Wait Till Your Boat Goes Down - That's When You'll Need Me Most
Posted 07-22-2012 at 03:37 PM by davidals
(February 2010 draft)
Do you believe in karma? I do - sometimes, or at least I think I do, and then I also believe that it's bull****: my lingering superstitions derived from an early childhood haunted by some bolt-slinging Judeo-Christian Ted Nugent-lookalike hovering, a mind filled with vengeance, off beyond the cirrus somewhere. Perhaps my understanding of the concept is stunted and inaccurate, possibly malevolent. Or maybe I'm just wallowing in a nonspecific variety of plight - the idea of a fate-directed cosmic punishment does provide a handy excuse for one's own unadmirable inertia. Think hard enough, and all faults become justifiable.
Once upon a time, when I owned a pleasant and efficient Toyota, my housemate had taken his car in for some repairs, and - due to an eccentric and ever-shifting work schedule, I was unable to offer him transportation to work one day. Relegated to bus riding, I remember him later groaning forth the observation that "the ugliest people in the world are on that bus." At the time, I found this evocative supposition to be trenchant, very sharp indeed. I've been paying for my endorsement of the observation ever since.
Many months and a handful of sad strange years have come and gone; the beloved Toyota is apparently reverting to nature. I enjoy my daily worker-bee commute, which involves an hour or so on a combination of busses en route to my lucrative 40-hour engagement with post-global underemployment and ego-scarring downward mobility. There are many, many familiars on my daily sojourn - I spend roundabout half an hour waiting for an uptown transfer. The vibe out on the street is most definitely interesting - workers and learners, loafers and dopers, backslappy denizens of the benighted creative class, always on the go go go, off towards the success, bosses, concepts evolving into presentations, those things that make us all tick: keep your eye on that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, where the good **** is. This is awe-inspiring, of a vaguely anthropological interest to lower creatures like me.
And, in the great yin/yang of the street, there's also a vaguely pathological undertone free-floating, ever ready to coalesce and materialize with instantaneous precision: the tardy tears and a raspy hail of innovative profanities inspired by liquor shakes and ill-timed, midday pharmaceutical crashes may tickle the eardrums from a distance, an impatient soliloquy of vernacular elements molded into one great, rolling, amorphous, syllable. This occasionally will migrate closer, to a more intimate proximity, perhaps accompanied by a more tailored personal request - please bruh o'Lord, help me out with a quarter, 50 cents...my mama died in my arms and I gotta get a heart transplant... Gas station after gas station, banished to the dim periphery of our sparkling village, all haunted by lottery lovers and informal prostitutes and university toilet cleaners howling crack arias into sultry summer sundowns as hybrids and minivans coast smoothly past, each a self-contained world unto itself. I know these folks too - I see them on my afternoon peregrinations, waiting for my transfer, and sometimes they speak, or sometimes I do, and I would really rather not, as I am an incorrigible *******, and there are worlds around which I'd rather not have as slices of my own world - my aspirations are oriented elsewhere, my habits are far less renegade - but they have jobs too: not allowing me to forget my place, which is on the goddamn bus, me and all the other brown-hued people of this town who rush off at all hours, doing battle with complex transportation systems, so as to spend our hours behind the till or in the golden, sultry sunshine keeping enviable enclaves spotless, well-nourished and smiling in the afterglow of neourbanist fantasias - healthy lads, happy dogs, left-wing Rockwell-isms.
This second leg of the expedition is a serious miracle of efficiency - eagle-eyed doctorals, a healthy-looking flock of them, flooding on at every stop, with meticulous arrival/departure rituals well memorized. The first part of my commute tends to be far more interesting, and far less orderly - I've learned to be out of my humble door early, very early. I start the day on the other bus - the one that's never on time, a slow ramble through that sprawl of the apartment complexes (barracks-style, with a few 1970s-vintage mock tudors and faux-chateaux thrown in for maximum architectural shock) relegated to the unaesthetic and thoroughly utilitarian expressways that skirt the edge of town. Day, night, rain, shine - a slow parade of all the people who'd very much like to be somewhere else, if they could afford it, not a ghetto in the most trad of definitions, but rather a vaguely somnambulistic procession of unfortunates of all varieties, my people each and every one: tirades, imaginary friends, lunchtime drunks, gibberish soliloquies, demonstrative highs, and languid, lugubrious lows. Every bus shelter is papered over with revealing fliers, all of them university studies seeking eager participants, some of whom will be duly compensated for their proud service to knowledge: men who have fathered children with multiple, unknown women, secret junkies, dads who blew rent on lottery tickets and a couple fifths of Orange Flavored Alcohol Beverage, still smoking and pregnant?, bad gums, maladjusted genatalia, rabies, dalliances with prostitutes, halitosis, mange, and every other known malady, abuse and affliction that poor people still manage to get stuck with. The language is kind, gentle, occasionally well-translated, in the most dispassionate of ways, for it is very true that no one really gives much of a ****. But the study of habits has its' benefits - isolate the subject, for however long it takes to craft some sort of dissertation, and the path to future tenure for someone out there has been handily secured.
Servant that I am, I cannot help but lapse into tantrums of judgementalism. Strive though I might for transcendent humanism, I have occasionally felt the obligation to say thank you to individuals who - a second earlier - might have explicitly called me a liar. All in a day's honest, respectable work. Unsurprisingly, warm feelings have become an exercise, like sit ups or cereals made from pseudograins - you know they're good for you, but there is that effort, that massive effort, herculean. Everywhere I look, I see an intricate cosmology of angst, so ubiquitous that it has lost any semblance of the personal. The semiotics of need - a universal accumulation of personal failures, crises, spectacles, ruts, ditches, disappointments, breath held, and no one (save for the alcoholic, homeless couple who spend drinky, drowsy afternoons riding from liquor store to liquor store) is relaxed. On that great slide to points beneath you, how on earth do you forgive yourself?
Every breath, an avenue of potential commerce: profit, loss, opportunity, debasement.
Do you believe in karma? I do - sometimes, or at least I think I do, and then I also believe that it's bull****: my lingering superstitions derived from an early childhood haunted by some bolt-slinging Judeo-Christian Ted Nugent-lookalike hovering, a mind filled with vengeance, off beyond the cirrus somewhere. Perhaps my understanding of the concept is stunted and inaccurate, possibly malevolent. Or maybe I'm just wallowing in a nonspecific variety of plight - the idea of a fate-directed cosmic punishment does provide a handy excuse for one's own unadmirable inertia. Think hard enough, and all faults become justifiable.
Once upon a time, when I owned a pleasant and efficient Toyota, my housemate had taken his car in for some repairs, and - due to an eccentric and ever-shifting work schedule, I was unable to offer him transportation to work one day. Relegated to bus riding, I remember him later groaning forth the observation that "the ugliest people in the world are on that bus." At the time, I found this evocative supposition to be trenchant, very sharp indeed. I've been paying for my endorsement of the observation ever since.
Many months and a handful of sad strange years have come and gone; the beloved Toyota is apparently reverting to nature. I enjoy my daily worker-bee commute, which involves an hour or so on a combination of busses en route to my lucrative 40-hour engagement with post-global underemployment and ego-scarring downward mobility. There are many, many familiars on my daily sojourn - I spend roundabout half an hour waiting for an uptown transfer. The vibe out on the street is most definitely interesting - workers and learners, loafers and dopers, backslappy denizens of the benighted creative class, always on the go go go, off towards the success, bosses, concepts evolving into presentations, those things that make us all tick: keep your eye on that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, where the good **** is. This is awe-inspiring, of a vaguely anthropological interest to lower creatures like me.
And, in the great yin/yang of the street, there's also a vaguely pathological undertone free-floating, ever ready to coalesce and materialize with instantaneous precision: the tardy tears and a raspy hail of innovative profanities inspired by liquor shakes and ill-timed, midday pharmaceutical crashes may tickle the eardrums from a distance, an impatient soliloquy of vernacular elements molded into one great, rolling, amorphous, syllable. This occasionally will migrate closer, to a more intimate proximity, perhaps accompanied by a more tailored personal request - please bruh o'Lord, help me out with a quarter, 50 cents...my mama died in my arms and I gotta get a heart transplant... Gas station after gas station, banished to the dim periphery of our sparkling village, all haunted by lottery lovers and informal prostitutes and university toilet cleaners howling crack arias into sultry summer sundowns as hybrids and minivans coast smoothly past, each a self-contained world unto itself. I know these folks too - I see them on my afternoon peregrinations, waiting for my transfer, and sometimes they speak, or sometimes I do, and I would really rather not, as I am an incorrigible *******, and there are worlds around which I'd rather not have as slices of my own world - my aspirations are oriented elsewhere, my habits are far less renegade - but they have jobs too: not allowing me to forget my place, which is on the goddamn bus, me and all the other brown-hued people of this town who rush off at all hours, doing battle with complex transportation systems, so as to spend our hours behind the till or in the golden, sultry sunshine keeping enviable enclaves spotless, well-nourished and smiling in the afterglow of neourbanist fantasias - healthy lads, happy dogs, left-wing Rockwell-isms.
This second leg of the expedition is a serious miracle of efficiency - eagle-eyed doctorals, a healthy-looking flock of them, flooding on at every stop, with meticulous arrival/departure rituals well memorized. The first part of my commute tends to be far more interesting, and far less orderly - I've learned to be out of my humble door early, very early. I start the day on the other bus - the one that's never on time, a slow ramble through that sprawl of the apartment complexes (barracks-style, with a few 1970s-vintage mock tudors and faux-chateaux thrown in for maximum architectural shock) relegated to the unaesthetic and thoroughly utilitarian expressways that skirt the edge of town. Day, night, rain, shine - a slow parade of all the people who'd very much like to be somewhere else, if they could afford it, not a ghetto in the most trad of definitions, but rather a vaguely somnambulistic procession of unfortunates of all varieties, my people each and every one: tirades, imaginary friends, lunchtime drunks, gibberish soliloquies, demonstrative highs, and languid, lugubrious lows. Every bus shelter is papered over with revealing fliers, all of them university studies seeking eager participants, some of whom will be duly compensated for their proud service to knowledge: men who have fathered children with multiple, unknown women, secret junkies, dads who blew rent on lottery tickets and a couple fifths of Orange Flavored Alcohol Beverage, still smoking and pregnant?, bad gums, maladjusted genatalia, rabies, dalliances with prostitutes, halitosis, mange, and every other known malady, abuse and affliction that poor people still manage to get stuck with. The language is kind, gentle, occasionally well-translated, in the most dispassionate of ways, for it is very true that no one really gives much of a ****. But the study of habits has its' benefits - isolate the subject, for however long it takes to craft some sort of dissertation, and the path to future tenure for someone out there has been handily secured.
Servant that I am, I cannot help but lapse into tantrums of judgementalism. Strive though I might for transcendent humanism, I have occasionally felt the obligation to say thank you to individuals who - a second earlier - might have explicitly called me a liar. All in a day's honest, respectable work. Unsurprisingly, warm feelings have become an exercise, like sit ups or cereals made from pseudograins - you know they're good for you, but there is that effort, that massive effort, herculean. Everywhere I look, I see an intricate cosmology of angst, so ubiquitous that it has lost any semblance of the personal. The semiotics of need - a universal accumulation of personal failures, crises, spectacles, ruts, ditches, disappointments, breath held, and no one (save for the alcoholic, homeless couple who spend drinky, drowsy afternoons riding from liquor store to liquor store) is relaxed. On that great slide to points beneath you, how on earth do you forgive yourself?
Every breath, an avenue of potential commerce: profit, loss, opportunity, debasement.
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