That was an interesting day, definitely not the same old
same old. Like they say, like I’ve said.
Oh yeah, but the train came off the tracks, that day. Really, honestly.
I’m not talking metaphors here; it’s real, it was really, really real. Sometimes, when you just feel like reading
the funnies because everything else in the freaking world is too real, all so
vivid and ugly, well, even when your nose is stuck in the funny pages hiding
from everything wrong, even then you’re vulnerable. Even at those times the
train can come off the tracks. Even then, especially then, a life can change, a
person can die. Yes, a very interesting day. I wondered, what happens now?
At first I didn’t see it, but I was moving toward one thing,
all the time. My footsteps took me places I couldn’t see in advance. I
wandered, always believing I’d turn up someplace, well, memorable. Somewhere historical,
from my past, with people I knew. Friends, family I should glimpse one last
time. Old friends and lovers; the dead I might commiserate with. But I never again
saw another person I once knew, or even recognized. I figured it out
eventually.
They were intersections.
I have seldom been a happy man, or even an overly zealous
spirit. It’s the cloud you know, or the ‘soul’ I suppose you could say. Mine is
fairly neutral, the neurons don’t lean much to one side or the other. I would
liken the inner being, the nonmaterial self, to a cloud. Now I am set adrift,
sockless, unshod to drift about here then there. But I’m following a path
unknown to myself. Floating amongst the lives of others and witnessing intersections.
I am, I’m guessing now, to choose.
Most are like me, such as I was, and somewhere in the
middle. That’s our lot in life, the great multitudes that make up our kind. We
fall among the ranks of the forgettable. All together we make up just a tiny
part of the whole. That’s how big the whole is, and the whole cannot be measured.
It is that weighty and is more than just a number or demographics. Big, big stuff
is the whole. I guess I should capitalize the word. It means that much, the
Whole. I see it that way, in my head, well, in my mind that resides somewhere
in a cloud. A cloud, adrift.
The Whole is everything. It’s not only souls, things, or
atoms. The Whole. The Whole is everything. Dammit, it’s even more than that. When
you glimpse it, and you will, then you will wish you might never have. The
first time I felt like I might throw up because the Whole, just the part you
can see in one glimpse, is nauseating. Seeing, feeling the Whole even in pieces
– good grief – is like riding on the subway backwards, or tossing on the high
seas in a boat as inconsequential as the flea on a brontosaurus. It is not to
be explained, not by the likes of me or even Whitman, or Yeats. Or bloody
Ginsberg. No one has the balls to define the Whole. If you want to know the
truth, then the Whole is as much a thing as it is the absence of a thing, the
void, a hole. Whole/Hole. It’s all the same. It’s all the same to me. And it
isn’t.
As it is, I’ll leave the poets to it. Surely they know better than I and those whose spirits I may have brushed against probably torment themselves and even invent unnavigable syllables to prove me wrong. Their ions are most assuredly not neutral. They inherit a stormy unmitigated jumble of hair rending madness. Those who reside in vexing clouds will never see the forest for the trees. For them the intersections are backlit avenues in a rearview mirror. Gone, gone, gone.
Here I’ve let it go, viewing the Whole from the corner of my
eye because that’s where I prefer it. Better yet I wish it lay beneath the
reflections of darkened pools. I like to see what can be seen upside down and
in reverse and the mysteries can hide down there – below - deep under the
things we think we can touch. Even the concrete facts aren’t what we always
thought they were, but in life it is what we are taught it is. That’s enough
for you now. And for me now, too. It’s easier that way, and that kind of
thinking stays the madness. Rationalizing keeps the Whole in corners: obscure,
uninvited.
The deep thinkers won’t be moving on. Too busy, they are,
dealing in dross. Maybe you’re beginning to wonder why the age of romantics is
gone and never to circle back around. All of the great ones, or most, are
sticking ass up from the muck. It’s an image not far from the truth. Only the
menial can look beyond the void. That interesting day I was speaking of? It’s
in the past. I’m perusing the options now, drifting through the intersections,
working my way toward the top of the pyramid. Some of us, I guess, never
choose. You feel might them, aimless, like a damp rag catching on your heels.
There are a lot of choices, too many in fact. The intersections are endless and
some never pan out. It’s hard to choose. The wrong choice can be pretty much
the same as life and death; they go hand in hand you may as well know. Nobody
gets out alive, once they’ve selected. Selected and admitted. This life, this
living stuff, is an elite club. Most spirits never seem to make it and they don’t
know what they’re missing. Then again, I
know. Here, I can tell you, from where I stand, life is no bowl of sugar. Nor
is it a crock of shit, but for the moment I’m clear of it. My intersection is,
blessedly, somewhere off the grid. If I’ve derailed in my past life, then I’m
content here this moment beyond the third rail.
Beyond a distant curve I think I have seen around the Whole
without going mad. There is a boy and a girl and he is leading her on a pony.
My atoms have done the math and the probabilities are endless, but they aren’t
finite. She’ll marry another, but it’s his son she’ll have. The son will find
another and that is the intersection I’ve glimpsed on the brim of the void. It’s
caught in a whirlwind but I’ve thrown down a line and only time, a lifetime of
time, will tell the whole story. I’m not eager to begin anew, but treading this
slurry is joyless even to a neutral soul. I long now and then to skim across
some manic and feel the prickle of chaos. There is no anarchy in the hereafter;
it’s only a waiting game where the points don’t add up. Some win, some lose.
Some go down the drain.
Rub a dub dub.
