Obiter Dictum

It had been a so-so day at work, but for one reason or another I was feeling particularly frustrated. Mostly with myself. I hate it when that happens. I slipped on my sunglasses as I shrugged my backpack onto my left shoulder and pushed the door open to the outside. Two steps down the sidewalk–only two steps into the half-mile walk out to where I was parked–I looked down and noticed a big, fat, black ant scurrying across the pavement.

In the space of a heartbeat, I mentally calculated his direction and velocity, compared that with mine as well as the location of my next step. In that instant, I knew I would squish him like a bug (yes, a pun) and felt a momentary rush as I quickly considered a symbolic squashing of myself; perhaps it would end this creeping malaise and recently persistent self-doubt.

In less than a split-second, I straightened slightly, slowing my momentum just enough that by stretching my stride a fraction I completely missed the fat, black ant. I continued to focus on him as I continued my walk, observing that he hadn’t even seemed to register that I existed. I felt better anyway, having spared his puny existence.

And then it occurred to me, as I passed under the ER Ambulance Awning, that if one were so inclined, one could feel the hovering boot heel of whatever supreme being/diety/force/power one might recognize as being in charge of the universe, ready to descend in an instant. I wondered, “How many times have I been scurrying on my way, focused on some inanity, unaware of the minor adjustment in galactic-sized gait that may have just spared my own puny existence?”

How many times has (G-d, the Grand Architect of the Universe, the Initial Consciousness, the Original Spirit, the Force, the One, the…the…Whatever!) looked down on me, heedlessly crossing His|Her|Its path, and felt a momentary rush as the thought of stamping out my existence flitted across the Supreme Synapse? How many times have I been spared?

Isn’t it funny how the universe sometimes conspires to help us put our troubles, our day, our lives in to proper perspective? Save an ant. Save yourself.

Every once in a while, I run across a link to a web site that makes me laugh out loud. This is one of them:

Awkward Family Photos

The commentary is mostly one-liners, and the titles for some of the entries are rather clever. I really did laugh out loud as I read through some of them. Given that one might refer to me as “jaded,” it takes a special web site to make me even so much as chuckle. Awkward Family Photos is definitely special. And, not in the short-bus way, either.

In the epic post-modern novel, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” American writer Thomas Pynchon wrote:

The real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Script, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But, out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being.

I could wax analytic and explain to you what I think Pynchon is getting at in that passage, but I believe it would lose some of its power. This passage, by the way, occurs fairly early in the book. Yet it shines like a beacon, illuminating the subtly shaded ‘market transactions’ which the author has placed in our path like so many barrier islands which me must navigate as we approach understanding.

Instead, I kindly suggest that you re-read the quote above. I will not be so crude as to also suggest that you keep in mind William Mark Felt, Sr.’s famous quote, “Follow the money.”