Moment

I meant to write a post yesterday about an encounter I had last night inside a taqueria, but I had one too many beers and one too many hits of the old vaporizer pen. I'm half kidding; it was laziness mostly, and the discovery of new music. I've been obsessing over a local band called Sonny and the Sunsets, and I got carried off to sleep listening to their unique tunes. More on that later.

So, I get out from work after a long day of rushing to meet deadlines so that I could see a couple of friends for a drink and watch the game. Something came up last minute and my friends had to bail. I decided to walk home; the weather was nice enough. There's a sports bar near my house with a lot of oversized TV's, the perfect venue to behold Steph Curry's glory. Upon entering I was greeted by a crowded bar. All of the community tables were full, save for one, and there was no room to sit at the bar. I moved toward an empty seat at the edge of the one nearly empty community table and motioned to a thickly spectacled looking douchebag, asking him if I could take the seat. He was sitting with two ugly women, one of whom was wearing an outfit way too showy and attention seeking for her frame. It somehow augmented her unattractiveness. "Is this seat taken?" I asked.

"I think so," he said, wrenching out a halfhearted smile from his boyish, feminine face.

The glasses he wore were so thick that I wondered if on a bright day, if he were to stare at the sun for too long, whether his eyeballs would burst into flames. The rest of his body, thin and meticulously groomed, appeared frail, almost insecurely neat.

"You think?" I asked, puzzled, turning my palms face up in search of a clearer answer. He looked to the women with a gentle sigh of impatience, as though he were asking for their help in dismissing me. "Are you waiting for people," I asked them. They told me they were. "Are you waiting for enough people to fill this entire table, or can I take this seat at the end?" I could feel the New Yorker in me about to take over. As I waited for them to deliberate and perform complex calculations about the attendance of their party, I considered just taking the open chair and explaining that because it was not currently occupied, and because I was a patron in search of a seat, that I was going to sit in it and there wasn't anything they could do to stop me, especially given the tables are first come first serve and my inquiry with them was merely one of courtesy, nothing more. Instead I opted to go upstairs and check for an open table.

There were none, so I left and went next door to watch the game at the taqueria. My intestines craved the warm cheesiness of a chicken quesadilla. This plan was perfect. I ordered one and paired it with a cold Corona. I felt like a Mexican sommelier, a lunchadora. The game was nearing the end of the second quarter and I had just finished my meal. I was watching with satisfaction as the Warriors laid waste to the Cavaliers when suddenly, after having missed an ugly shot thrown from behind the backboard, LeBron James went stumbling off court, exaggeratedly collapsing into a crew of camera men. Appearing out of nowhere, an older woman, probably in her mid 40's, with the testosterone levels of Rocky Balboa, came screeching into my left ear.

"Oh my God," she shrieked, "is that Lebron?!"

Her degree of animation amused me.

"What happened?" she demanded to know.

I turned to her, and saw she was incredulous, almost shaking. I couldn't tell if she was shocked by his exaggerated head holding, his dramatic rolling all over the floor, his wide-eyed pleas to God, or the fact that he'd flashed his penis on live television. I replied: he's flopping.

"What," she screamed, drawing the attention of the entire taqueria, "he's not flopping, he's hurt! Look at him, his head is bleeding!"

One of her friends, a younger woman who might have been her daughter, laughed and said that they were from Cleveland, that they needed to calm down because they were in enemy territory. Unfortunately, her mother's testosterone would not be stopped and she proceeded to rebuke me.

"Flopping?!" she repeated again, "yeah right! He bashed his head right off that camera!"

It was true, it was all there in the slow-motion replay. He ran his big head straight into the camera and gashed it open. "This is outrageous, he was pushed," she carried on. I laughed at her and saw she was deeply irritated with me. People who take sports seriously enough to feel profound vexation, or those who take offense at a light-hearted, offhand joke disturb me.

So, I replied in kind: "Yea, ya know, I don't think he was pushed. No, no, he wasn't pushed, you can see it right there in the replay, see? To me this looks like a pretty clear cut case: he suffered from a really severe leg cramp."

I wish I could adequately convey the look she gave me. I have never seen a grown woman of her age so openly communicate violence with her eyes. I feared that if her daughters hadn't pulled her away that she might have tried to bite my ear off, or worse, she might have flashed me her penis right there in the middle of the taqueria.

"You idiot," she said through clenched teeth, foam bubbling at the edges of her lips, "his head is pouring blood! Leg cramps!?"

Seeing as she wasn't going to take my remarks as the jokes they were, I tried to align her with and engage her on an emotional level. "Yeah, you know what, you're right; that is a lot of blood. Do you think he's gonna make it?"

She began trembling apoplectically. Fearing she was about to have a stroke, and because I needed to return a call to a friend who'd rang me while the interaction was unfolding, I excused myself. I went home, watched the rest of the game, saw the Warriors embarrass the Cavaliers, smoked some pot, and went to sleep. Before my head completely sunk into the pillow, I felt the need to write. Here's some bedtime gibberish:

Our reality is a tangle of dusty electrons swirling through a vast emptiness. We are the nothing, and the thing.

Everything only appears to have an apparent order, because with our limited capacity for understanding we can only see things on an infinitesimally small scale. To see the totality of the incredible immensity around us would require a truly tremendous reservoir of foresight and existential indifference. Because to really care deeply, one must be completely detached from the object of affection. The object must become meaningless. In its meaninglessness it will achieve union with the perennial, omnipresent sense of loneliness swelling inside our dying hearts. There is a sense of unity, a primordial communion shared in the ignominy of our mutual obscurities. 

Here we realize that our worries and our woes, our victories and triumphs, all of them, are the same; they only vary in their momentary meanining. Life, morality and consciousness are just patterns of recurring motifs in momentary meaning. We see and feel things because they are perpetuated through us, and by us. We are feeling machines. We exist only to feel. We cultivate realities rich with feeling. The capitalist economy is one of feeling is it not? Cosumerism is its embodiment. It is the curation of an illusion; the so often exploited delusion of the self. The idea of individualism is a distraction from the intense, dizzying feeling of oneness. 

To feel the infinite expanse of time and space rationing your breath, stretching through gravity the muscles in your chest as your lungs expand, then, warming your lips while you surrender that breath to the universe once more, is to realize that it is the opening and closing of your eyes that brings birth and death to all that is. To be is to touch at something deeply temporal. In this way we continue battling the present as it is destroyed and resurrected, born and killed, murdered and murderous. 

When does it end though, and why? When does the moment come in which it is no longer necessary for more to follow? Why does life end? For Meaning, I guess. Without a beginning and an end can you have a story? 

Survival, and more importantly, life, love, and living, is the transcendence, from one moment to the next, of impossibility over adversity.