I know I've been absent lately, and that I have yet to really get my series on Same-Sex-Marriage off the ground. But I wrote this. Feel free to read it. Or don't. But you're already here, so go ahead and read it.
“I’ll do it”, the creature cried from the high place. “I’ll jump, I’ll do it.”
The place was indeed very high. The fall would be fatal. A group of people gathered below the creature. A woman stepped forward. She was too old to go dancing, but too young to know the terror of a grown child. “I’m sure you have a family somewhere, she said, and I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to do this,” she began.
“Just think how horrified they’ll be if they learn you’ve done it. Think of your mother, think of how she’ll be horrified. What about your Dad and how it will shake his confidence in himself? What about all the cousins and aunts and uncles that will miss you at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Think about how sad everyone will be when Uncle Bill says, ‘if only it hadn’t happened’ and when cousin Angela says ‘it really was such a terrible loss’.
The creature was silent. A man stepped forward. He was the kind you would see in a coffee shop, not a regular, just a visitor, or the kind who lines his walls with classics he does not read. “But wait,” he began, his well-trimmed goatee lifted high above his clever corduroy jacket and his color-coordinated fitted pants of indiscriminate stylish material.
“Surely you know that your life has meaning in and of itself. All life is valuable, especially sentient life. You carry within yourself a divine spark. If you believe in God, be assured that he loves you. If you don’t, be assured that your life carries value, regardless of all external circumstances. Be of good cheer, oh friend I have yet to meet, for whether it be Darwin or Falwell who is correct you are the product of a long, ingenious process and you have value for simply being yourself, a unique and improbable expression of a unique and improbable species. Descend, therefore, and follow not this terminal course of action.”
The creature was once more silent. A young woman stepped forward. Her bright, mismatched colors said more about her personality and life experience than any words ever could. “But most of all,” she began, “remember that life is just worth living.”
“I mean, come on, think about it for a second. Life is just so wonderful if you look in the right places. Go out for a cup of coffee, listen to a songbird, go to a concert or whatever you want to do. There’s so much of the world out there that you probably haven’t even started to explore. Come down and go find life the way it’s meant to be lived.”
Still the creature was silent. The three who had stepped forward were perplexed. The air hung still, and the thought of death hung heavy and cold over the scene like a wet woolen coat.
An old man didn’t bother to step forward. His rosewood cane, onto which he had failed to mount a rubber stopper, took the place of a gavel as it racked about and broke the tasteful silence. As the persons near to him inched away, he let out a long, deep cough that trailed off into sputtering and then more silence. Deliberately silent, he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket. This whole rest was followed by a sforzando of coughing and hacking which subsided into a decrescendo deep breath which stood at a nice mezzo piano. “Do it,” he sputtered out, flatly.
“This bitch over here thinks you have yet to consider your family or how they’re going to feel. We both know that you have. You’re standing up there, relishing the fact that news crews and policemen and paramedics are on their way. You’re going to love all of that attention, however this works out. You don’t think you did it for the attention, but whether or not it was a motivation, that’s why you’re standing up there. If you really wanted to go quietly into that dark night, there are a few thousand ways an idiot like you could kill themselves quietly in an apartment or a back alley.
No, you’re here, at this high place, so that all of them can see, aren’t you? You want them to hurt and languish and say ‘oh if only I had done this’ or ‘why didn’t I pay more attention when such and such a thing happened.’ That’ll show ‘em, right? That’ll make ‘em wish they’d treated you better.
And this jackass over here thinks you have somehow managed to not absorb the McPhilosophy that’s seeped into the deepest corners of every educational system and every movie and every dramatic TV special everywhere, or that if you have absorbed it, you need only be reminded of the orthodox opinion to return once again to the great conformity. He believes that bullshit, but you and me, we know how to call a duck a duck.
You know you’re fucking worthless, or at least you want to think you are. If you don’t think you are, or if you’re not sure, I’ll tell you now that you are. There’s no such thing as a sure-fire inalienable human center that gives us a special privilege over the beasts of the earth, and however fantastic our circumstances are we both know that perhaps you and I and everyone else are products of an incredibly, complex, well-organized pile of steaming shit.
And then this one here wants you to take a deep whiff and call it roses. She’s close to correct, closer than she thinks. There is a big, beautiful world out there, there are places to be and people to see and things to do, but in ascending the mountain of self-devaluation you have made it clear to all of us that you don’t want to do any of that.
You are worthless, so get the hell down, one way or another.
You are wasting my time, their time and your time. You have decided that life is not worth living and that your oh-so-sensitive soul can no longer bear its slings and arrows. Fine. Do it.
You are worth exactly nothing until you decide that you are worth something. At this point you seem to have decided on the former. So either commit to that decision and embrace your meaningless end or get down here and decide that you are worth something. Go out and make yourself worth something. Do some important shit in some unimportant place to make it, and yourself, important. Or don’t. Until you do one, you’ll just be standing there, wasting my time and wallowing in your non-existant worth.”
The creature was silent. And then, in an instant, the creature decided.
No comments:
Post a Comment