Po Boy Views
By
Phil
LaMancusa
Miss
American Pie
Or
Ape Talk
“And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son and The Holy Ghost,
They caught the last train for the
coast.
The day the music died.”
Okay,
you’re sitting down in your favorite chair, bone tired, after (another) full
day of working your ass off for enough dough to keep your head above water, a
roof over your noggin and the bill collectors away from your door and you say
to yourself :“I guess this is just about
as good as it’s gonna get.” Question: Is it time to quit your job, join a
cult, hit the road and surrender to the futility of your existence?
Suppose
you’re on your favorite barstool, watching Jeopardy with the gang and trying to
figure out what dinner was going to be, what DVD you were gonna pop in the
player before you settle in to reruns of Frazier or Golden Girls, taking Fido
out and flossing another day away. And on that sultry, sweet smelling, siren
wailing evening you asked yourself: “When I’m frigging eighty-five and walking some
fleabag, will I wonder where my life went and what function I served?” Question:
Should you order another double, find out if the circus is hiring or consider
doing a ‘flying novena’ to Saint Expedite?
Or,
say that you’re on your morning run, after a skinny latte and bran muffin at
Starbucks; looking forward to a long shower and then off to university to earn
that MBA, pull down some serious bucks in the work place and after purchasing a
cute condo, meeting the right person and having two point six children who you’ll
send to your alma mater and blah blah
blah (you know how your mind works when you lay one Nike sole down after
another on the St. Charles streetcar tracks). Except today you’re thinking that,
actually, all you are is a randomly constructed piece of protoplasm with no
apparent purpose on the planet, destined to last X amount of time, to perish
and be thrown away like that plastic Alpine Spring Water bottle that you just
threw into the garbage receptacle; you, your loved ones and the horse that you
rode in on…so much molecular landfill.
Perhaps
you’re the youngest kid from a Seventh Ward brood walking to school in
unpleasant weather trying to forget the recurring dream of the nothingness of
death; of trying to scream when no sounds come out, of trying to run and your
feet stuck in mud. Your headphones yelling hip hop lyrics, homework undone,
lunch money tight and indifferently observing as a young girl offer herself to
a man in a pickup truck. It occurs to you that you didn’t ask to be born; and no amount of encouragement, prescience
of possibilities or glimmers of greatness will dispel the pessimism of ghetto
gloom. You figure your epitaph will read:”Three ways out: music; sports or
dealing drugs and he weren’t no good at none of ‘em. He’d a run away but there
weren’t no place to go…”
How
about a hundred million people on the earth that feel that life’s pleasures are
fleeting and it’s miseries pervasive; the bus driver who’ll be going to a
funeral when he gets off; your waitress raising her children on her own; the
bank teller whose hours have just been cut; the shopkeeper whose Small Business
loan is defaulting; the musician whose van was just stolen; the shop girl who
just found a lump; the guy in clown makeup who didn’t know that growing up
would be like this or the veteran school teacher that just lost her savings in a
bad investment. Salt in the wound that God was meant to heal. It’s life that wakes you to a sunny day and then proceeds to
mug you with circumstances beyond your control, leaving you praying for a good
case of amnesia. It’s called
non-clinical depression when your mental levees crumble. “Cryin’ won’t help you;
prayer won’t do you no good”.
The
theory is that the cause of non-clinical depression is basically the witness of
our own mortality; our glimpse of death; the proof of our insignificance. We
get it from experiences of life that show us how powerless we really are: a physical
beating; a debilitating illness; a sexual abuse; bullying and teasing; hunger
for food and nurturing; unrequited love; death of a loved one; something that
kills our spirit, even for a brief time. A dashing of our hopes, for a divine
intervention or a resulting happy ending, that we bury and cover with a
protective layer of personality or futile diversion.
What
results (?): a (what can be called abnormal) tendency to become introverted;
angry; aggressive, goal oriented, complacent? Self medication, dependency on a
higher power, sarcasm, cynicism or a philosophy of existentialism? Insatiable
appetites, a mania for exercising, nervousness, anorexia or cruelty towards
small animals and weaker people? Doesn’t that all sound like a laundry list of
the ‘human condition’?
Question:
Who gives solace to the tired, comfort to the weak, strength to the poor; hope
to the disillusioned; stature to someone with low self esteem? Who provides
poultices for life’s bruises; lifts up the downtrodden; swings low the sweet
chariot? Answer: Nobody.
Simian
sez: only you can stop the madness. Counterproductive things that do you today
may be the result of a past inequity; attitudes and prejudices that people
exhibit are not present at their birth; tendencies are a result of training
with you losing sight of the fact that basically you have nothing but the
future in this form and you should be making the most of the short time that
you have. Heaven, hell, reincarnation and life after death are all hearsay. You
have from this moment forward to make your life sane and enjoyable; if only you
can ignore your past and put it to bed.
Easier
said than done. First you have to fix the things that are broken now and rid
yourself of the things that impede your progress; quit unhealthy behavior and
influences. Eliminate the negative. Clean house.
Realize
that you can depend on nothing and that everything depends upon you. To
reprogram yourself start with right speech which will result in right action
and be followed by right thoughts; one foot in front of the other. You’re not here to break even and be lost in
the shuffle.
The
monkey speaks.
