Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Sights and Sounds and Knowledge

I am sometimes awed by the gradualness with which life reveals its fullness. I was about eleven minutes into a Seinfeld last night before recognizing it as a rerun. I imagine that any error in my timing would have to be on the side of late recognition, and a significant portion of those eleven minutes was commercials; however, that’s still a big chunk of new-to-you Seinfeld to see after so many years in syndication (and with me being such a fan of the show). It’s like the final piece of a puzzle that fell into place...or could there be more?

Yes, this delicious tension of wondering is life’s mysterious melody. Any shoe might be the last to drop, the final beat of existence’s unfathomable rhythm. It was the one where they were on the subway: George is going to a job interview but gets robbed after agreeing to be the sub in some bondage with a beautiful stranger, Kramer gets a hot tip and wins big on a long shot at the racetrack, Elaine never makes it to the lesbian wedding in which she’s to be the best man, and Jerry goes to Coney Island and talks baseball with an avuncular fellow who’s inexplicably naked. That episode has always seemed strange to me, disjointed, but now I realize that the whole point is that the gang separates on the subway and so they must each go on their own respective adventure. The individual plot threads are not supposed to mesh well.

Life’s seeming imperfections, the incompletenesses that can haunt and nag us for years, might eventually all snap harmoniously together. Someday the contours of human consciousness may be illuminated, and all experience will be taken in at a single reckoning. In the meantime, complete seasons of most shows are available on netflix, but you’ll have to sift through all the stuff you’ve already seen before.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Harboring Old Grudges, Brokering New Deals

I was already pissed off as I woke up this morning. Vicious shards of daylight came jagging through my window, hitting me in the face as I opened my eyes. I rose nauseated, with a dull ache in my back and a sharp headache. By mid-morning the pain in my temples was virtually audible, buzzing and crackling mercilessly into my ears. The day seemed to throb, alive with an infamy all its own, and I suffered an agony of shame and regret for merely existing, for simply being a human being on so wretched a day as today.

For lunch, I met my friend at the Bongo Burger. I was picking the mealy tomato slices out of my falafel and muttering about how I didn’t like the cashier’s face and how it’d be funny if the fry cook burned himself when my friend asked me why I was being such a dick. I said that I thought FDR had been right, that December 7th truly had been a day that has lived in infamy, and that the seventh had certainly always sucked in my personal experience. I acknowledged the possibility that Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor speech may have become some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for me, but I also argued that other explanations, ones involving astrological and/or karmic principles, could account for why December 7th had always been such a rotten day for me for as far back as I could remember. My friend told me that it wasn’t the anniversary of Pearl Harbor that lived in infamy but, rather, only the day of the bombing itself. I asked how could a day that ended 68 years ago “live” in infamy – or, for that matter, in any other condition? How could that possibly make any sense? My friend said that she didn’t know but that FDR had specified in his speech that he was only talking about December 7th of the year 1941, that it was only that particular date, the day when Japanese forces actually carried out their treacherous attack, that would live in infamy.

After lunch, I wikipediaed it. My friend had been right: “…December 7th, 1941, a day that will….” I suddenly felt much better. My headache dissipated, and I immediately began to feel a lot more optimistic about both myself and others.

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