Doodles and Such (Day in the Life Musings and Other Notes on Fabricated Events) -- Christopher Klinges -- copyright 2008, 2020

Doodles and Such (Day in the Life Musings and Other Notes on Fabricated Events) -- Christopher Klinges -- copyright 2008, 2020

            She passes a sail exam on the first try, and feels pretty good about it.  Two days later, still full of pride, she receives a letter addressed to “Dr. Pamela Ward.”     

            Speeding down the highway mindlessly, I strike a butterfly -- or it strikes the windshield of my car. (The relative viewpoint can really help to objectify the horror, shift the blame a little, and reduce the pain.) Looking back through the rearview mirror (as if through a glass darkly) I see parts of the unfortunate creature drop like wreckage through the air to the ground. I want to cry. I feel profound regrets at the tough-luck-ending of the insecticidal encounter. I think I might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown based on my utter sadness -- which lasts until I fall back into mindless, automatic observance of my advance in space between lines on the road.

            When the septic system backs up at 3 A.M. and spills crap clotted water three inches deep all over the first floor living spaces of my home, I ask “What did I do to deserve this?” The question is rhetorical, so I won’t speculate in detail here, but I’m sure there’s something blameworthy in the behavioral record of the last forty-eight hours, some peccadillo that deserves the mess I find myself in.

            Later that day, after the plumber has performed his augury to reopen the free passage of waste through my drain for a nominal fee of two hundred forty dollars (plus twenty dollars tip), and before the pipe clogs again following another anal-retentive-dump by someone in the household, I see on the nightly network news that Bangladesh has been hit by a monsoon, and the country is entirely under several feet of water with the exception of a few islands of high ground scattered around willy-nilly, which serve as refuge for the several millions who aren’t among the several hundreds of thousands who are no longer among the living because they’re drowned under the several feet of dirty water. I wonder what awful sin an entire nation could have committed to bring down the Almighty wrath like that. I make an insensitive mental comment to myself that the Bengalis must be utterly reprobate sinners to deserve such a fate. Repenting instantly of my nasty judgment, I thank God that I only had a few inches of sewage in a couple of rooms to clean up, and not thousands of square miles of it. (That’s what I call “catching a break”; or -- more traditionally -- a blessing.)

            Sitting in the parking lot at McDonald’s listening to the radio news while force feeding myself some plastic-fantastic chicken something or other (which admittedly tastes pretty good), it is reported that a sixty-five year old man in New Jersey has won that state’s one hundred sixty-three million dollar lottery jackpot, and has come forward after three weeks to claim his prize, which amounts to sixty-seven million dollars in actual take home winnings.

            Excuse me! One hundred sixty-three million in the jackpot means sixty-seven million take home winnings? What a rip-off! What a perfect example of false advertisement! What a perfect example of exploitation of the weak by the powerful. 

            If I were holding the winning ticket, I’d march into the lottery office, throw my winning ticket on the nearest bureaucrat’s desk and scream (so they hear me), “Take your friggin’ winning ticket, and give me back the honest dollar I used to buy it.” I’m sure they’d be baffled. I’m sure they’d tell me “This is highly irregular.”  I’m sure they’d ask me to wait while they call a supervisor. I’m sure the supervisor would tell me that my request cannot be honored because there are no refunds on lottery tickets.

            On my way out of the lotto office, I happen to see a guy walking down the hallway wearing (from top to bottom) a fisherman’s cap; a scraggly beard; a wrinkled white tee shirt (probably underwear serving an expanded function); plaid shorts (hemmed below the knees) that are too long for his bony legs; brown socks (pulled way up tight to almost reach the lower hem of the shorts); and red Converse ankle high sneakers. The gentleman is in his early fifties. I greet him charitably as we pass with the following comment: “I see that sex appeal is no longer one of your concerns.”

            Less charitably, I think to myself that the guy probably doesn’t have a wife, and doesn’t care if he ever has one. Or, he might have a wife, and she insists on dressing him up in such a way as to guarantee that she won’t ever have to worry about any other woman taking an interest in her man. I can hear her telling him that morning, "Here honey, wear these socks. They'll look great with your shorts."

            And, the subject of interest reminds me of a story earnestly related to a group of us by Pamela Ward, who has a nascent interest in her ancestry, and has been able to establish via Internet searches (into the wee hours of many recent days) that she has a very distant relative by the name of Becky Ward who “knew the Shawnee Indians”. I inquire as to whether or not she knows if Becky’s knowledge of the Shawnees was biblical. She pretends not to hear my question. I start to ask it again, knowing she is a little bit deaf when she wants to be, but she (all breathless with excitement about her ancestral excavations) begins to relate that she is also kin to three women who were captured by the Shawnees, tortured, able to escape, and subsequently able to tell their tale to numerous reporters, who gave the ladies their fifteen minutes of fame  (back in 1794) by publishing their tale of rape -- in the sense of abduction -- in the newpapers of that era.

            A young fellow named Doug (who looks like a sack of potatoes wearing a Metallica tee-shirt) is standing idly by, and listening with mouth agape. (If he drooled, it would not be unexpected.) He asks, “So when did all of this happen?”

            “About three hundred years ago,” Pam says proudly.

            “So? Like who cares?”, Doug says.

            “You’re a perfect example of the kind of guy my mother told me I should never date,” Pam says.

            Other than the obvious fact that Pam is thirty years older than Doug, and her dating him would look bad if not illegal, I wonder what kind of guidelines Mrs. Pam’s Mom issued to her daughter regarding prospective suitors.

            Pam lists the requirements and red flags as follows:

                        Must be clean shaven. Cannot wear tee-shirts, especially dirty ones, torn ones, or those emblazoned with the names of rock bands. Can’t be a good dancer -- if a guy knows how to dance it shows he comes from the wrong side of the tracks, because only “that kind” has time to waste on learning how to dance. Good table manners-- knows which fork to use first, where to put his napkin, and how to break and butter his bread. No sports cars.

            That’s the whole list. It looks simple, but Pam says that in application it weeds out a lot of garbage simply and effectively. She says the only exception she ever made was with me concerning the prohibition on sports cars. She adds, “In hindsight I’m not sure I was smart to have made the exception.”

            I don’t say it, but I think it: Doug's topically ignorant reaction strikes me as being profoundly perspicacious given the truism that yesterday's news is yesterday's news.

            Yesterday’s news back then was not nearly as pervasive as today’s news is right now. There was less of it to process (no twenty-four hour cable news channels; no internet on demand news-casting), and it was more significant; little things still mattered and could get your attention. People sent postcards of a special place to special people, and it meant everything. Now we, all of us, have seen it all, and no place is novel, and things don’t mean as much to anyone anymore.

            Enthusiasm is derived from Greek and means “to have God within”; “God in-dwelling”; “God at home” -- knock, knock, God inside. I theorized a cause-effect scenario where enthusiasm begets energy, “little e” is the father of “Big E”-- e yields E (e-->E). It follows when you think about it. “God is light.” Light is radiant energy...a spark, a laser beam, a supernova. If no enthusiasm then no energy, no light; dead cold absolute- zero space. I fashion an aspect of self into a perpetual motion cheerleader: “Give me an E.” If the cheering section is stifled; if no E is shouted back from the bleachers, I’m looking out from a black hole at the universe being sucked out of existence.

            (From the website of the 2003 movie ’21 Grams”:  “Whether you fear death or not, it comes, and at that moment your body becomes twenty-one grams lighter. Is it a person's soul that constitutes those twenty-one grams? Is that weight carried by those who survive us?”)

            Think about it, at the obvious--if unscientific--level... E=mc2... You die; the spirit (energy) departs; to balance the formula the mass of what’s left behind weighs less, twenty-one grams less. Perhaps. (Sometimes you just hafta take the word of others at face value because you have no easy way of proving or disproving what's being said; and you're inclined by laziness to not check the veracity of hard to prove facts.)  

            I want to doodle in profundities, somewhat like that last thought. I want to think and speak in gibberish that makes all the sense in the world. When I play, I want the effort to be a magnus opus. Why not? I have nuggets of sense I could string together at random if called upon like one of those Polynesian necklaces with various kinds of shells in procession along a string.

            But, there’s the rub. No call for it. Events proceed successfully with minimal input from my node in the fabric of humanity. (At least I’m humble about the significance of my contribution.)

            Anyway, to battle boredom while awaiting the call I’m expecting to get sooner or later cueing me that it’s now time to play my BIG role in life, I doodle on my body with my electric razor. (I especially like to weed whack the beard I have growing on my left shoulder. I’ve discussed this feature of me with Pamela, and offered an explanation for it. I told her, “Since my job entails carrying heavy, abrasive objects on that shoulder, I believe hair has abundantly developed there as a kind of natural protective covering.” She suggested that I should start carrying things on the top of my head instead.  “Maybe then you wouldn’t have to do that comb-over thing anymore,” she said.)

            It’s about transformation, remaking, rebirth. When the soul sees itself in a new light, when the spirit is shaken to its depths by awareness of a new reality, then the previously random doodles will have served their purpose, and I and everyone else will see a puzzle completed where before no one could have imagined there were even pieces of a puzzle present and awaiting an effort at interconnection and organization. My faith is there. It (me, this life, existence in general) isn’t just a mumbo-jumbo of nonsensical random nothings. It’s a big box of puzzle pieces waiting to be recognized as such and assembled into the correct picture. There are some things waiting to mean something. Of course, with no mindset, I am happier.

            Scoffers will grant that there’s a picture forming, but laugh that it’s just as abstract as the mishmash of molecules that are available to make it. I’ve got hopes that the image will be photographically precise with high resolution and no question as to what it is.

            So, on the day after Christmas when you go to the restaurant and you’ve waited for forty minutes to be seated, and at that point some gentlemanly looking elderly chap enters the waiting area and commences coughing with a wheezing, wet, flu-like cough without covering his mouth do I make sense to myself, to an onlooker, to any impartial judge to just walk away from my ambition of eating where I’ve been waiting to eat? Yes. The pager is returned to the reception station without apology, and I freeze the consumptive boor in place with my contemptuous glare as I turn and exit the premises. And in the fresh, cold, relatively germ-free outside air I know I am a man in having acted decisively, in having suffered loss, in not knowing what to do next.

            Anyway, I’ve got this 1994 Dodge van. Doug calls it my 1994 P.O.S. (piece of shit) van.

            I say, “They don’t make them like that anymore.”

            He says, “No they don’t. They've learned how not to make those kinds of mistakes anymore.”

            I want to sell it to him. He won’t hear of it. I want to repeat the offer in case he missed it the first time, but my pen decides to run out of ink; and that is where this doodle must end...