It came upon me like a behemoth draped in child’s pajamas. High School. How did this sneak up on me? I feel intuitively that I just finished h.s. myself about, maybe, 15 long years ago? Of course it was approximately an eon hence since I donned zipper-bedevilled bell-bottoms, since I wore puka shells without irony and wore my then substantial hair in lengths that neither flattered me nor drew the opposite sex to me. I moved about in a regrettable cloud of Leo Sayer. That morning (Monday August 24, 2009), my son, or little boy, began high school. I had a mild nightmare about the blossoming new epoch Saturday night and awoke Sunday morning in tears. George Harrison solemnly intoned that All Things Must Pass, and then he politely passed. But why this? Why does this have to pass? I’ve just grown accustomed to the hand-holding and hugging and shy confidences, and now we enter the darkling era of fishnet gloves and projectile ennui? Already? The outlandish finitude of All This, combined with the irreducible fact of everything happening exactly and only once, have conspired to make me one of the walking wounded; a bruised husk. Give me back my Flower!
Behemoth
Published by jef
The blood thrumming around the still-point of this light headache can be traced back to the first rain. That is, our blood just sort of drifts, like smoke, through time; with stops in the Cambrian, the Renaissance and so on. It’s an impenetrable, infinitely-layered heap of unknowing. Okay? (sighs) Yeah The World (as it’s called) is a hopeless lucid dream, but not the kind where you can leap off a building, flap your arms and take joyous id-flight. It’s the kind where you show up for just long enough to see yourself in a mirror and Know that You are Here. That apparently necessary bit of business having been addressed, thermodynamics or some other such fancy idiot enters with a tea towel over its forearm, takes you politely by the gnarled elbow and ushers you back into the soil, where the mostly irritating Circle of Life awaits to make of you a tree, then a shoebox, then wet mush in a landfill again. Bring me my slippers! Oh…never mind. But I’m not here to philosophishizzle. We’re doomed animals at the momentary top of a food chain of no eternal consequence. It feels like. That’s not meant to be a downer. Bacharach sprang from the Ur-ooze, so that recommends the place. Let us celebrate our moment in the hum de dum dum de dum de de de dum dum. View all posts by jef
