“Irrelevant,” I replied.
I backed into a barstool, and ordered a Coors Light. Might as well relive the glory, I thought. Surprisingly, the beer tasted good: crisp, cold, bubbly, sweet. I chatted with everyone in the bar. It could have been a nudist bar. No one wore the clothes of status or rank. We all started from lack of knowledge of the others. In a way, I was slightly ahead, since someone knew I once wrote a song. But no one wanted to talk about that. Instead, we talked of music, big screen TV’s, business, advertising, tourists. Passing the time talking of the passage of time.
As the beer lightened my senses, and the patrons drifted away, I recognized something familiar. I looked at myself in the drug store mirror, and I saw the 19-year-old Iowa farm boy staring at the mirror in the hotel room in Loup City, Nebraska. I saw the 20-year-old musician trying to grow a goatee in Pueblo, Colorado. I saw the 18-year-old high schooler ordering a Hamm’s at Frank & Fran’s in Quitman, Iowa.
Now nearly 50, I hadn’t ever gone anywhere. I was a reflection of a person, at rest in a bar. The bar was home. No stress. No tomorrow. No competition. Just relaxed people, enjoying the existential act of being together in a bar. Of just being.
The bar - the bar! - was the real world.
The End.
Chapter 12
Action vs observation redux.
Is constant action required to stay alive? Or is that novelist sitting in the closet just as able to affect reality?
Heisenberg, et al discovered a perspective-altering principle that I only faintly understand.
It used to be thought that the real world stood apart from the perceived world. Atoms and electrons jumbled their way merrily along, crashing into one another and making rain, babies, and chemistry experiments.
We would watch and unravel their secrets.
But a funny thing happened. They discovered that the act of our observation changed the way the atoms moved! Suddenly the audience was affecting the play. This discovery is changing the fundamental way we think about ourselves and our world.
Light can either be a particle or a wave, but really both simultaneously. In the famous double slit experiment, the light starts as a photon, becomes a wave as it propagates through two parallel slits, then collapses back to a single point when we observe it on the other side of the slit. Yet that final dot falls into the pattern of a wave.
So my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. We start as a single point, then turn to waves spreading throughout our lives. But when we take stock of our situation, we end up as a single point.
The most horrible resolution, though, is not that the dot has not changed.
More hideous by far, is to not be observed at all.
The End.
Chapter 13
“Shelda, I think I’ve figured it out.”
The statuesque black-haired linebacker stared skeptically at me through half-closed mascarad eyelids.
I continued, unintimidated.
“Mediocrity, rot, and decay,” I said.
She continued staring.
“We–everyone–are living lives of quiet desperation,” I said. “We are in marriages that limit us, raising children who resent us, working at jobs that demean us. Every aspect of our lives work to destroy us.”
I continued.
“Of course, the irony is that everything conspiring against us grew from our own choosing,” I said. “We picked our spouse, decided to have kids, and lobbied endlessly to be hired for the job. It’s like a Sartre novel. God is laughing at us. The Devil, too. He doesn’t need to do anything evil. God is handling it all.”
“Mediocrity, rot, and decay,” Shelda intoned.
“Most certainly,” I said. “In our youth we pursue it; in middle age we perpetuate it; in our dotage we succumb to it. It’s simple thermodynamics. It just takes us a lifetime to realize it is immutable.”
Shelda wiped the bar.
“So what’ll you have?” she asked.
I thought.
“What,” I asked, “is the point of having anything?”
“Dammit, Fred!” she slammed down the bar rag. “Just because you believe the whole world is sliding to hell in a handbasket, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the ride. Just because you know you are going to outgrow the bicycle you got for Christmas, does that make you any less excited to get it? Just because you know the roller coaster ride has to come to an end, does that stop you from crawling into the car?”
She wasn’t finished, either.
“You ‘cry in your beer’ types drive me crazy... no, you bore me,” she scolded. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to crawl in here and share your dismal observations about all humanity. The hard thing - the thing you don’t realize because you are too busy being right - is that your epiphany isn’t new, or hidden, or undiscovered. Everyone realizes - at some primal level - that life is futile. The geniuses are the ones that get past that, the ones who realize life sucks and will end in futility, but continue to live anyway!”
Bum limped up to the bar with his lopsided smile and raised a finger. Shelda pulled the Hamms handle and expertly filled his glass. He accepted it with a wordless tilt of his head and shuffled back to his seat.
“Look at Bum,” she said. “He’s crippled, blind, can’t drive, has no family, and owns nothing. Compared to him, you are a sultan. Yet who is the one with the more positive outlook on life?”
She had me there. I considered Bum for a moment.
“So...” I asked tentatively. “Are you saying the sole purpose of life is to be...” I shuddered... “to be ‘happy’?”
“Not just happy,” Shelda said, leaning on the bar until her dark-lined eyes bored holes in my head. “Defiantly happy.”
Chapter 14
I stared at the painted counter, swirling the amber liquid in my glass.
“Color,” I said.
“Excuse me?” Shelda said.
I looked from my Shelda-shaped glass to the real thing.
“It’s all about color,” I repeated. “Color just confuses us. The world is black and white. If that’s all we see, things become less confusing. Black and white. The end.”
Shelda took a desultory swipe at the beer glass sweat with her rag.
“It ain’t black and white, honey,” she said. “Black and white is Oreo’s. Black and white is root beer floats. Black and white is hot fudge sundaes. It ain’t black and white... it’s gray. The opposite of color is gray. Gray is slush and mud. Flannel. Clouds. Oatmeal.”
“Gray is indecision, moral vacillation, hesitation. Black and white is crisp.”
She stopped wiping.
“So what the fuck is your point?” I asked.
She dropped her jaw and looked at me through her healthy brows.
“I don’t have a fucking point. You started this.”
Chapter 15
“What if you could see your future?”
Lester looked up from his third Schlitz of the afternoon.
“Huh?” was all he could manage.
I smiled.
“What if I could tell you what is going to happen next in your life?” I repeated my question.
He gave an unsteady half grin. “I can tell you that,” he said. “I’m going to have another beer. Want one?”
I shook my head. “No, no... I don’t mean in the next minute. I mean what will happen next month or next year, or ten years from now.”
“Still too easy,” he replied. “I’ll go to work, come home, go to Frank’s, and have a beer. Want one?”
At first I was frustrated with the provincial attitude. Here I was, offering this man the gift of looking back 30 years from now and peeling back the mystery of one man’s future. And all he could think about was sitting in Frank’s and having a beer.
But then I analyzed what was going to happen with Lester’s life, and he was pretty much right.
Lester was a wise man. Why would any of us want to know what lay in our futures? Great fortune and triumph? That woul
d only make us impatient with our present, and remove our incentive to invest in every existing minute. Tragedy and loss? We would dread the new day, and take desperate measures to avoid the natural path.
Knowing the future would destroy the present. And the present is the only place in which anyone can exist.
I know what it’s like to be dead.
A tripping Peter Fonda kept saying that to a tripping John Lennon. Being dead is the key to living. As a dead man in a quick world, you would be free of consequences. Freedom from consequence is release from inhibition. No inhibitions means confidence which means success and a fulfilled existence. Not existing in the conventional world is the essence of living. The dead man walking among us is the freest individual on the planet.
I bought Lester his fourth beer of this day.
Chapter 16
I needed Shelda. So I turned the corner onto the one-block-long commercial part of Quitman’s Main Street and walked the familiar downhill path to the bar. Both bars were smack dab in the middle of the block, on the same side of the street. I passed the door to the first one, took 2 more strides, and entered the second one.
Shelda was there, what are the odds?
She looked up and didn’t change expression. Good. That meant she was... well, it meant she was ready to go in any direction.
I swallowed and began.
“Shelda, remember last time I was in here I was dead?”
She kept looking at me. No change. THAT was a little unnerving.
“Well, it was not quite true.” I glanced away, then back at the still expressionless face. “I was dying.”
She didn’t respond, so I kept on.
“Not really dying, I guess. Just at the point in life where I could imagine my demise without fear or horror. I thought I had a life-ending condition. So I started thinking about putting my things in order. It was really quite illuminating.”
I went on.
“The things I thought would be important, weren’t. Taxes, insurance, papers, banking... all that was meaningless. And not meaningless in an ‘oh I see the big picture’ way. Because the other surprise was that I did not obsess on writing a novel, composing an opus, or climbing the Himalayas.”
I couldn’t tell if she cared, or was even listening. But it didn’t really matter. And she knew that, too.
“No, what mattered was the truly little stuff. Not my legacy, but listening to my daughter sing. Watching an ant carry a thistle seed. Mostly, and most surprising, paying attention to what other people were doing and feeling.”
Her mouth dropped open slightly.
“Suddenly it mattered that I said Hi to the person behind me at the grocery store. It mattered that I laughed at the joke the 10-year-old told me. When I asked ‘how are you,’ to anyone, I started listening to what they answered. And I cared about the answer.”
“This totally surprised me. Before, when I was immortal, those tedious social interactions were distractions that kept me from working on my opus, or finishing my homework. Imagine my surprise when God forced me to see that those distractions in my life are supposed to BE my life! Can you imagine listening to people, really listening?”
Finally, Shelda smiled.
Of course she could.
Chapter 17
Liquidity.
I watched the people drink.
There was Bum. There was Lester.
There was me.
As the beer swirled in the frosted glasses, the saltwater sloshed in our bodies. I remembered reading an account by a neurologist about her having a stroke. A vessel leaked in her brain, flooding the left hemisphere with blood. Blood is toxic to neurons, so over several hours she lost function of her left brain. Gradually the part of her brain that guided her, gave her structure, linked random thought, and ultimately defined her sense of self and separateness from surroundings ceased to function.
Surprisingly this lifting of barriers did not frighten or upset the Jane that was left (right). She described the experience as blissful, a feeling of being at one with the universe. Edges softened, borders dissipated. Her most striking revelation was that she was liquid.
This is factually true - humans are more than 90% water.
But early on, we are trained and conditioned to consider ourselves as unique and individual packets of form, separate and identifiable from other human form packets sloshing along beside us.
As I contemplated the foamy brew in my mug, it occurred to me the real surprise is not that we are so watery, but that thinking so is so startling. After all (before all?), we crawled from the sea; we will return to the stars.
“Get Fred another beer.” I heard Lester’s slightly slurred order from the next table.
It struck me that adding alcohol to our buckets of blood and salty water was a way to acknowledge our liquid state, without the inconvenience of having a stroke. Alcohol poisoned and rendered our left brain temporarily impotent, slipping us down the slope of reason to that state of blissful acknowledgement of our oneness with the world. The schmaltzy camaraderie with strangers, the lopsided grin of inebriation, the lack of judgment and lack of care at that lack, were all results of slipping off the shackle of form and sloshing along beside our foamy friends.
I turned to Lester, nodded and raised my glass.
The End
Chapter 18
Looking back over this, it now strikes me as bemusing that any of us even care about the meaning of life. It’s all just details.
And there is no end.
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