Turn of the Road

Sometime ago, when you were about to turn 64, in the spring of 2222, things happened really fast. You got religious with exercise, stopped smoking, dropped drinking and doing drugs, lost weight, did Yoga and meditation, fell out of love with yourself, became taciturn and laconic in speech, got antisocial, and started writing violent tales of fiction, of the noir tradition. You cut off all social ties except with your only long-suffering fan. You felt complete and all the need to be understood and the desire to share your feelings evaporated into thin air. People at the office and the poker table, friends and mere acquaintances alike, thought then you were really nice and fun to be around because you were full of humility and self-effacing humor. Little did they know you were preparing for a mini-thermonuclear war.

What precipitated your change were three things.

First was the encounter of this passage:

"Love can die. It's a mysterious thing, the death of love. Sometimes it fades slowly, like a long sunset with amazing and rare color that lasts in the memory forever. Sometimes it becomes obese and dies from its own weight, the density and slowness that come with things grown too large. It is often killed on purpose, by someone who is in love with someone or something else. But the other person, the one still in love, is a loose end, snapping and cracking in the high wind of life passing them by. Life moves so fast it creates a back draft, that leaves things scattered and blowing in its wake. Life, of all things, is alive. It is everywhere and moves beyond speed.” (Scott Wolven, whose stories burned a hole in your heart and left it smoldering).

The death of love was no surprise, but Wolven's rhapsodic treatment of it was a delight. It brought on catharsis and closure to your wounded, tortured soul although you knew way back around 2005 that the bitch Laura didn't deserve your enduring fiction and affection. Still, a love had to die of its own way. No two love deaths were alike. Yes, as Wolven insinuated, life, unlike love, is everywhere and it moves beyond speed, beyond time, beyond sorrows and regrets. Yes, life in the abstract may not die. But an individual life surely does.

You are a firm believer that everybody should die at least twice in order to appreciate how wonderful and yet precarious how life is. So everybody should visit a hospice and hang around it all day at least once a month in order to experience what a slow death is like and how painful and sad to see life dissolve slowly into nothingness. All the fucking concerns and worries about status, power, fame, and money would be seen for what they are: a colossal waste of time. In the end of one's life, what matter are love and peace because status, power, fame, and comfort cannot comfort us as we are dying. Anybody who is reading this would think you are mental and would want no part of your mental affliction. But he or perhaps they, of course, would be wrong. You are not peddling psychobabble. Far from it.

What you are saying is that everybody would be better off if they visualize, think, meditate about their own death everyday of the week, every month of the year. Then perhaps they would not take themselves so seriously and lie to others so shamelessly. Remember, the heart knows nothing about death; it's the mind that causes all the sufferings in this world as it thinks it is really something marvellous whereas it is just a piece of shit, full of fears and ignorance and nonsense. The funny thing is only old farts with money are fearful of death. Young people or impoverished seniors never are.

Second was your coming across the portrait of a Norwegian chess prodigy in New Yorker magazine. Genius is more than just talent. Love, hard work, and imagination (which accounts for originality, otherwise everybody would play like robots, patterned after computer-generated moves) are key factors.

Third and last but by no means least was your belated realization that self-projection was a poor way of understanding others. Just because you were not evil and mendacious that didn't mean most humans were not like so either. In fact, the inverse was true. With humans, you must be prepared for the worst and the unexpected. Pick on their "pride", their ignorance, and their stupidity, and they would scream like fucked-up monkeys and reveal their true colors. Bait them with the smell of "power", and they would run for it like hogs after garbage and dogs after human shit. It's hard to love human scums. No wonder killings take place and celebrating dances ensue. After a while, it was tiresome to play a detective of the human heart. A few pieces of evidence would be enough to arrive at a conclusion that a person in front of you was a human worth saving or a scum deserving to be exterminated like a vermin.

Now all your senses are on fire. You are aflame with a clear realization that life is more often than not a series of serendipities and chance occurrences, and you must be ready, unappeasably ready, for them. You can't afford to have an emotional shutout; you can't simply have a swooning surrender to temptation; you must not mislay any claim to moral distance.
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(To be continued)