What follows is another stale post from a long ago time, from last October, back when things were normal…
But were things really normal back then? No. How about in 2018? Normal then? Or 2017? Was that normal? Let’s go back further. How’s 2015? Or the year before that? Or even the year before that? Wind it back further. Perhaps 2010? Or was it more than ten years ago? An abnormal decade in disguise? When did anything last feel normal? Could it be as far back as then, as far back as October of 2008? Possibly. But another October, eh? Again with October! The 10th month of year that takes its name from the quality of eightness.
See—it’s not just me. Things haven’t been normal for a long, long time. Everyone’s just been too busy with subtle nonsense to notice.
Today was meant to be a writing day. It still is, but it’s not the writing day I had in mind when the day started.
I took the day off specifically to revisit and hopefully finish the backlog of posts I’d started since my few weeks of writing fury a few months ago fizzled out. It had been raining since Wednesday afternoon and showed no signs of stopping, so the conditions were perfect for me to sit inside all day working at my desk.
But first: a simple errand to run. I wanted to collect a few fancy things to make into a deluxe breakfast worthy of a bespoke day of writing. Normally I’d walk, because it’s a lovely walk, but after 24 hours of rain and wanting to get as much writing time as possible, I took the car for a quick and dry trip to the grocery store.
—except the windshield wipers stopped working at the first red light.
They stopped just as the car did, so I thought at first I’d stalled, but no, it was just the wipers, just stopped at the top of the screen as I sat feeling that familiar sinking feeling of realizing this car of mine was about to consume yet another day off, consume yet more of my patience, consume yet more of my dwindling spare cash…
Some of my best thoughts occur while I’m waiting to turn left, and the thought I had this time, as I felt myself being consumed by the moment, was a simple one: not this time. As the light changed I drove forward. Fuck the wipers. Fuck the car. I was getting breakfast. I was going to have my day off. And this Justin Trudeau of a car was not going to disappoint me. Not this time.
While I wouldn’t recommend driving for long distances without wipers in the rain, from a visibility point of view, it’s not unlike riding a motorcycle in the rain—although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that for long distances either.
At the grocery store I ended up getting just two things for my deluxe breakfast: some local free‐range eggs and some wonderfully marbled prosciutto …from Spain. These would go with some potatoes I knew I had back at the apartment and then be dribbled with hot sauce.
I did some very brief diagnostics on the wipers in the parking lot. The fuse was okay. I could hear the wiper motor running. The wiper arms themselves moved freely and at the same time. It was looking like a simple mechanical problem, likely a broken linkage at the motor. Maybe, I thought, maybe I can do both. Maybe I can get the broken part off the car and replaced all before it gets too far into the middle of the afternoon and I could still feel as if I got my writing day.
Okay—deal. Let’s do it.
Parked back at the apartment I realize the deal is off:
My parking space is now a puddle about ten centimetres deep. The water is up over the bottoms of the front tires, right where I’d need to be standing to fix the wipers. I could move the car so the puddle isn’t a problem, but it’s also still raining so I’m going to be soaked by the end of it all anyway. I’ll still have to drive the car sans wipers up the mountain to the dealership, still have to drive back again, still have to make sure I actually get the wipers fixed, still have to feel like I get to have my writing day—
Not this time.
Suddenly it all just leaves my head. The deal between my fixing the car and my spending the day writing vanishes. The feelings that were consuming me at the red light fade away. Fuck the wipers. Fuck the car. It’s time for breakfast.
As I’m making the eggs I was so pleased to have bought because they’re not from crate chickens I wonder two things: how do free‐range eggs work in Canada during the winter and why did I buy Spanish prosciutto when I know it’s an Italian thing. Do the chickens wear boots, and should I really be patting myself so hard on the back for choosing local eggs and then feasting upon imported cured meat I could have just as easily purchased from a producer that didn’t use a container ship to get it to me?
My mind wanders back outside, to my second Impreza, to soggy lil’ Justin sitting up to his tires in a giant puddle, and I laugh: I need to fix the wipers because it’s raining, but I can’t fix the wipers because it’s raining.
It’s called a dolly zoom. And while you may not know it by name, you’ve seen it in movies. The foreground subject will remain stationary as the background appears to move up behind or away from them. It’s visually striking because it defies traditional understanding of perspective. The foreground subject remains the same size relative to the frame despite everything your mind is telling you should be happening. It’s typically used to highlight some deep understanding the character is coming to realize, a shift in perspective.
In this case, in my kitchen, as I was frying up a super egg—which is three eggs mixed together and cooked sunny sides up in a small pan—my dolly zoom moment was one of pure paradox: what I do at work is make sense of nonsense. I spend 8+ hours for 5 days in a row refining chaos. It never ends. And when it does, my mind is fried. All I want to do is have a drink or a smoke, watch a movie, and go to sleep until I have to do it all over again. And for weeks on end, that’s what I’ve been doing. There’s been nothing left of my mind to spend on writing or photography. It’s goo by the time the week is over.
This mind full of goo place is an uncomfortable place for me. The words and images I work with to create posts and photographs bring me great peace and satisfaction. I feel it when I’m unable to write or take pictures for long periods of time. But as much as I want to sit down and finish what I know there is to finish, part of me just wants to relax. And isn’t a day off supposed to be just that? Do I really want to take a head full of goo and tell it to do more thinking?
I don’t. I really don’t. Not this time.
Not this time…
Besides, breakfast is ready. The super egg is perfectly done. The prosciutto is shredded and is now resting atop freshly made home fries. Hot sauce is at hand. And the dolly zoom moment is over.
With breakfast I decide to watch a specific episode of Futurama, one I’ve watched many, many times before: The Sting. It’s one of my favourite episodes of the series and sits among some of the best stories I’ve ever seen on screen. I cannot do the episode justice in attempting to summarize it here, so I’ll just say it’s one of the rare pieces of TV that will almost always at least have me thinking about shedding a tear or two by the end of it. My eyes are tingling even now.
What makes the episode so powerful is how it illustrates life’s great contradictions:
And that’s as far as I got… Yup. Now it’s June.
There was going to be more, of course—just look at that punctuation! But ending it where it happened to end and not coming back to it until now—near perfection. Absolute near perfection.
Now it’s months later, into the first few days of June, and the more I was thinking of adding doesn’t feel like it fits anymore. The job which brought me so much unending chaos and rendered my mind to such gooey goo no longer exists. The times where I found myself having to choose between relaxing and writing are not the fleeting moments they once were. Time itself instead sits omnipresent. Chaos intensifies.
In Futurama’s The Sting, one of the characters experiences a loss so tragic it begins to threaten their sanity. Increasingly vivid hallucinations undermine their perception of reality. Dream and wake states lose definition adding to the uncertainty of what’s really real and what’s really not. The chaos of what they were perceiving nearly consumes them—it is only in the last few moments of the episode where any clarity is derived, when the true nature of their reality is revealed. What they found was the power of companionship and compassion, the power of kindness.
In another instance I would have rewritten this post to bring cohesion to what I consider a disjointed mess of thought and expression. This desire to rewrite speaks to an old idea I’ve up until recently still clung to, an idea that as I experience the continued undermining of my own reality I could embrace the uncertainty of what was happening around me as a down payment against future clarity. But this deal I make with myself is a delusion. It’ll never amount to anything more than a pursuit. I will never wake from this particular chaos.
My wife was a true-crime writer and researcher, and the phrase she hated the most was, “You know, everything happens for a reason.” She’s like, “No, it fuckin’ doesn’t. It’s chaos. It’s all random. And it’s horrifying. And if you want to try to reduce the horror and reduce the chaos, be kind, that’s all you can do. It’s chaos. Be kind.” She would just say that all the… “It’s chaos. Be kind.”
Now… I would always… We’d have these huge philosophical arguments where I was like, “I don’t believe in an intelligent creator, per se. I think that there might be a lattice work of logic and meaning to the universe that maybe we’re too small to see.” And she was like, “Sweetie, it’s all random. It’s all chaos. It’s chaos. Be kind. It’s chaos. Be kind.”
And we would go back and forth. And then she won the argument in the shittiest way possible.
—Patton Oswalt
Annihilation
In one absurd and poignant sentence Oswalt referrers to the sudden and unexpected death of his wife.
I laughed out initially before the weight of his words caused my chest to collapse. A tightness in my throat tugged at the back of my eyes. The laughter evaporated out of my lungs. I could hear the audience experiencing the same peculiar sensation: two distinct and normally exclusive emotional states being felt simultaneously, a collective sorrow but with a smile. The joke stung like no other.
A few days after watching the stream of Oswalt’s performance I thought of this unfinished post for the first time in months—a usual indicator of a chance to finish something I’ve started. On June 1st I titled the post “The Sting” and began working on it again. And while doing some research I found out the original air date of the Futurama episode I’ve been referencing was June 1, 2003—17 years ago.
The temptation to draw connections through coincidence in this instance is strong. Yes I did resume working on a post which takes its title and theme from an episode of television which aired on the same day many years ago, and highlighting it would make for a somewhat satisfying circular conclusion. But as I’ve mentioned before, the further one goes back in time the more time starts to drift. And wouldn’t the more interesting coincidence be actually publishing the post on the same day rather than simply resuming work on it? I mean, I could fake it—make the post today and then immediately backdate it to the first of the month… But it hardly seems like a coincidence anymore after all that effort. And to be honest I didn’t even watch the original airing of the episode in 2003. It may not have been until at least 2008 before I saw it.
From a purely operational perspective everything happens for a reason—nothing would happen otherwise. What starts to cause confusion, what starts to cause pain, is when that reason reconciles into a comparatively senseless experience. That’s when the deals start. That’s when present nonsense is endured and banked in exchange for a promise of some future order because everything happens for a reason. What’s been made senseless will—somehow—make sense once that reason is known. But sometimes that reason is never known, and in waiting for something that will never be known, something else gets banked as well, something at least I never realized could be hidden away and lost at the same time: happiness.
And right now, I’m still wounded and I’m healing, but there’s people out there, especially the people in power. I’m sorry to get… I’ll leave you with this. There’s people that wanna create wounds that will not heal. That’s the turn-on for them, so just… I’m just gonna end this by quoting Michelle Eileen McNamara, “It’s chaos. Be kind.”
Thank you. Good night.