“Anything can happen in life, especially nothing”
Michel Houellebecq
“‘Tis very warm weather when one’s in bed”
Jonathan Swift
**************************************************
Litter-Box day dawned pregnant with theoretically infinite possibility. With an icy, even terrifying clarity, I realized -- even before I pushed PeeWee and Tweeter off my chest to throw back the bedclothes -- that the choices I made in the next 24 hours might well determine the course and content of the first day of the rest of my life.
If I might be blunt and not the Panglossian halfwit you desire me to play: frankly, I wouldn’t mind, at some point, waking up to the second day of the rest of my life. Get on with the show, as it were. Well begun is half done. Move along little doggies. Boost the sisyphean boulder over the hillcrest once and for all. But even if I stay in bed all day, playing stubborn, oblivious opossum (a not uncommon event during my current “sabbatical” from employment), when my gluey eyelids do at last crack open, the future yet unwinds before me like the winter road to Moscow, or that dismal, humid march from Bataan. The cats hunker upon me still, glittery-eyed and petulant, hungry for their wet food. And, once again, it’s the first damn day of the rest of my life.
It's like something out of “Twilight Zone” or “Groundhog Day:” weird, malign, spooky. Buddha calls it the "Wheel of Suffering."
“The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort”
Friedrich Nietzsche
I know that beginnings are important, but the fathomless void is a lot to stare in the face before the day’s first caffeine, thyroid tablet and antidepressant. To be honest, it’s not unusual for me to squeal like a tea kettle with anxiety just over the breakfast toast-bagel-or-muffin/butter-cream cheese-or-marmalade decision, much less the drear prospect of millions of life-determining choices for which I will unfairly be held responsible. So, perhaps it won’t surprise my readers that on this particular day, a day auspiciously designated, celebrated and identified with the cleaning the litter box, the thought popped up, full blown as Lord Brahma from the lotus blossom of Mahavishnu's navel, seductive as weasel’s dark hidey hole and, indeed, not for the first time: “I wish I were dead.”
Like Arjuna on the field of dharma, the soon to be blood-drenched plain of Kurukshetra, I lay paralyzed with indecision, the bow and arrow of bold action falling helplessly from my feeble grasp. Moreover, it was really chilly outside the sweet and sour papoose of my bedcovers; I would yelp in unmanly complaint during my frantic scramble for yesterday’s underpants. And should I miss an elusive leg hole as I hopped in goose-pimpled and slumber-dazed panic, to crash like Icarus back to earth, my dwindling credibility with PeeWee and Tweeter would be undermined even further.
Once they expected great things of me and now they see a hunched, rosy-arsed and knuckle-dragging baboon scrabbling for his panties: titan become pygmy.
“One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea”
Walter Bagehot
Coincidentally, considering my rosy-arsed baboon metaphor, my next thought, as I lay there limp and torpid with existential impotence -- this being after quailing before infinity, yearning for extinction, the anxious contemplation of putting on my underpants and making toast, and my bereavement over the loss of my pets’ once high esteem -- was of bananas. Many years ago now, my mother, a woman of great shrewdness and common sense, told me, apropos of nothing we had been discussing at the time (at least as far as I could tell), that one could crack open a banana in the same manner that one might break a breadstick -- that is, by gripping the fruit firmly at each end and then performing a quick snapping of the wrists. She was quite immovable in the face of my patent skepticism – not to mention, surprise and revulsion (why is she telling me this?) – and indeed made a credible case that this seemingly brutal technique was actually more humane than the usual flaying (or, for that matter, defenestration). In any case, as we had no bananas or plantains at hand to effect the proof of her intriguing hypothesis, I made the appropriate placatory noises and the conversation happily moved on to other less inflammatory topics.
Wait! One last thing: mother insisted it was imperative to show no hesitancy or fear, much less compassion. One had to stare the banana in the face, say a quick prayer of thanksgiving to Lord Jesus, provider of all bananas, and then get it done. Otherwise awful (though mercifully unspecified) consequences might ensue. Her hands twitched and she darkly muttered something about insolent roosters getting what they deserved.
Oddly enough, in one of those strange quirks of the susceptible psyche, this lunatic notion snatched hold of my imagination, and over the subsequent decades I proceeded to consider, caress and dandle the idea for literally thousands of hours -- to no certain conclusion. And though I consequently skinned and consumed many a banana-fruit -- as a sliced garnish to my Cheerios or as a thickening and sweetening agent for my smoothies, or even, on occasion, al solo -- I never had the audacity to attempt the extraordinary deed my mother had so baldly described. The power of the taboo was simply too strong. It was if I could smell the dark, shameless stink of madness waiting for me, crooning and licking its lips, just beyond the flickering light of the rational mind.
“Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”
John Keats
But when my boss called me into her office for a good, vigorous, bend-over-and-grab-your-ankles ass-whacking (with her cricket paddle), or when I shot rats down by the dump, or even as I tugged the Priapic spigot out of the Wine-in-a-Box preparatory to watching the Saturday morning cartoons, I found myself day-dreaming about that uppity banana being snapped in half like a crisp, hard carrot. I’d replay the sharp crack! and the rupture of fibrous, yellow rind and white, clotted meat between my two clenched fists. But only within my mind's eye -- for these events never occurred in actual life.
That’s my position and I’m sticking to it. And my psychiatrist, Dr. Friedman, is bound by the hippopotumatic oath.
Shortly before my mother died, I finally summoned the courage to raise the subject again … and to my bug-eyed, slack-jawed astonishment, she adamantly denied ever speaking of or considering, much less performing, such a freakish act in all the days of her life. Indeed, she vehemently expressed the greatest distaste, offense and umbrage at my accusation and she could not be budged from that position -- even when her pain medication was withheld.
I didn’t know what to think then and I don’t today, though I’ve toyed with the possibility that mother had been brainwashed, bought off, threatened into silence or even taken over by … something, I don’t know. But on that aforementioned litter-box-day morning of theoretically infinite possibility, as I lay cocooned and weighted down by felines, while my synapses cried for caffeine and Serotonin, and my underwear hung tauntingly on the bathroom doorknob, I thought to myself, with a triumphant gurgle of cynical hilarity, “And that, my dear, is why the caged sock monkey sings.”
Henry E. Panky
|
