Hyperreality

I've seen it done, so. But someone asked whether there was some other reason I didn't say yes to a viable option. I've always thought I knew the answer to that. But when it was asked I found myself speechless.

The truth is, and you know this, I am tired of being sad. I can tell you I know all about fate and destiny and how sometimes people are meant to be melancholy, that sometimes people enjoy being despondent. But I'll be the first to tell you that it's not a nice place to be in.

Which is why, despite full knowledge of tendencies to keep running into walls and jumping unprotected into bottomless gorges, I will keep trying. And the past may remain hanging in the background, and I might not be able to completely eliminate the effects of whatever happened in the past and what it did to who and what I've become, but I've found it pays to stop the addicting, debilitating kind of rumination I sometimes think my cortexes were made for.

I'm going to run my answers down until I can punch them in the face and call them all manner of bad things. Especially for keeping me waiting.

Plan B

It took us days, days, to assemble the road spikes. We had neutrino bombs waiting at the sidelines, Trojan horses ready with their toothy smiles and sincere crinkles at the edges of their eyes, we rehearsed everything from the approximate blood pressure of the caravan driver at the time of assault to the point-blank plunging of the spear into said driver's chest. Everything.

Everything worth thinking about and planning for, we did. Shobashi Wayne, the slit-eyed guy with skin like porcelain, kept coming up with stupid ideas to anticipate: a sudden sandstorm, the president driving, even the spear-bearer developing a brain aneurysm at the last minute.

I obliged, every step of the way, because this day was unlike any other. If this day pans out the way it should, I would have single-handedly brought this entire town to its knees. It was an important milestone, too crucial to leave to chance. I have the patience of a vulture waiting on a lion to finally die. I circle, invisibly, unceasingly, until a clear shot is made available.

It was all going to be beautiful. Except for one thing. The one thing we didn't even have to consider. The one thing we assumed would behave according to plan given the annual recurrence of the caravan arriving on the 20th of January at 3 in the afternoon.

It is this: that the caravan would be a caravan.

When I first heard the helicopter's rotor blades, I simply wanted to die.

Before Step One

My third night in a row thinks it should never really have happened but is thankful it did. Everything feels wrong and right and deadly.

What makes sense now? I don't know what to expect from work, from the family, from dreams sketched hastily at the back of unlined notebooks. And yet none of that matters. There is only asphalt and feet and a simple decision that should do wonders for a soul that had lost faith in itself and in the world.

Pure and full and black and white. Here in this world there is no try, there is do and not do. A curse, a blessing, that thin line that is actually a universe—three universes, even!—apart, the porous, scalable, absolute-ness of actually doing something versus just thinking about it.

How close we are to utter destruction every time we fail to try.