People Either Care or they Don’t
by Joel Van Noord
Today I’ve switched from cnn.com to bbc.co.uk and read what I thought was common knowledge. I would still think it is except my boss confessed, through his dramatic initiation of the conversation (and his new learned knowledge), that we’re in the center of the 6th Wave. As it’s apparently esoterically known. My boss, nine years senior was in Toronto for a week, being tempted to cheat on his wife by fellow nerds and geeks each publishing and presenting their own special niche of knowledge for general acceptance. This was where he learned this knowledge.
The 6th Wave, or course, refers to the 6th mass extinction of species that has occurred on the planet. This one, or course, is ours and is more dramatic than the KT extinction: the wave of death that erased the dinosaurs and developed the conditions for the fire wielding simian to emerge from the savannah to create machines and laboratories for cloning sheep and murdering in the name of mythical religions and so on and so on.
Why do people have passions and why do they have the passions they have? I’ve been trying to think about that lately.
To a biologist, passion must be an attractive gene. The one with the passion danced the best around the fire and entered the most pussy and squirted the most sperm.
Today, any man that wants a mate can find one. In Elephant Seals, one male will contribute 98% of the genes during a breeding season. One can argue which type of evolution is better. One could, indeed.
As for me, realizing a passion (or romanticism as my friend describes it) is enough. It is enough to appreciate and embrace it; rationalism is only a dulling tool.
Yesterday, as I was behind the wheel of our Hemi backed truck, returning from a dam 5 miles south of Quebec in upstate New York, we passed a cluster of cars on the road. I slowed to a stop and we noticed it was a funeral. Then we noticed, more specifically, an older woman passed out on the steps of a church building; the frantic actions of the elder man in a crisp black suit revealed it was recent and dire. He was fanning her face and looking about with sudden jerks of his white haired head for someone to help.
“Should we stop?” I felt obligated to say as we gawked and drove past like everyone else in line to gander at the scene.
“No.” My boss pronounced hard with a laugh. I shrugged. We were trained in CPR and we were federal employees with the US government. After that, on the same drive, we passed a fisherman below a dam, probably ‘fishing for walleye out of season in protected sturgeon habitat’. After he mentioned this I said: “Should we stop and bust him?”
My boss drooled a string of brown spit in an bottle and had the same hard pronouncement.
Not that anyone’s obligated to do anything. The only responsibility there is the one you give yourself. The only morality is what the [most immoral] strongest inflicts. I guess the point is that we could have done something.
My boss, who’s earning his masters, carries a cynical pessimism for most things. He’s contradictory and finds great passion in the oddest places. On NPR he shrieked the station to a halt when they aired a special on the state of bridges in the north-country. He reveals contradiction after contradiction and I wonder why he cares about what he does. What happened that makes him deeply care about this while deeply caring about hating that.
I’ve met this woman who is a feather in my life fallen from something great. The hours illuminate when I’m with her; naked, behind her, after I’ve stood between her legs for one of her arrivals, then I’ll turn her and prop her up and point her to me. Rub the outside until she’ll eventually pull in with long elegant hands.
My mind will flutter with a romantic dreaminess. She’s dirt poor, saving, perhaps, 40 dollars a month. Soon I’ll move in with her. I’m letting go of ideas carved by a previous lover. Letting go of ideas of who I was going to be. Settling comfortably to the ones given by this creature.
We now have dreams that are too big for occupations.
After work we’ll play basketball. Something I haven’t played in years. It’ll be two on two; me: the average sized athletic and coordinated one, and the tallish, lanky kid with the mid range jumper. We’ll vs the giant linebacker with a six pack and the short Appalachia kid with popeye wrists from climbing. I’ll back this Appalachian down or jerk him on a cross-over every time. The giant will rip every rebound and the lanky kid will hit a third of his jumpers. The two of us will run pick and rolls. The Appalachian will hold his arms stiff on each drive, out of ignorance, impeding the movement of me, the dribbler, and I’ll fight through this for a lay-up or a pass-off. It may accidentally get physical but there will be no hard feelings.
In a month or so, in the middle of June, my approaching serious girlfriend will leave town for Cape Cod with an aunt and I’ll be downtown with a co-worker and his fraternity brothers. We’ll get ridiculously drunk watching the Redsox and we’ll venture to a three dollar second floor dance club. We’ll wander and my co-worker will mention his paper on a new Caribbean nesting location for Nassau Groupers and the implication for conservation.
“It’s important.” I’ll say with a distance, “But nature can’t be a zoo.” I’ll try to say, sage-like. I’ll then tell him about Ecuador and our conversation will move along with a respectable fluidity.
On the dance floor I’ll soon wander and become intrigued by a 5-10 woman with shorts that’d be tight on a 5-4 girl. Her outfit will be the material made into ‘wife-beaters’, she’ll have rolled shorts and a rolled tank top of this material and her skin will bounce with her dancing body. She’ll be brunette and her breasts will defy gravity. I’ll watch her thighs for the longest time and approach her to dance a distance away before walking past and observing again from the raised banister opposite of where I first was anchored.
I’ll watch as a normal girl will ask a question and near-supermodels will walk past. I’ll get a drink and the giant is conspicuous as Moby Dick. I’ll mention something no one will remember to my co-worker and he’ll talk about work and I’ll feel like I didn’t work with him. Happy with a distance from the idea.
I’ll then ask where so and so is and I’ll get a shrug. My co-worker will order a shot and I’ll sway heavily on my feet and smirk but tip it anyway. The shot glasses will sit next to each other on the bar representing our friendship. I’ll slap him on the back and leave him standing there, I’ll think of her pussy drifting by the ocean in the fresh salty air. I’ll see myself there, in her dreams, kissing my way up her legs, holding her toes, finding the soft skin on the inside of the thighs and rubbing my nose up the shoot, only to be funny.
The giant on the dance floor will still be at it, wailing to the beat in utter futility, she’ll be looking at no one and she’ll continue to dance in the same desperate manner. She’ll be dying from the goal she’s got her back to. I’d comfort her if I could. She could have three fourths of the men in the place.
As I’ll walk back to the bar they’ll all be gone. I’ll lap the tight confines and they wont be there. The lights will rise and the giant will become embarrassed in her near nakedness. Her sweaty white attire will show the color and texture of her nipples. Her black thong will be obvious and she will be raped if she enters the outdoors.
I will enter the outdoors and I’ll be past drunk. I’ll have vomit creeping from the stomach and little recollection of anything from the night. I wont remember suffering through a Redsox game nor the people I’d shed for that night.
I will, however, remember that I’d taken the bus into town and it will be four hours past the last bus.
There will be a sense. A desire. For some experience. There will be a lust for an uncomfortable experience I’ll feel I’ll be rewarded with. So I’ll walk a block and sit. Hide up in. Wedge myself back into. A dank crevice as my head spins. I’ll lean back into the granite corner of the city library. I’ll wait until all is quiet, 45 minutes for the drunks to stager out of the bars and the late night pizza shops that serve these drunks. I’ll wait until they are gone and I’ll lean my violently spinning head back and I won’t remember anything past a vague idea of why I’d do that.