Looking fortune in the face

Sunday morning instead of sleeping in and waking late in warm light gilding the curtains and lying in bed for a few minutes half submerged in the oceanic night half stretched onto a sandy shore of day and feeling the soft bed and blankets and pillows and petting one or more cats imperious and affectionate and then walking on slightly sore feet to the kitchen and brewing a cup of coffee and sitting on the porch and letting myself rest, I sit in a chilled coffee shop where I’ll work an extra shift to help pay for a new used car and my cat’s tooth extraction, not only her one tooth hanging loose down past her jaw, black and rotten like the befouled saber of a derelict cavalryman, but a complex feline dental surgery performed by a high price specialist using customized tiny tools, the removal of all her teeth and some kind of gum grafting or suturing, as well as the rent and utilities and gym membership and past due amounts on lab work not covered by insurance, as well as inevitable yet unforeseen future expenses springing from a pulpy mass of possible accidents, burdens and calamities, from a densely interwoven fibrotic network of systems, things, functions and people always on the oily edge of disrepair and disaster.  

The cost of maintaining a life exceeds its energetic reserves and so we draw for a time on credit and then at some point that might be later today or after fifty more years of labors so bland and ponderous they crush even the memory we might have kept of them so that in effect we move forward through our days as if hauling a huge colorless stone strapped around our necks dragging the ground behind us and erasing the path by which we came and levelling the grass and flowers and razing rodents and bugs, at last unable to take another step we surrender to our malevolent cackling creditor and let him repossess our defaulted organs and depreciating skin and repurpose our bones into dust and ash, as the world with all its sepulchral shades and airs of gloom and sweeping tracts of desolation still demands always more fuel to keep the dismal fires of hell on earth blazing, always more dandruff and jelly from dead bodies to smear on cracked walls and lard the blasted and shifting soil.  

Two days off would be nice but then I think about how my outlook remains a boutique product of a localized and insular upbringing, and that my american middle class tastes, interests, sensitivities, my work ethic, my sense of justice and proportion, my ethical tuning fork, have all been formed out of a narrow strip of space and time with extremely delicate supports that have already for the most part crumbled, and that—outside the little glass globe I was born into, powdered as I was with a cozy snowfall of loving words and caresses that, yes, as I went from childhood to adolescence sometimes changed into stinging rebukes even then retaining their source material of familial concern—nothing humane or decent or pleasurable or fulfilling has ever existed, and that what encircles me and the seemingly dynamic and varied choices in profession and pastime and identity afforded by my economic class and genetic code is an infinite bubbling tarpit of tortured forms beyond all imaginable horrors. 

With one day off a week I wish for two, when one day is already a privilege endowed by a nameless foundation staffed by countless agonized picketers and sacrificial beasts, a stroke of brainless luck, one whole day free from more grief and toil, free for now from locusts and gory tidal waves and the barbed lashes of burly slave overseers driven to whip naked wretches under pain of death by queer cruel pharaohs boasting of descent from jackal headed gods, one day off with only, as of now, light aches and early signs of oncoming maladies, in a week of work that, for all its tedium, is far less punishing than most tasks that give the world its meager share of stability and comfort.  

The insatiable heart of a damned man who measures his fortune by what else he’d like and not by all the evils he’s skirted, held off for later, evils that will visit him no matter what some time or another, doomed as he is to wait for his ruin that typically arrives in pieces, in unrecognizable fragments that collect into a killing strike, not only laboring under the curse of death but also an obstinate disregard of his fate, all his days failing to grasp the key facts, all the while supposing he knows enough, at least enough to know he doesn’t know enough, without knowing that his paltry ironic knowledge won’t be enough to save him, not even from himself, the phantom organ players in the boiler room of his operatic bass profundo guts, the inner imps raking their nails on his ribcage, even his idea of devastation a kind of anodyne, arranging his attention and his habitual flopping around to more effectively downplay his predicament and go to his grave with hardly a whiff or foretaste of the sulphuric pit of vengeful and crestfallen shadows lying ready to entomb him forever.  

Someday I’ll savor the burnt casing memory of having lived, but not yet, not until enough heads have been separated from necks and trunks and limbs have been torn asunder and venom-drenched deities have pounced on my ailing frame and sucked the plasma from my cardboard body like a small juice box and I’ll have garnished the misery of an attunement to a ravaging end with the regret of having blown the bounty of chances to feel a complete and encompassing joy, a fixed passion for living and an assent to birth while still in good health, while triumphant in spiritual and physical combat or at least locked into the struggle and making it a close contest and thereby glorifying the inescapable reality of strife as the not so much father or mother but sexless originator, the generative gash of all incomplete entities slated for a brief appearance in an arena of bloody spectacles and somber circus acts.