The View From Scranton

Sulking Toward Bethlehem

The rains came Friday – blessed, glorious torrents of team – and with them almost went what little was left of my resolute. I'm talkin' 'bout strength, dig? A little big thing called fortitude. A Stoic's great good grace. The solid in my ever dwindling mass. One minute it was there; the next it was gone. Long gone.

Long done gone.

The Sophist says the capacity to act or be acted upon is the mark of real existence or ‘that which is.' If so, then I ain't. Isn't. Aren't. I am not permitted to act. I am not permitted to be acted upon, unless you count the daily dalliance of humiliatings. Instead I'm held in a place between stages, a stage between places. Linger. Limbo. Lull. Calloused, bruised, exhaust wrung, does not make me real. It only makes me vivid, livid. Vividly, lividly unreal.

A Fool.

So I sit, stirred to a sullen, sulken, silent, the ass-end of another dog day refurbishing a house that I don't own, a house that I won't own, a house I wouldn't own, a home not my own, in a town that can't have me, cursing the vivid lividity of it all. My feckless, reckless plightedness. A steam swamps my soul, a hiss of unreason and ugly, wobble and woe. With all the ire of anger, I am consumed.

The Stoics held that uglies like fear or envy, or, I suppose, bitterness and anger, were false judgements, that the sage would not, could not befall them. Later Stoics took it a good step further, believed the sage to be immune to misfortune. That a right course made for a right soul.

Boy, did I steer sagely wrong.

Perhaps if I could grab hold of my own wheel the road wouldn't elude me. Maybe if I didn’t have to come back to a Houseful of malignant ghetto hillbillies I wouldn't wanna run over things.

Take Little John, the Oompah-Loompah Old Head. A pipsqueak tweak with a crack chip on his bony shoulder, he’s nasty, rude, vindictive and deluded. Weighing in at what must be 175, arising to a whopping 5'3" in his padded bobo's, the creature is all stomach and skull and stupid. Coon-eyes popping from a popped top. Sneak ways slithering from a scaled skin.

He's without idea, stuck in some seventies slow jam of weepy sorrow and monster rock promise, and he's utterly without ally. If I burned bridges, this idiot torched the world. What meager world it was. He must've. I mean, he has one of three sisters and a housing-homed dad and that's it. No friends. No connections. No nothing. This is the guy's hometown and still he's gotta temp it. In fact, he had to temp it twice; the first agency fired him after he feigned a wrist injury, then, when given an office position, spent his days sorting promotional golf tees. Really. He didn't step up, so he was pushed out. Down. Usually the only people who get canned from a temp service are the ones who don't show up at all.

Gimme my hometown and I'll make it mine again. Or else.

But enough patheticry. It is what it is until it isn't and I'm a fool to fond and fret the could'ves, would'ves, should'ves. There is a worse. A much worse. I just came in from a smoke where a man who lost both his parents while away said today he'd be visiting their grave sites. For the first time. He'd been down thirteen years, couldn't attend their funerals, couldn't be by their bedsides while they were ailing. Now he was going to see them and they were dead. Hard as it is to fathom after all the funk and fetters and frustration, but I got it half good.

posted by John Hood. @ 5:19 PM