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Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

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I’ve been away, gone, AWOL, hiding out, undetectable, secreted off to an undisclosed location, POOF! vanished without a trace. Here today, gone tomorrow. Fact is often much more mundane than fiction, and although I’m tempted to say that I’ve been busy stirring up cultural resentments, poisoning the well of political discourse and fanning the flames of international discontent, the truth is that I nodded off last Spring during the overwrought season finale of NBC’s Chicago Fire and woke up several months later just in time for Shark Week and Bear Grylls’ new survival competition series, Get Out Alive. Bear must certainly know that no one escapes this mess in living-breathing condition, but none-the-less, every week he urges his rag-tag teams of whining fiancés, dumpy middle-aged married couples, muscle-bound homosexuals and parent/child combos to believe that there is something profound waiting for them on top of the mountain or that rappelling to the bottom of a gorge is a worthwhile spiritual endeavor. It’s all horseshit, and Bear Grylls – like everyone else – is running and climbing and jumping away  from the terrifying truth that there’s nothing either up there or down there but the eventual end. “Let the mountain give you strength,” Mr. Grylls compels his competitors onward, but once they’ve crested the summit they all look exhausted and fitfully anxious as they stare off into the nothingness. 

Time is the most beguiling of commodities, coveted and squandered in equal measures. People pine for the “good old days,” or fret, “If only I had more time,” or long to go back and start it all over again, yet every Monday morning people count the minutes to Friday wishing away a week’s worth of life for a couple of days that will undoubtedly be a disappointment. For me, time isn’t a curse but rather an organizational tool to keep my eternity in reasonably tidy order. I don’t want to simply wander the world aimlessly forever, and I’m too damn vain to lose track of my impressive accomplishments in a haze of lazy forgetfulness, but a limitless supply of time can take it’s toll on even a hearty immortal creature like me, and sometimes I am overcome by the ennui of it all and choose to exercise the luxury I possess to close my eyes for a few months, years or decades until I wake up refreshed and with a renewed vigor to stare down the mighty crush of existence with my cold, black, vampiric eyes. I’m bored. Oh sure, technological advancements are racing forward at the speed of light, and now young children are computer savvy little beasts who can boast an impressive list of beloved bookmarked porn websites. Tesla is redefining the auto industry, and the current crop of 3-D movies are crystal clear – no longer a murky blur of green and red confusion. Just about anyone can record a dance pop hit in the comfort of their own home with a bossa nova techno beat just a click away on their laptop or become a momentary sensation courtesy a self-produced youtube clip, but the bigger picture has lost its vibrancy. The colors have bled, the hues have faded. The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African American teenager Trayvon Martin was greeted by the expected spate of protest marches that sprang up across the country like a singular, seamless corporately sponsored event featuring large posters of Trayvon – not the young and happy kid, but rather, dressed in a white hoodie looking older, harder and a little bit dangerous. They were lackluster affairs, and the outrage seemed fragile as if everyone was impatiently waiting for the next thing to be offended by…been there done that before. The Egyptians have swelled up in revolutionary zeal over a hated dictatorship for the second time in as many years, but ironically, my most vivid personal memories of the Egyptian people go all the way back to their Golden Age when I watched them toil under centuries of divine despots who claimed to be Ra’s viceroys on Earth. Everything old is new again. Congressional Republicans are still trying to dismantle Obamacare and stymie their hated nemesis at every turn. No one really pays much attention to their futile grandstanding, but the vaudeville-like posturing has ground the nation to a legislative halt. Anthony Weiner’s dick doesn’t look any different attached to a mayoral candidate than it did when he was in Congress. The same old story. It was the best of times, it was the most tedious of times. Someone woke up grumpy…perhaps I should have slept awhile longer.

Last Winter I stopped in the drug store to buy a package of light bulbs and a hairstyling product I saw advertised in a men’s fashion magazine. I expected a quick trip in and out of the store, but a large woman wearing sensible shoes who looked to be around fifty-five stepped in front of me as I approached the checkout line and then proceeded to pay for her purchase with a personal check. My annoyance faded when I spied the illustration of a child angel with puffy wings utterly useless for flight, golden curls surrounding her round face and a white shimmering nightgown on the front of the check. As the little girl angel – who was bathed in rays of heavenly light so gentle they would never scorch her tender, pink-cheeked skin even in the absence of a high quality sunblock – sputtered, stalled and jammed the cash register’s printer, the woman slipped her light blue pen into a slot in her checkbook and closed it to reveal a cover with bulbous mounds of painted clouds that looked like pastel blue and white cotton candy emblazoned with the declaration, “I believe In Angels” in a floridly scripted font. I tried to catch the ponderous, jowly woman’s attention so I could ask, “When did you lose your daughter?” but I abruptly stopped myself. Seldom do I admit to any deficiencies in my normally astute observations, although in this instance I began to suspect that the woman’s fascination with angels might not be linked to a dead child. Maybe she lost something even more elemental during the course of her years, maybe she lost the humble, basic expectation that life should be better than this. I watched as she lumbered away, paused to check her receipt then walk through the hissing automatic doors to fade away into the night. Back to where? I wondered, back to what? “Will that be all for you tonight?” the cashier, a young man who looked vaguely like a skinnier Ryan Seacrest, asked. “Oh,” I said, turned away from the doors and absentmindedly picked up a small potted grafted cactus that was sitting in a cardboard display next to the register and added it to my purchase.

My unplanned nap caused me to miss the climactic final scenes of Chicago Fire’s debut season, but a real life fireman drama unfolded several evenings ago on the corner of my block. I walked up as two fire engines, an ambulance and several squad cars with their sirens howling and their lights flashing stopped in front of an old, stately courtyard condominium building. “Someone in the building smelled a dead body!” a woman walking her hyperactive Boston Bulldog told me with breathless excitement after I had joined the crowd of neighborhood gawkers. Narrowing my eyes I scanned the pretty building suspiciously and drew in a breath. I smelled something bad. I detected the feint odor of decay wafting in the air, but it wasn’t death.

Death. People assume that my peculiar circumstances cause me to view death through an enchanted midnight blue lens, or that my very existence veneers death with velvety dark glamor. There was nothing glamorous about my own death. The mechanics of it were quite ordinary. I remember choking and struggling futilely against those strangulating final moments before everything suddenly went black. When my eyes once again opened I saw that life and death were simply the same savage, ravenous monster. I rose from the blackness and saw the horrible truth. Over these countless centuries I’ve smelled death in the pass of Thermopylae, in the Teutoburg Forest, Gettysburg and Leningrad. I’ve smelled it under dark, dirty expressway underpasses and hospitals, nursing homes and in refrigerated, perfumed funeral parlors. The noxious scent that reached me on the street wasn’t the stench of the end, but of hopelessness and despair.

Slowly, I worked my way through the crowd until I reached one of the fireman who had just walked out of the building. He wiped a sleeve across his face, waved his hand towards the landscaped courtyard and said to a cop waiting for information, “It’s real bad in there.” “Dead?” the policeman asked. “No, she’s alive,” the firefighter said putting the back of his hand to his lips, “She’s fine, I mean she seems like she’s ok, but it’s…bad…you know…her apartment…really bad in there.” Medics appeared in one of the building’s entrance ways and pulled a woman out on stretcher. She was covered with a crisp white sheet that was bunched high around her shoulders. A personal hell exploded into a public horror, and word of the filth and squalor that the woman had been living in spread like a disease through the crowd. Some people gagged, others laughed, some shook their heads while most simply stood in stunned silence. The woman was wheeled through the parted crowd like Norma Desmond ready for her close up, and in one last desperate effort to regain even a sliver of dignity she tried to smooth the crumpled sheet around her chin. I recognized her. She was the woman with the angel checkbook I saw in the drugstore last winter. The ambulance doors closed, and the woman disappeared in  a scream of sirens off to the psych ward of a nearby hospital where someone would sort through the wreck of her life. Here today, gone tomorrow.

I wonder when the woman who lived in filth began to believe in angels? Was it before her life spiraled downward out of control into a sewer of hopelessness? Did she believe that someday she would find peace in pristine powder-soft clouds bathed in clean radiant white light, or did she desperately need to believe that something existed somewhere that was better than this grimy, rank, cruel world? I made my way through the chattering neighbors, across the street and back home. I turned on the TV just in time to see Bear Grylls rub his hands together, pat his knees and say, “This was a hard decision.” The remaining teams of survivalists exchanged nervous glances in the flickering light of the campfire then with noticeable compassion Bear told the gay couple “I’m sorry, you’d never get out alive.” Here today, gone tomorrow.

Got a problem? Maybe I’ll help: Ask Alexios at caballoblue@yahoo.com

©2013 M. Smith

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