/ Fission Accomplished

PRE-SCRIPT : I should probably warn people that I am not really well adjusted at the moment, so what I may be offering for consumption is a veritable quandary. OH MY GOD I KNOW WHAT WILL FIX IT ALL, too, but self-denial also refers to what you do not put into your body, and not just willful ignorance of what comes out, kind of.

Anyway, I am pretending that it is earlier in the afternoon, on my way home from work. I am in my car, as I am wont to be on my drive home from work, afternoons or otherwise, or you know, when I was a mad drunk, and driving home with the Tacoma Aroma still fresh in my hair.

I am in my car, as I said. It is 4 in the afternoon. I don’t have any props for this scene. Well, I’ve got my camera.

I am in my car.

Up ahead there is a wreck, must be, because all the cars have crawled to a stop and the wind has stopped blowing and it’s impossibly dark outside, but when you roll down the window, it’s unseasonably warm, and you can just feel yourself coming out of sorts.



And when you roll it back up, you see your reflection, how screwed up you are, how many wrecks line the lines in your eyes and the lines in your repertoire and the lines and lines and lines, oh like regrets in single file lines. Elementary school behaved. Crisp uniforms and yellow oversized buttons. No idea what you are in for, kiddies, run!

Traffic picks up, incrementally at first, but as the novelty wears off, exponentially, until you are foot to the floor past 55, just trying to make up time and the tremors are either seismic or sobriety bound. Goddamn! you say. I cannot keep pace with all this traffic, ebb and flow. This modern living, they ain’t kiddin. We work more than our ancestors and by rights that means less than our children, whose own descendants will be sleepin’ on the job, by default.

I don’t remember the last time I tried philosophy.

I remember acknowledging my own existence, saying out loud, I know, I am alive, this is who I am, because I was so tired of forgetting and not thinking, but I cannot remember falling in love and subsequently busting that relationship. I see me. I am smitten with myself. I run when I look the other way. I’m sure there was mad, passionate lovin’ somewhere in between. I might have even called, breathed heavy and hung up, then spent the rest of the night paranoid that the caller was in the house, because Caller ID don’t take into consideration my multitude of personality quirks.



It won’t bother me to die in one of those wrecks, as long as I don’t bleed out regretting my own obscurity, practicing an acceptance speech for an award that someone else worked so much harder to actually earn. Or it will, in some terribly pathetic way, but christ, I got that call that every kid secretly desires, the one where the estranged parent says, I AM SO PROUD, SO, SO PROUD, and I didn’t want it. I turned down pride, of all things. Got plenty of sin, apparently, pallets and pallets of cheap merchandise-like mortality.

And then I turned right around and showered affection on my own clan, and thought, ALL THE ANSWERS, RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF ME. ALL THIS TIME.

Oh, it just isn’t though, and it’s not for a want of desire, because, I know ignorance is bliss, and I am blissfully practiced, I am tellin’ you, but it isn’t about looking at your pretty girl and your growing kids and saying, THAT IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT. THAT’S WHAT MADE IT ALL WORTHWHILE.

At least I hope. I mean, I've been wrong about these things before. It's what it's.