Astrophage

I hadn’t seen Theresa since we’d played a wedding at Lake Louise in January and now it was April already and here she was walking down the street with her bass clarinet and some fella I’d never laid eyes on previous. I couldn’t get much of a read on the guy. He had the beard of a craft beer aficionado. Seemed like the kind of guy who’d always be ready to oblige you with a handshake or broad grin. I literally did a 180° and booked it back in the direction from which I’d come.  It hasn’t yet been easy for me to find ease anywhere, my childhood having been plagued by all kinds of visions of how ghastly things were going to get, how poorly I’d handle it, and the torments and agonies I would suffer for having had so little a proper part in the part I played. Theresa doesn’t prick up her ears when I’m with her until what I’m talking about briefly overlaps with one or another of her personal interests. A conniving careerist who isn’t going anywhere special, she startled me over dinner once by angrily describing how another friend—a guy we both know, perhaps her lover or former such—avoids her and then mopes and then grandstands, all of this stuff that Theresa was doing to me at the precise moment she was clumsily delineating the thing. What are you gonna do? Someone can be looking right at you and obviously have a lot on their mind, then proceed to tell you that they have nothing to say and everything’s okay. Nothing is ever okay on this planet, Jones. I no longer have the remotest capacity to divine what is going on around me, especially with respect to people I think of or previously thought of as friends. It’s a contagion of emotional withholding; it may correspond tangentially to solar flares and shifts in planetary axis and all these sorts of things. We have the degeneration of U.S. statecraft to the level of candy floss and bumper cars. We have all-too well documented evidence of the nightmarish zeal brought to bear in Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is all stuff of which I’ve been terrified since I was in grade two at Woodlands Elementary and having to see all this sordid destiny through to the end has positively shredded my last goddamn nerve. What could anybody want from me? My psychiatrist says I can start looking for employment when I stop showing up at the emergency room for a spell. Whatever I have to offer may not be there tomorrow as that is the way of all things in transit. That is the way of Heraclitean flux. It doesn’t debate or abide contracts. It’s all the different kinds of weather we know and don’t know. Who out there I wonder has the most up-to-date numbers on the unknown unknowns? I will take the Buddhist stance here and strive to live the mandate: I don’t know, and it’s terrific. “A crowd of facts,” observes Henderson in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, “came upon me with accompanying pressure in the chest.” The philosopher Byung-Chul Han advocates immersion in a “hovering time” that can avail us visions of “temporal sedimentations issuing a phosphorescent glow.” Take this if you will, from his 2021 book The Scent of Time: “The spell of profound boredom will only be genuinely broken if the ‘vita activa’ incorporates the ‘vita contemplativa’ into its critical pole and once again serves the latter.” If you cannot read, learn, and discuss openly then you can contribute to nothing other than the real-time downfall of postindustrial society, and I’m confident you are not very likely to ever see your own personal part in it just like those clueless jet-setting billionaires can’t see theirs. Nietzsche is largely talking about the ‘Protestant work ethic’ when he writes: “Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.” The artless bustling business of people might be the whole imposter civilizational facade its very self. You have enough jobs, you quickly catch on that nothing on God’s earth is run all that well. The inefficiencies and redundancies are astonishing. People who are manufactured more or less by the state are prepared early to inform on one another, to compete for status, to maintain plausible deniability, and to go ahead and do what they think they can get away with. In a basic sort of inherently socio-mechanistic context like that you can very easily see how conspiracies of silence may come to predominate. I’m not good at fixing this problem. Wherever I touch it the big bad bastard gets all the more inflamed. I don’t have the illusion of permanence, breaking it all down as I do to the twelve-stepper’s twenty-four hours. I have managed one day at a time well enough to still be here. But everything has to pass through a filter in order to meet and greet the reader, so going forward now for however long I am going to do stories that are essays and essays that are stories, and all the characters are going to be composites just like all of us already are, neither selves nor mere animals, but rather something much more akin to the capricious wrath of Zeus.