CLASH OF TITANS

I shall walk beside all things
Till all things
Come to know me.
- Marin Sorescu, Perseverance

I, too, shall persevere, in spite of this heart which, in the meantime, is in a chronic state of chaos. The words are incriminating, here for the picking: meantime and chronic do not jibe; one is temp, the other infinite. Ahhh, confusion clarifies.

I read the draft in MS Word while dithering around, dithering around a la Keane in Can't Stop Now, understanding with misery the principles of cause and effect. If I drink I will get drunk. I am drinking; Oh drunkenness, where art thou?

The draft: The Pink House on Periwinkle Street is intended as 6th of 13, this specific spot seven stories away from pan. I look at the text and find them in shambles. These words are my mirror, they assume my reflection horroris causa.

In this evening of irony I look around and check the ingredients: A glass of cheap Merlot; organic bananas from Honduras; a view of the blazing sky from my patio facing west; cd music from the component playing Neil Young's greatest hits; a short story anthology called Telling Tales edited by Ms. Nadine Gordimer ruffling between myself and the computer monitor; and the television screen, in zero volume, showing a man struggling underwater. These, ladies and gentlemen of the freaking jury, are surefire ingredients for insanity.

Yet I don't need them for I am already insane. A couple of days ago I read in an "underground" book of lists that we come closest to the pathology of mental illness whenever we are sleep-deprived. I am very sleep-deprived. In my insanity you must watch this syrupy saliva from the left corner of my ill-begotten mouth accumulate at the bottom and as I move my head left to right the bottom of this gooey trapeze gets heavier and sways away like a pathetic pendulum.

(1. There was no need for Nancy, a pretzel vendor from the Dominican, to further drive me nuts. She spoke no English but when I asked her "Que paso?" the other day about the worry lines, she said, sans accent, "I am perturbed"; 2. I noticed the stress getting into my essential nerves when I almost kicked my car and asked it, if it were to answer, why I would need 2,000 lbs of steel to carry 200 lbs of ass; 3. Pink House on Periwinkle Street is certified trash. Everytime I type a word the one before it becomes wrong.)

The man on the tv screen is now terribly struggling. I take the headphone off (off my head, of course), put the book down on the computer desk, turn the tv volume up, and be horrified by the sight of this man trying to get out of what looks like a steel cage submerged in water. In vain he grapples for air, struggling to get to the surface, struggling to get back to life, with cheeks inflated he must be saving the last remaining bit of now poisonous air in his lungs. Now he loosens his grasp of the steel bolts. The puffy cheeks become unpuffed. He sinks. With both arms floating on the sides and feet up he suddenly looks like a tired man sitting on an invisible lazyboy. The man is now dead and every second of this horrible transition is shown on film while a proem of some sort is being narrated. The movie turns out to be Zentropa by Lars von Trier.

I feel the surge. Should I puke or should I not, should I stay or should I go? I go back to my computer desk, pick up the book and start reading the first story: Bulldog by Arthur Miller.

Bulldog, too, is about transition. The tension in Miller's story builds up from the time the 13-yr old boy acquires a puppy from an older woman with whom he has sexual orientation, up to the time the man from the dog pound takes the puppy from him. In a surprising twist by the end of the story, the kid experiences an unexplained sense of happiness. He plays the piano with some chords he had never learned, some tunes he had never met. This last paragraph is epiphany, a discovery of happiness I have never encountered in a short story for a long time. I begin to smile, then laugh, then smile again without tension, without apprehension, with plenty of reasons. I wear back the headphone and right on target is the cd's last track, Harvest Moon, Oh my Lord, my favorite Neil Young song I last heard 15 years ago! I am pleasantly surprised, not knowing the cd has it. I am floating. I am singing. I am Miller's 13-yr old boy in an unexplained feeling of happiness..."Come a little bit closer, hear what I have to say, just like children sleeping we could dream this night away..."

Tonight I will be able to sleep the sleep and tomorrow I'll summon the essence of Flannery O'Connor to reside at the tip of my pen. In this beatific night of quadruple-media, the scores are tied, 2 against 2. But since happiness is at the moment, I no longer plead insanity. The transition is at hand, this song should not end, this story should not end. Heck, if I am this happy even this post should not end.

The last one I can make, this post will not end...