, because your high school English teacher will rip you a new crevice for doing so.)
And I've never seen Mrs.Forgeron since that night, and, while that isn't particularly strange, one not having seen one's high school English teacher since, well, high school, it does kind of make me sad, because that's the last thing I remember of her, and it's a funny moment, a human moment, and it's imprinted in my psyche, that single point in time before time itself started to rocket forward, with me in the caboose, hanging on for dear life.
So, yes, we all just got here, and guess what? We're all leaving here soon, too.
A morbid thought?
Not necessarily. As Woody Allen once said (far funnier than I will), not only is there no God, but trying finding a plumber on a Sunday.
In other words, the practical aspects of life are often more of a pain-in-the-butt than the cosmic questions. And death is certainly a pain-in-the-butt, but you can't get more everyday than that, or more mind-blowingly, galactically incomprehensible, either.
And they're the same thing, in any event -- the daily life and the cosmic. It's all tied together in this impenetrable, unfathomable spiral of space and time that scoots us along. We hang on and go for the ride. I'm trying to figure out how to survive Phnom Penh one day at a time, while the solar system continues to expand and contract, or do whatever it does.
(Not that I can understand all that, either. Like space -- how come there's no up or down? Can someone explain it to me in a way that actually sounds logical, or plausible, or even possible, 'cause I just don't get it. Whenever someone accuses me of writing a story or a blog that isn't plausible, I just point up at the moon and say: "Is that freakin' orb plausible?" Okay, I don't really say that, but I've thought about it.)
I think the best thing do is hope and plan for a long and healthy and happy life, understanding that it's going to go by in less than a blink of an eye, that disease and death are all we have to look forward to, and that all of our random acts of kindess and violence, our Valentine's Day cards and Christmas hugs, our stabs-in-the-backs and momentary moments of heartfelt reconciliation are all merely candles in the wind, as transitory and meaningless as Joanie Loves Chachi. (Not their love, which I'm confident is eternal and bursting with meaning, but their show, which was actually pretty good, if my seven-year old self can be trusted. So maybe there was some meaning in its demise, after all, if only because it allows me a fond memory of me and my best friend Mariano, both age seven, laughing with glee on the porch of my old house at a Mad Magazine parody of the show, Joanie Loves Chooch it was called, where Joanie spent the entire story plotting to kill Chachi with a kitchen knife. I remember so much of that moment, that stupid and wonderful childhood memory, and I refuse to believe that it happened twenty-two years ago. Not possible. Didn't that show just get cancelled two years ago or something? Seems like it...)
And don't discount or discard those strange, fleeting moments of bliss, those seconds of happiness that suddenly pop up when you're combing your hair, or stepping out of the shower, or watching a three year old drop his ice cream cone onto the floor as his eyes grow wide in disbelief at the unfairness of the universe. (Get used to it, kid.)
They're all we've got, those moments.
Maybe they're enough.
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