And So it Goes

              There is a lady in our town who lives on Main Street. I mean literally lives on a bench located on the main thoroughfare of Corcoran. It's plain for everyone to see that she's clearly hurting. She sits and stares to the west or stands and stares toward the road. Sometimes she walks back and forth like she's one of the characters in small town version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, waiting for some kind of salvation that never seems to come. She's moved a couple of times because she used to sleep on the sidewalk in front of the cafe where I eat breakfast everyday, and she was sleeping in the park with the other homeless after the local police told her she couldn't sleep on the cafe's sidewalk.

         Like I said, she is clearly in some distress. But she's not the only one. Every day there's  a whole group of people who traverse the stage outside the window where I'm eating. Dressed in scabs, filth, and ragged, unwashed clothing, they are all broken in one way or another. And clearly, the powers that be, depending where you want to place their abode either in Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Washington D.C., or Sacramento don't seem to give a damn about them. I feel like I can say that that because it's been going on for such a long time and nothing seriously has been done to identify the problem much less fix it. Our political divide where both sides of the table are blinded by the ever expanding, ever darkening mists of their own flatulence can not seem to bring themselves to see past the end of their own noses, each side wanting and/or needing to keep the sores of the body politic gaping and bleeding and oozing in their misguided efforts to throw both blame and stones across the aisle as if their only job in life is to accuse the other side of sin. 

      I know that I myself should be a lot more empathetic. I really understand that I should do more myself, and I'm not trying to place the blame on others. I've just never been a person who could walk up to someone in such a wretched condition and say, "Here, let me take you somewhere where they can help you." It's not in me, and me makes me even sadder because I've so often searched those darkened reaches of my own inner world looking for the wells of healing water and only found an half-filled gallon jar or two, barely enough to satisfy my own needs in such arid times. I'm a typical American in that way, someone who write checks to charity, so I don't have to listen to the news. But everyday, this dystopian panorama is still outside the window where I sit and eat my eggs and bacon.

      I often feel like someone who paid a lot of money to watch Beckett's Waiting for Godot in a luxurious theater after eating a fine meal and drinking several Scotch and waters (at least four, the last one a double). My conscience is pricked and made alive by the stern scenarios, but by the time I get back home, I leave my conscience outside and lock the door behind me where sometimes, I hear it scratching like a spoiled cat.

       Yesterday, I drove to Fresno to give my daughter some money to help a lady in need get off the streets. I was a little short while waiting for my SS check to come in, so I took my coins to a Save Mart in Hanford and traded them in for a little piece of paper worth $40. Yep, that's about as far as I go. I'm much better at complaining about things.

       Whenever, I'm in Fresno, I go to Barnes and Noble. Normally, I buy a book or two. I'm trying to break that habit because the inside of my house looks a lot like library after an earthquake. As I'm typing this, I can  look to my right and see a battered, used volume of Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. The tag on the cover said I bought it for 25 cents. I remember I bought it because I needed to find something to tell my daughter that she needed to be a little less altruistic, so that she could take better care of herself. The philosophy in the book though reminded me a lot of Nietzsche, so I quit reading it after the first chapter. On the top of the stack of books behind my laptop is the book, Savage Journey, a biography of Hunter S. Thompson. I can walk into any room of my house and come face to face with some great thinker. While I'm ironing clothes, for example, I'll pause long enough to read a page or two of someone like Joan Didion or Carl Jung. Waiting for the shower to get warm in the morning, it's H.G. Wells's History of the World. 

        When I catch myself doing this, I'm reminded of one of my earliest images of my mother sitting in a chair in the living room smoking a cigarette with an inch long ash and holding a romance novel in the other hand while the vacuum cleaner stands before her anxiously waiting. My brain has always been restless, ever searching for the bit I missed the first time around. This state of affairs has its benefits, of course, but its not always a good thing, as it makes it hard for me to focus and get shit done, and its getting even harder for me as I age to sit still and just enjoy the beauty of the world around me. It seems that I would rather run the world through the filter of someone like a Larry McMurtry or a Carl Jung than actually see the same real thing right across the street.

     So, now, instead of buying a book, I grab two or three and sit down at a table with my coffee and a small notebook to write down the lines or expressions that I like and want to remember. I kind of like this arrangement better because it adds the sport of people watching to the reading endeavor. Sitting there, I read an essay on Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five by Salman Rushdie in which he explained the meaning behind the iconic catch phrase made famous by the novel, "and so it goes." Rushdie explains that it wasn't so much a shoulder shrug offered in the face of existence, as most people think, but, rather, a respectful nod offered to the specter of death. Rushdie claims that every time the author used the expression someone in the book had died. It made perfect sense to me, so I wrote it down, now here I am talking about it.

      I often wonder, when I am alone at night, why I don't possess a greater amount of empathy towards the people who sleep on our nation's sidewalks and haunt our crosswalks holding up cardboard signs to elicit our sympathy and aid. Sometimes, I think it might be because what empathy I have, I need for myself. I was cruising along minding my own business when the powers that be just started raining nuclear bombs down upon my head. It was like God let Harry Truman take the wheel for a moment, and he decided I was threat to the Domino Theory of Cold-War containment. My wife suddenly up and leaves, my mom has a stroke; the first night my dad spends alone at home because Mom is in the hospital, evidently thinking about the idea of living life without her; suffers a mental breakdown; dad gets dementia and dies; ex-wife gets cancer and dies, mom gets a pace maker and dies of a Covid related illness. And so it goes.

     Kurt Vonnegut was actually there when the Allies firebombed the fairy-tale city of Dresden in retaliation for the German bombing of London. He went down beneath the ground of one of the most charming and magical places in Europe and emerged into the smoking ruins of a rugged Martian landscape. That scene resonates with me. I sometimes feel like I fell asleep on the couch while watching Father Knows Best and woke up to the Kardashians blathering about whatever the hell it is they blather about while sitting on that couch from Friends smoking a joint and watching a drunken Bill Maher urinating on Howard Stern's head while he's passed out in the doorway of the Mayberry jail. Otis the lovable drunk's neglected corpse is covered with cobwebs in the jail cell behind them but they never seem to notice. That feeling emptied my storage capacity of empathy about a half. Then, I think I hit a rock while driving the back roads to Tulare and punctured a hole in the tank that left me on empty.

        Yet, it might have been that brainless twit of a judge that let those two drug smugglers who brought 250,000 hits of Fentanyl into the valley loose the very same day they were busted. That's more than enough Fentanyl to kill every person in this area. Stuff like that makes you realize that we're living in weird times and you can't just be handing over your empathy to every one with a cardboard sign all willy nilly like. Most of them, the drugged-out ones, would trade your empathy for some Fentanyl while you were standing there if they could. You might need it later to barter for something someday or need to dig a hole and hide it for an occasion where you know it's truly needed, and not just give it to someone of the ilk of the person who stole your mom's wheelchair and sold it for five dollars.

         And it's not that I don't realize that the someone who stole my mom's wheelchair is worthy of empathy. I just used to know it a whole lot better before some people made a cottage industry as well as a political philosophy out of the signaling of virtue. They teach it to our children in our schools, and, hell, you can't even go into a fast food restaurant in America without the person behind counter asking if you want to donate your change to an advertising effort that shows the world how much more virtuous their corporate ownership is opposed to another corporate ownership. There is reason that the Bible says to "give your alms in private." People ain't changed all that much, especially corporate ownership.

       I was telling my brother this morning that there's a lesson to be learned by the lady's presence on main street. I just don't know what it is yet. I told him that according to science, we shape our own reality by our thinking. I then told him to straighten up and quit thinking weird shit, and I would try to do the same. I thought about whether this world is one of those Escape Rooms that people pay good money to escape from (Don't ask me), and maybe what we needed to do was to come up with a phrase that would free us all. I remarked that the lady standing there dressed all in black against the stark background of downtown Corcoran looked like something out of an Ibsen play or that movie The Seven Seals by Ingmar Bergman. You know the scene where the knight plays chess with Death? So, as we ate, I googled Ibsen and started reading a list of famous quotes from his plays.

       The first one was cool, and I thought very appropriate for these times. “It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life.” I looked over at my brother and asked, "She still there?" He just shook his head sadly. I read the rest of the list, and then I would ask, and he would shake his head. The last one was the best. I told him excitedly, "This is great. It has got to be the one."

         He had forgotten by that time what we were doing and sheepishly asked, " The one what?"

            I looked at him with disdain and said, "The code word, the secret phrase, fool. The one that's going to change everything and make it go back to the way it was before."

           "Before what?"

           I was almost frothing at mouth by then, "Before Covid! Before Newsome and his slick ass hair. Before The Joker. Before Schiff. Before Antifa.  Before Hunter knew what crack was. Before Miley Cyrus. Before Nickleback. What do you mean before what? Before what ever it was that broke that lady over there's heart."

          "Just shut up and say it." He's usually like Silent Bob but sometime he's heard enough.

            "Okay. Here it goes, 'I don't imagine that you will dispute the fact that at the present stupid people are in an absolute majority all the world over.'"

           Nothing.