I Can Almost...

When they asked for a vaccine volunteer, being one who believes that although life has its quirks, it fore the most part can be relied upon to be predictable, I couldn't refuse. That I believe is because reality has a way of cementing beliefs to reason, leaving only the possibility of it being real or imagined. We are free to choose.

I know that sounds simplistic, but when you eliminate all the superfluous and imaginary elements of a dream, you are left with what is actually draped over the back of the chair, no matter how dark it is or how imaginative or spiritual your beliefs may be.

I attempted to explain this to Johann. He is the person who hands me my coffee each and every morning from behind the glass shield that is to protect me, him, from the invisible plight that looms on everyone’s horizon of late.

I arrive late most mornings, by late I mean after the rush. But that was before the Inevitability God decided to apply some pressure to the overpopulated home we call Earth.

I am what is referred to, in some circles, mainly in my apartment building, as that lucky bastard who gets to go to work. A year ago I would have been considered someone less envied, as they along with me, would have spent our morning pressed against one another on our way to economic security, as if practicing for a packed car episode of the “Strangest Things.” I still have visions of tumbling from a VW Beetle, being followed by fourteen others who also wish they’d never been born.

But that lack of participation in the morning cattle call allowed me to get to know Johann.

During the times when speed and dexterity were admirable qualities it didn’t allow for the excesses of conversation, or on most days more than a head nod and brief mimed “Thank You,” as you were escorted from the cash register by a line of those eager to lose themselves in a day they knew would probably not be their last, but all things considered, a day closer to the day they could roll over and look at the alarm clock, and smile.

The break in the regularity of promise made it possible for Johan and I to spend time talking about the ironies of life, our ability to have outsmarted the hand of destiny, or we had managed to hide well enough to avoid a respirator, at least for this round.

During one of our more juvenile explorations of life in general, making fun of the mundanity, the repetitive insensitivity, and pure luck sprinkled on us like holy water from the universes scepter, signs appeared, we just failed to see them.

It was during one our well-oiled sessions that the subject of signs, an act, person, object, that prophetically tips one off to an event in the future; a three-point dunk from center court in the spirit of Michael Jordan, or Casper. We are not fixed in our presumptions of what a sign should be, or even resembles. We prefer to leave the imagination to the serendipitous dance of fate, which although it often asks predictability to dance, she has yet to accept.

Playful disregard of possibility, when amplified by youthful disassociate tolerance, elicits a dangerous concoction of doubt and disbelief, that until the day you are carried out on a stretcher, you continue to scoff at. Such was the day Johann, sweating profusely, attempted to hand me my morning stimulant and collapsed on the other side of our plexiglass limbo that was purported to be as efficient at saving souls from a personal form of hell, as confessional exoneration of sins trespass.

As I stood not knowing whether to challenge the improvisational hand of fate, or accept its providence, although reluctantly, or run to nearest vaccination center, an irate cab and its driver crashed through the front window and stopped just short of indicting Johann with a label of permanence. 

Could this be a sign? A ridiculous attempt I thought immediately, to gain the attention of those who had snubbed the providence inflicted by fate on those who did not believe, in the similar vain of one receiving coal in their Christmas stocking.

Once the smoke and clouds of accumulated coffee vapor had departed the small space, and the taxi having been extracted from the eye of the building, I was freed. Free to contemplate the external forces applied by someone or something to the doubt of those, who find the inevitable not challenging enough on its own, and feel compelled to add cynicism to the equation. 

Johann it turned out had not succumbed to the tendrils of the phantom disease, but from dehydration associated with late nights and alcohol. It gave credence to my suspicions that he had been burning the candle, plus two rather large trash barrels at both ends.

It gave me the impetus to examine previous erroneous assumptions about signs being the result of unrestrained imaginations, and too much time on our hands.

Even though we go through life filling in the blanks of other people’s cross words, we should not forget that all of what we consider may not be luck at all, but a sign that we haven’t been paying attention.

Did you know, well probably not, that most wars, divorces, assuming they are not one and the same, and point spreads, aren’t simply some high rollers idea of playing God. There are forces in the universe that can and do differentiate between stupidity, and ignorance. It is of course up to us, to decide which to acknowledge before we disregard knowledge, the ultimate sign.

It all has something to do with a cross and who should be allowed to climb on it, and pretend they are the ultimate sacrifice, when people of all makes and models are disappearing like smoke, because some refuse to see that what we are witnessing is no more than a man, and couple of sticks of wood; at least according to Johann who is out of rehab, a sign no doubt from “Doubters of Doubt.” It is an all-inclusive newly established chapter dedicated to the interpretation of signs, and is presided over by Johann. The premise is, that not paying attention is not only stupid, but ignorant. And of course the illusion the vision releases in our minds, allowing the placing of our will to live, at the mercy of arrogance.

I have yet to attend a meeting as I am waiting for a sign that cauterizes my belief that ignorance and stupidity are not only dangerous, in and of themselves, but tend to spread enough doubt to make even a mole hill, a slippery slope.