Life's Last Bus

It was late on a Friday night, and I was heading home after an evening with friends at a comedy club. Some lived within walking distance, some ended up taking a cab, some weren't ready to wrap up the evening and continued their saturnalia. I did my best to catch the very last bus of the night, and when I arrived winded on the main street as the bus loomed close, it looked like I had won. But it turns out that a bench—no matter how conveniently situated—doesn't constitute a bus stop. The bus breezed by, leaving me feeling small, alone, and abandoned.

As I walked downtown-wards in search of a later-running route, it struck me that this is exactly my life. I've missed the very last bus. I've run, I've tried to catch it. Worst of all, my friends are catching cabs left and right, and there's nobody left to offer me a lift.

Abandonment is a terrible thing. The hard exterior that I hide my vulnerabilities behind is the one tool that's left to me in these times (and you need that hard exterior when navigating downtown-wards through sketchy unfamiliar areas). But after a certain point, even that exterior starts to crumble, and the vulnerabilities force their way through.

Hopefully there is one last reveler left to enfold you in a hug, reinforcing your protective shell and literally holding you together. Hopefully you don't find yourself completely alone. Hopefully the bus shows a rare courtesy and welcomes you aboard. Hopefully all this imagery doesn't resonate too deeply with you.

The eternal edge

Do you ever feel your spirit just break? You crumble from the inside—you can actually feel this happen—and you become nothing but a stupid swath of pitiful skin wrapped around some tired bones.

In the space where other people probably have memories, I have an accumulation of regrets. The ridiculousness of it all sometimes cracks me, and hysteria wells up. I can hear the scream inside my skull, feel the rasp in my throat as if it were something audible rather than imagined. I can feel the rage enveloping my lungs, while I consciously work them like a bellows to keep clinging to life, forcing my breaths as the confused resentment-terror rises.

They say that if it doesn't matter in ten years, it doesn't matter now. This is meant to give you perspective, to realize how insignificant a present injury really is.

Let me tell you, it matters after ten years. And as the decades add up, the injuries compound.

I've had trouble identifying the emotion that governs my "attacks." It's not quite panic. It's not quite anxiety. Not even just anger. It's a kind of rage-despair-drowning, as though myriad indignancies have pushed me to the edge of a maw of pure desolation, and there is no immediate way to step back. The breathing is like the equivalent of frantically waving one's arms to prevent physically toppling into the chasm. As though I'm drowning, my respiration instinctively stops, closing some valve to keep out the toxic surroundings. Forcing the air in, forcing it out—it's necessary, but it's like breathing something viscous, something that does not contain enough oxygen, something that only staves off suffocation for another moment.

So there you are, flailing your arms at the edge of the cliff, not quite falling, but not quite managing to catch your balance. Maintaining yourself in this frozen moment of uncertain teetering.

The Underworld's torments described in Virgil's Aeneid are most remarkable to me for one particular quality: they are eternal. Tityus's body, flayed open over nine acres, is constantly devoured and yet constantly renewed, so that the torment never ends. Three poor souls were fated to spend eternity beneath an enormous overhanging rock, that was forever on the very brink of falling and crushing them. A moment as frozen as teetering at the edge of the cliff, yet the doom of being about to fall is eternal. It's mind-blowing.

iam iam lapsura cadentique: just on the very, very edge of being about to slip and fall.

That edge. That edge is a beautiful moment in Latin. Being forever just about to slip. It's the moment before ultimate certainty, yet that moment is eternal. That is a beautiful image indeed. That is perfection of language. The rage-terror-drowning itself is not beautiful.

The Perfect Analogy

If there's one thing I can count on, it's that I have a Corner Gas reference for any situation.

Hank: "Pretty ironic, huh?
Brent: "What is?"
Hank: "You need to see in order to tighten your glasses, but you can only see by wearing your glasses."
Brent: "That's not really ironic, it's more of a Catch-22."
Hank: "It's like if you had a hearing aid and to adjust it, you had to hear things."
Brent: "I'd be turning mine off right about now."
Hank: "No, wait—It's like if they had a device that people who had no sense of smell used to help them smell, and to use it they had to smell."
Brent: "Yeah, there it is, the perfect analogy. Anything else would be gilding the lily."

The perfect analogy. Could there be any greater satisfaction than crafting such a thing?

No analogy is ever perfect, but I say that heaping on simile after simile creates a fantastic Superanalogy. As the number of parts approaches infinity, the superanalogy's representation approaches perfect.

My best friend and I are two of a kind. But we're more than that, too.

We're like two beans in a pod. A pair of mittens. A bowl and a cup both filled with the same soup. It's like we're shopping in the same cereal aisle. Riding the same ferry. Like a little set of booties and a little vest being worn by the same dog. Like an umbrella and hood under the same raindrops. Like a pair of boots in the same puddle. Two jokes with the same punchline. A cat, and another cat. Birds of a feather? Heck, it's as if we are actually the same duck.

We are the perfect analogy, the supersimile, the megametaphor, with a friendship that can only be approximated by an infinite number of relevant analogies. No greater satisfaction indeed.