Dark and Stormy Night

I suppose there are two ways one can go in life. Fate can be captured as movement along an x-y axis. You can either embrace life (x) and all of the myriad possibilities life throws your way, or you can tell the universe to go fuck itself (y), what I call the big cosmic fuck you.

Lately, I’ve been falling farther down the y axis. The plane seems not to be level. This has got me thinking about the ultimate form of the cosmic fuck you. Would I know one if I saw it, said it, inflicted it upon existence? At first, I concluded that the biggest F.U. is suicide, a snub in response to the invitation to live out one more day at the party. I talked about this with a friend Vince, a guy who is familiar enough with my philosophic wanderings not to be overly alarmed at such talk and call county mental health.

“The biggest F.U. to existence is not to kill yourself when you are in deep depression. Let’s face it, that’s very unoriginal. God’s been dealing with that kind of behavior for centuries. Just take a look at the sad sacks who keep throwing themselves off the Golden Gate in despair. It’s so unoriginal as to be offensive.”

Vince bent over to reattach the bag to the rear of his lawnmower. I sipped a Kirin Ichiban Lager he had pilfered from his employer - an Asian food market.

“So if suicide isn’t the biggest F.U., what is?” I asked.

“The biggest possible F.U. would be to kill yourself at the time you are most happy, at the moment when you and the universe are in harmony. Imagine it like the universe is a girlfriend and you have the best god-damned sex in the world. It isn’t going to get any better than this you think and for good reason - it was fucking good. What do you do? You break up, leave her and move on,” he explained, pulling back violently on the starter cord. “You’d be essentially doing the same thing with the whole world!”

And this is why I knew I had to go back. If I was to perform the biggest fuck you in the romantic history of the universe, I would have to kill myself at the instant I was most happy and at one with all there is.

I’m back in Satellite Beach. It’s a community on the coast of Florida looking out into the Atlantic. I live in a house just across from a beach. There is a strip of a road between the back yard, if you could call it that, of my house and the waves lapping up over the sand. There is also a wall made of cinder blocks about four feet high to keep me from playing in this road. Cape Canaveral is on the horizon.

The strip of blacktop runs from Patrick Air Force Base to the rocket range proving ground. My father is a twenty-four year old lieutenant who calculates the trajectory of rockets and missiles. He does this instead of shooting an M-16 in a rice patty in Southeast Asia.

I walk along my old route from the school. It’s been over three decades since I’ve walked along these same pastel-colored houses. Squat clapboard ranch homes, a bit more put together for the officers than the enlisted, just as I remember.

I see myself walking home from the school. A red towel is tied around my neck and draped down my back. My child version thinks he is Underdog. He is on his way home now to watch the latest afternoon episode. He walks up to me as if I am an old friend, which I suppose is accurate. He carries a masonry jar of butter that I remember having churned back, back in Montessori school.

Here’s what I’ve decided to do. Since I don’t know what the final results of my act will be, I have decided to call this an experiment. I’m going to extinguish myself at the time I was most happy. Since I will be killing myself in the past, my act may result in severe consequences. For example, I’m not too sure I will exist after I’ve set all in motion. Will I just dematerialize at the very point I interrupt the normal continuum of events? I don’t think this is going to happen. I know I haven’t yet set up a solid null hypothesis.

The sun is shining down on both my heads, though it takes the light just a bit longer to reach the dark, shining hair of my younger self. I take the jar of freshly-churned butter out of the child’s hands, promise him that I will give it to his mother, and then compliment him on the fine aerodynamic lines of his heroic cape. He smiles up at me, the trusting soul.

I turn to see one of those blue busses barreling down the road carrying airmen to and from the barracks, commissary and testing range. Without hesitation, as I know overthinking may make me weak at the moment I must be most adamantine, I put down the jar of butter and heave my child self up, one hand under the arm and the other grabbing the fabric of my denim Toughskins. I throw the child over the wall and into the road to meet the tires of the blue air force bus.

There is no squealing of rubber on asphalt. I consider that I have in fact dematerialized as there is little sensation at all. I still see the lovely blue sky, bereft of a spoiling cloud but one sliver of fire and white smoke running up into the sky. Three men are riding a rocket to the moon. The bus has stopped. There is little traffic anyway as most have pulled off the road to watch the upward assault. Fresh, eager men smelling of aftershave and shoe polish lower their windows and point out at the rocket from the bus. I hug the cool wall and see the child standing in the middle of the road, his eyes following after the fiery dream. Everything is going well. He will not have to rescue any wayward astronauts this day.

So, count this fuck you as a failed experiment. I remained soiled by the beautiful stain of being. I climb over the wall to express my sorrow to the kid, but he’s not listening. He’s already in orbit. I say only one thing to him before leaving.

“Watch out for 2001. You won’t even know what’s coming before it hits you.”

It was with great sadness I learned of the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s death in a freakish encounter with a sting ray on the Great Barrier Reef. Although I had seen the man less and less over the years, I still recall with fondness scrambling by his side over sand dunes in search of scorpions, poking sticks under rocks to agitate rattlesnakes, and scuba diving in the South China Sea (in his khaki-every-zoologist/safari guide uniform he always wore) to swim with sea turtles. Being the consummate showman he was, he played footsie with the rider of the pale water buffalo-camel-ostrich-whatever, always understanding the value of an ounce of peril mixed with a pint of knowledge.

I fear for men like the Crocodile Hunter and Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man. They make a career telling a cold, unresponsive camera lens to be careful of fangs, and teeth, and claws and spitting venom. Take one . . . let’s do it again . . . take two . . . no, that doesn’t sound right . . . take three . . . okay, with a little editing we’ll clean it up Steve . . . Tim . . . Bucky . . .

That’s right . . . Bucky. Bucky Mularcky, the Shark Wrestler. He’s actually the guy who started it all, the original. He was the man upon whom Peter Benchley based the character of Quint in his famous novel and film about lurking death in the depths, Jaws. He may be more myth than man now. I only heard one story of the Shark Wrestler, told to be by the man who everybody thinks Quint is actually based on.

“Quint’s not me,” he said. “It’s him. Buck Mularcky, a retired jockey with one arthritic knee who made a second career out of taking rich, fat Boston blue bloods out on a good ol’ shark hunt. Instead Buck dived in and wrestled with them. Made those wall street types piss right there on deck with his antics.”

Buck Mularcky bit off more than he could chew on that last charter when two great whites bit him in half like he was a bloody chum ball. He had grown too comfortable with danger, fallen in love with the hero, The Shark Wrestler, he had become in the eyes of those city cats. He was Narcissus, only he had the whole Atlantic gray to look down into and see his beauty smiling back at him with several rows of sharpened teeth.

Okay, Bucky didn’t have a camera. Both the Croc Hunter and the Grizzly Man did. I wonder if they saw their own reflections in the camera lens?

Who’s next for the death of scale-shell-fur-claw? I met a man who raises redworms, Eisenia fetida. He dived into a vat three feet high of worms when I stopped by his warehouse on business I will not discuss here. He had an audience of one. Think if he had a whole nation? I was more than a bit shocked at his behavior, but later I learned that worm husbandry was a second career for him. He had been a competitive skier and had lived in the French Alps the last twenty-five years. It all came together. Hunt McLish is an adrenaline junky that, if I am to call myself human, I must save from his own foolishness.

You see there’s a reason to fear. There’s a purpose to not forgetting the fear. We are here today because our ancestors feared that which could kill them. They didn’t go walking up to bears, wrestling sharks or jumping on top of mature crocodiles. Respect and fear of that which has the potential to kill is a survival trait passed down through thousands of generations. To try to turn off that fear, disregard it, embrace that which can kill and thus turn off the wisdom of the species, the generations, is mortal folly, though yes indeed, damn good entertainment!