At Least They're Committed

Sad, sad pathetic soul.

I’d die for my family. I’d kill for my friends. I covet my coworkers. How lucky am I!? But you know, there’s always gotta be something, someone. Some “It” that doesn’t quite get the whole life thing; immune to being tormented and crippled by over-consciousness, unshackled by respect or consideration for other people. There’s always one. Pity.

I’m not sure I believe in Hell. Do you? I’d like to think there’s something beautiful, inspirational, redemptive in everyone. Even Golum had a purpose. We all do. Did anyone ever read Steinbeck’s East of Eden? or maybe see the miniseries with Jane Seymour and the Bottoms brothers? Brilliant. She was great. Her name was Cathy or Catherine, just like mine. The epitome of evil. Charming. Desirable. Manipulative. Hey, I can be evil! Honest! A necessary evil, but still. Anyway, the character I remember the most was Lloyd Bridges.’ He sat atop a horse and looked down upon a Bottoms boy. Some people just have no soul, he said. “She’s got the eyes of a goat.”

I only saw it once but I remember that. The overarching moral was the same as Ordinary People by Robert Redford, laced with your basic survival guilt — the kind that Daniel P. lives as a healed body but not mind or soul, who was cut from the twisted metal that killed his brother and best friend; the same my brother Dan goes through because his friends asked him to go fishing with them, but he didn’t, and an overgrown stop sign and VW Bug were no match to a cement truck. “Why them? Why? Why? Why? Why not me?”

It wasn’t their time. That’s all. In Ordinary People and in East of Eden, the perceived weaker was the stronger. Those who society had recognized as strong had simply skirted true adversity. When the brutality of life rained down, they went down. For the rest, there’s more to do. Just gotta stagger onward.

The troubled, the lost, those who are beaten by life but who keep getting up; those who cry because they homeless children straggle behind waddling grandmothers unsure of where their next meal will come from; those who still pulse despite another chunk of bloody muscle ripped from their heart when a boy loses a loved one to suicide. Just maybe we’re strong. Maybe we have to be because we’ve been facing it all along. We never could turn away, can’t close our eyes and erase the wretched images from our brain. The visions, the despair — always there, dormant at best, ready to invade our senses, to remind us how brutal is life, how rotten is Mankind despite how hard we try. How we scratch to evolve.

But for me, I have been very, very blessed with a family that seems to celebrate my childlike antics and random ravings; by friends who forgive me my eccentricities, my bizarre episodes and my brazen humanity; by colleagues who empathize with my frustrations and offer soothing consolation and council.

It’s all good. For me anyway. I mean, there’s always one: one who will be condescending, patronizing, demeaning. One so lost in itself that it has to attempt to suck the life out of every good soul around it. I should know. I’ve always been perceived as easy prey and I have the scars to prove it. I’m not easy, though. “The eyes of a goat.” I see you. Just because I’m no man’s or woman’s judge, don’t think for a heartbeat that God doesn’t see through my eyes and millions upon millions of others like me. Sad, sad, pathetic soul. I pity you. You’ll never have what I have . . . you don’t deserve it.