The sky is so crisp and clear tonight that I imagine I can make my bottle of seltzer float beyond the stars, adding effervecence to the ether above. Even with the parking lot lights. The milky way would be clouding the night out in Cave Creek. And I am a singular Van der Waals coffee force tonight. Spilling all over myself in the car. Spilling all over my replacement suit in front of the computer. And spraying seltzer all over myself, having flipped the bottle so high in the air, not high enough to escape the atmosphere, high enough to agitate. I could only laugh. Physics works. Even when inexplicably entwined with what we think of as fate. I wonder if unification theory, when realized, will shed more light on the nature of chance, create more big questions, answered by a battery of astronaut autistics, the thousands on monkeys of brain evololution, or tell us that fate is a factor, the Narns spinning, the demiurge first moving.
The DMZ between the annoying and the tragic is the absurd. Spilling coffee all over myself in the car, creating a magic spinning spurting breve cup in my futile attempts at recovery, laughing at myself trying to determine whether this was a SIGN that I should not go to the reception, or that I'd chosen the wrong color suit, was between. Spilling the remnants of yesterday's latte on my lap, trying to hook up my headphones, was annoying. Spraying seltzer all over myself in the bathroom was hilarious. Had I slipped and fallen, and survived, without continuing sadness, with time, would have been comedy, tragedy PLUS time.
To find ourselves, clarity, Pam suggested that at the times we find ourselves in the most absurd moments, the other in a situation, the outsider looking in, those are the moments that perhaps more than any other draw our lines, our essential, our two-dimension, cartoonable selves. I think of those moments, those narratives, as occuring several times in my life, sometimes moments of clarity from regret, sometimes with great content. I think of the time I stuck Aunt Rudy's son-in-laws best man in the butt with a thorn at the reception when I was four or five. I realized then that people were not cartoons, that pain wasn't really funny, maybe not even in Roadrunner and Bugs Bunny cartoons. I think of Mrs. Chalkley, telling those bees to leave Matt and I alone, and the connectedness that we can have with nature, especially if we respect it and don't stick rake handles in ground bees nests. I think of tackling "wolf boy" when he was being chased by the neighborhood bully, and my own culpability in propping up the particularly insidious elements of patriarchy. I think of throwing the rock at Matt after coming back so high from my retreat, and what that taught me about the allure and and danger and the ephemeral nature of connecting with Godhood. I think of Dorie Lahood screaming at me in the Opinion layout room about being an asshole, and smirking, and realizing afterwards that I was being an asshole. I remember the German final and 'Til Tuesday coming up close coming on the radio, and realizing that what I felt was so important throughout was simply not. I remember knowing I was going to freeze to death in the woods, and being happy and content. I recall the clarity in the storm regarding eternity and agape and the transcendent potential of us all. I think of the strange calm that overcomes me when life's big stressors occur, like Rob firing me, and those so many moments on the road, driving long, running long, when my brain floats away, or dreams, rewriting the script, reshooting the scene. I think of all the other moments where I am completely aware of the irony, the public spectacle of life, that doesn't detract from, necessarily, but makes it all seem of the true consequence, infintesimal and infinite, ephemeral and eternal, sublime and absurd, all at once.
Meanwhile, I hope the coffee stains come out. Or are delayed in their staining. Until they get rushed to the dry cleaning hospital.
Ineluctable is used to mean inexpressible, but never as eluctable. Which means avoidable. But never expressible. That's an etymology to trace, maybe to treasure, a word to smell when I speak it. Even if I'm the only one who understands. Maybe especially. The scent safari of dogs, with words.
1:42:04 AM 
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