Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Sometimes I can't tell if I'm facing the end of the day or the end of the world
When I wrote this there were forest fires all over Alberta and B.C. You could barely see past the buildings in your immediate line of sight. It was as things had ceased to exist or had begun to be erased. Remember in Back to the Future when Marty McFly starts screwing up and the chances of his parents getting together grow slimmer and slimmer and his siblings start slowly disappearing from the family portrait? It was similar to that, but instead of one person it's everything. Basically time felt like it was being erased. To make matters worse, the day that the smoke was the worst, the power went out at the exact same time that the power went out in the major cities on the East Coast. The big mouths who claimed to know everything were spewing theories of nuclear holocaust. My roommate had filled the bathtub up, just in case the water was cut off. I was plotting which stores I was going to pull smash and grabs on first. It was a crisis on infinite earths.
When I wrote this there were forest fires all over Alberta and B.C. You could barely see past the buildings in your immediate line of sight. It was as things had ceased to exist or had begun to be erased. Remember in Back to the Future when Marty McFly starts screwing up and the chances of his parents getting together grow slimmer and slimmer and his siblings start slowly disappearing from the family portrait? It was similar to that, but instead of one person it's everything. Basically time felt like it was being erased. To make matters worse, the day that the smoke was the worst, the power went out at the exact same time that the power went out in the major cities on the East Coast. The big mouths who claimed to know everything were spewing theories of nuclear holocaust. My roommate had filled the bathtub up, just in case the water was cut off. I was plotting which stores I was going to pull smash and grabs on first. It was a crisis on infinite earths.
I don't believe in fate or destiny, but it's hard to argue the validity (or lack thereof) of those concepts with someone who believes they'll follow their father's fate because up to this point in their lives everything's been frighteningly similar. It's like an echo, it sounds a little distorted, a little further off, but it's inevitable that the differences will be negligible.
I don't think I've ever experienced that. I certainly can't imagine that. Oh there's always the odd, you look like your dad, or dad was your size when he was your age and then bam, he got a gut...but there's never been that fear of depression, suffocation, anguish, and illness. It's a tough thing to deal with, the elephant in the room. It looms large. Noone wants to acknowledge it, they'll mention how you have the same hair, a similar nose, but noone wants to mention the pachyderm.
I suppose it's a lot to swallow. How the fuck do you fight off destiny? Do you ignore it, in hopes that it won't come true? or do you acknowledge it as a possibility and try to fight it? Maybe even simply acknowledging it seems too much like embracing it, I'll never know. Do you keep constant reminders of it, like post-it notes pasted by happenstance over your craninum? How do you try to avert what is slowly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Can you imagine feeling like you're going through the same motions he did? What do you do when you feel that you can't stop it?
I don't think I've ever experienced that. I certainly can't imagine that. Oh there's always the odd, you look like your dad, or dad was your size when he was your age and then bam, he got a gut...but there's never been that fear of depression, suffocation, anguish, and illness. It's a tough thing to deal with, the elephant in the room. It looms large. Noone wants to acknowledge it, they'll mention how you have the same hair, a similar nose, but noone wants to mention the pachyderm.
I suppose it's a lot to swallow. How the fuck do you fight off destiny? Do you ignore it, in hopes that it won't come true? or do you acknowledge it as a possibility and try to fight it? Maybe even simply acknowledging it seems too much like embracing it, I'll never know. Do you keep constant reminders of it, like post-it notes pasted by happenstance over your craninum? How do you try to avert what is slowly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Can you imagine feeling like you're going through the same motions he did? What do you do when you feel that you can't stop it?
