Don’t Feed the Crows
by Eric Richter
It’s getting tougher to get out of bed and get on with the day lately. Unemployment must really be kicking in. Or Funemployment, as I’ve been told it should be called. Whatever you’d call it, the days start the same; I shuffle out of bed half blind and half mad and stand patiently over a boiling pot, or in line at the local joint, and shrug off the gift of another new day while the coffee brews. Unless I’m late for work or something. Which I’m not today, seeing as I’m still unemployed.
So I get a cup of calm all brewed, and I hide out in the Sports section or the Front page, where other people play out their lives so I don’t have to look at mine. For a while, anyway.
At least until reading something about a shooting at some office, at which point I am caught up in my recent dreams: dreams where I speed along in a car, helplessly caught and ripped by bullets in a gunfight; or the one where I run through the same pattern of halls and doors inside my grandparents’ burning house as I try to lose the Terminator, clenching and grinding my teeth as I dive to get around another corner before… well, you get the idea. Evidently the newsprint wasn’t strong enough to hold these things back.
I should tell you here and now: the dreams terrify me. So does the news. I mean, my god, what if they’re all true! And what if I’m trapped between them? Trapped in a corridor of endless options that ultimately lead to life’s grim, and seemingly unavoidable, demise. That’s why I was not in a hurry to open up the day. The very real sensation of being shot repeatedly, or trapped inside a burning hell with a robot trying to maim me is, well, scary. And I don’t know what to do about it. That’s scary too.
But what really scares me most is the crow dream.
See, I’ve been having the same frantic car crash and terminator dreams for years. But the crows are new, and they’re visiting often. And in their coming and leaving I can trace the stitches of a well-fitted suit of habits. Habits that define my life. What an ugly suit they make, and how tightly it fits! Sadly, I fear that suit won’t get much better looking.
I don’t mean to be morbid. Sure, I would rather spend my time dreaming of life’s end as more of a retirement party. A big bash kicked off with congratulatory speeches by Tom Landry and Muhammad Ali, the respective angels of discipline and sacrifice that I will always revere. After the speeches, Jim Jarmusch would somehow weave my life into a slide show that revealed my time on earth as golden, and show the mistakes I made to be divinely-inspired steps to a jolly enlightenment. Then we could all hit golf balls out over the houses on West Cliff in the sunshine, drinking Schlitz and slapping backs. Heck yeah, it would be great! And the whole shindig would wind down with Malcolm X, William Blake and Al Green hanging my beloved black socks high up in a heavenly rafter… and I’d build a bonfire with my lover while the curtain came down, leaving the two of us to slowly skinnydip away into the stars, an eternity of Mondays be damned.
That would prove God exists. And that life is work worth our time.
Dying in a hail of hot lead doesn’t give me that feeling. Neither does being caught alone in a park full of hungry crows with an empty popcorn bag, watching with one good eye as my last and only true friends scatter off from the branches, indifferent to the shame of my exhausted givings.
Maybe having a job isn’t so bad after all.
What we call the beginning
is often the end.
And
to make an end
is to make
a beginning.
The end
is where we
start from.
—T. S. Eliot
No comments:
Post a Comment