dead trophy men
There is a stretch of road that I take on the way to and from work that is narrow and long and has only one open lane for each direction. Coming back, hungry and exhausted, I ended up stuck behind a line a slow-moving cars bookended by a black hummer that towered over my view of the oncoming scenery. It usually takes 45 minutes for me to reach home, and lately for fun I’ve been trying to beat my time whenever traffic isn’t so bad. My best time was making it through the front door by 6:37, which I scored last week.
Today I imagined being able to effortlessly skirt between the other vehicles-in either lane-and manage to dodge every obstacle by use of proficient and skillful driving the likes of which any stuntman would be jealous. “How calculated must those movie sequences be?” I thought. You would have to spend a lifetime devoted to honing a single talent in order to drive cars for the movies, right? The same surely applies for the best of any occupation. “What am I good at?” I wondered. What do I spend my life working on? Self-hate?
Every once in a while I fantasize about being granted (either by way of magic or radioactive-spider bite) supernatural powers that would allow me to be able to do anything I would ever want to do; some days I like to think that I could perfectly imitate any voice, other days I wish to be able to come up with the wittiest response to any given statement or situation. I daydream about being likened to admired characters in popular culture and then slowly taking over their personas, complete with the adoration and interest of nations. I wonder what it’s like to be perfect.
And say I am granted my wish; twenty-two years into a life spent stumbling and mumbling and suddenly, with either the snap of a finger or the tapping of a toe, I am all-of-a-sudden perfect. I turn the medium-sized company I work for into a multi-billion dollar industry, I casually suggest to scientist the accurate and elusive cures to life’s deadliest ailments, and I am paradoxically, universally liked. Even an elderly, man-eating white-hating born-again Christian would say something like “He’s certainly charming,” in an air eerily similar to my feelings towards Will Smith.
As an embodiment of perfection, I may live forever or I may not. I didn’t think about it, really. Does the perfect person die? I couldn’t say. Would a perfect person allow others to die? That I feel slightly more sure about, but I still don’t know.
So I’d call up (lost love #1-3), or perhaps fly (either I would have my own airline by then or invented jetpacks) to her, and I would ask her for another shot (first shot?) and she would of course be interested but I know there would be hesitation on her part because now that I am the world’s greatest living man, why would I still love some unknown who didn’t allow things to work well in the first place? I’d tell her we would just try. She would probably spend a lifetime asking “why me when you could have X?” and I’d be honest this time and flippantly say I just don’t know because I don’t. I say I’m sorry for having not spoken in so long and somehow she understands.
I tell myself I’ll just close my eyes and when I open them I’ll be perfect.
I immediately begin to chew on the inside of my lip, and grind my teeth. Traffic is still moving slow and I beat myself up about letting my heart stay broken for years when the average person only needs a few weeks to heal. Maybe a perfect person shouldn’t be capable of love. Nor should he or she think so much about themselves. Nor do they chew up the inside of their lip so much that it swells on both sides. I opened my eyes and I wasn’t even close to perfection. My clothes still didn’t match and my hair was still too long. I still knew that when I came home to write all this down it wouldn’t come out the way I wanted it to, but I still wanted it to. I still felt in my soul-or whatever approximation of that you would call whatever combination it is of personality, mind, and history that I have-that as deeply lonely as I could get I still lacked the desire or ambition to meet anyone and knew that as soon as I did I would try my hardest not to make friends. I still couldn’t drive without my glasses.
One of the last things I saw on the drive back, after I had long convinced myself to stop imagining things that will never happen, was a big black cow grazing on the field near the sidewalk, standing a few feet far from the fence where her family gathered safely. “NO!” I yelled: an earnest wail left unheard, locked in small car finally gliding freely on an open road and imperfect world where animals can’t stay in their cages and all hell could break loose.
Today I imagined being able to effortlessly skirt between the other vehicles-in either lane-and manage to dodge every obstacle by use of proficient and skillful driving the likes of which any stuntman would be jealous. “How calculated must those movie sequences be?” I thought. You would have to spend a lifetime devoted to honing a single talent in order to drive cars for the movies, right? The same surely applies for the best of any occupation. “What am I good at?” I wondered. What do I spend my life working on? Self-hate?
Every once in a while I fantasize about being granted (either by way of magic or radioactive-spider bite) supernatural powers that would allow me to be able to do anything I would ever want to do; some days I like to think that I could perfectly imitate any voice, other days I wish to be able to come up with the wittiest response to any given statement or situation. I daydream about being likened to admired characters in popular culture and then slowly taking over their personas, complete with the adoration and interest of nations. I wonder what it’s like to be perfect.
And say I am granted my wish; twenty-two years into a life spent stumbling and mumbling and suddenly, with either the snap of a finger or the tapping of a toe, I am all-of-a-sudden perfect. I turn the medium-sized company I work for into a multi-billion dollar industry, I casually suggest to scientist the accurate and elusive cures to life’s deadliest ailments, and I am paradoxically, universally liked. Even an elderly, man-eating white-hating born-again Christian would say something like “He’s certainly charming,” in an air eerily similar to my feelings towards Will Smith.
As an embodiment of perfection, I may live forever or I may not. I didn’t think about it, really. Does the perfect person die? I couldn’t say. Would a perfect person allow others to die? That I feel slightly more sure about, but I still don’t know.
So I’d call up (lost love #1-3), or perhaps fly (either I would have my own airline by then or invented jetpacks) to her, and I would ask her for another shot (first shot?) and she would of course be interested but I know there would be hesitation on her part because now that I am the world’s greatest living man, why would I still love some unknown who didn’t allow things to work well in the first place? I’d tell her we would just try. She would probably spend a lifetime asking “why me when you could have X?” and I’d be honest this time and flippantly say I just don’t know because I don’t. I say I’m sorry for having not spoken in so long and somehow she understands.
I tell myself I’ll just close my eyes and when I open them I’ll be perfect.
I immediately begin to chew on the inside of my lip, and grind my teeth. Traffic is still moving slow and I beat myself up about letting my heart stay broken for years when the average person only needs a few weeks to heal. Maybe a perfect person shouldn’t be capable of love. Nor should he or she think so much about themselves. Nor do they chew up the inside of their lip so much that it swells on both sides. I opened my eyes and I wasn’t even close to perfection. My clothes still didn’t match and my hair was still too long. I still knew that when I came home to write all this down it wouldn’t come out the way I wanted it to, but I still wanted it to. I still felt in my soul-or whatever approximation of that you would call whatever combination it is of personality, mind, and history that I have-that as deeply lonely as I could get I still lacked the desire or ambition to meet anyone and knew that as soon as I did I would try my hardest not to make friends. I still couldn’t drive without my glasses.
One of the last things I saw on the drive back, after I had long convinced myself to stop imagining things that will never happen, was a big black cow grazing on the field near the sidewalk, standing a few feet far from the fence where her family gathered safely. “NO!” I yelled: an earnest wail left unheard, locked in small car finally gliding freely on an open road and imperfect world where animals can’t stay in their cages and all hell could break loose.