MYGENERATION

I saw something incredibly absurd today, although I cannot quite articulate why the image stuck with me so strongly. I’d like to share what I can about the moment, and I hope that you will find something of value in my explanation.

It was a beautiful afternoon in downtown Athens, and I felt beautiful— not just physically or externally beautiful (although I admittedly did feel that), but deeper and more completely beautiful than that— existentially beautiful, one could say. I felt incredible to be alive— to feel the visceral, carnal, TANGIBLE pleasures of moving my body; riding my bicycle, traveling through space, sensing everything inside and outside of me; being present in such an incredible world and possessing the ability and the privilege of interacting with it, relating to it, learning from it, being with it. I felt IT is what I felt, and it felt phenomenal.

I’d just left the caring arms of one of the most incredible people I’ve yet had the pleasure and privilege of meeting and getting to know. I felt so good that it didn’t even bother me to be leaving such a splendid moment with such a splendid person for the exhausting, stressful, and dehumanizing confines of my nightly wage-slavery flipping burgers at a downtown diner. The downsides of my job were trifling matters of little consequence in the moment, even though I was rushing my way towards them, physically and temporally. Somewhere between the beauty of the background I established above and the dark, dreary death that is my job as just described is where I saw it.

I was biking between a row of bars (Athens has more bars than you can shake a fucking stick at; this particular street had three bars so fucking close together that you could slip them in an regular postage envelope and send them to your Grandmother in case she ever got thirsty on a Sunday afternoon) when a cacophonous rapport echoed along the concrete chasm that lined the street and snapped me from my ataraxic daze. In other words, I heard a loud sound and was like, “Wut?”

There, perhaps seven stories above street level and to my right, was a peculiar sight— an arm, a hammer, and a window. It looked as if the Once-ler was fiddling around with a window several floors up in the Bank of America building!

The confluence of elements was too spontaneous, too illogical to comprehend— I looked around frantically for someone—anyone!—else who was witnessing the same thing as I brought my bike carefully to a halt. The mixed group of patrons outside the bars were too preoccupied with their own ataraxic states to let the Onceler arm bother them; they seemed completely ambivalent or oblivious (or both) to the scene unfolding above us. I was alone on this one, which only served to enhance the experience— I felt like the only one who noticed, the only one who cared about what was going on— I felt even more compelled to pay attention and to make sense of whatever it was that I was seeing, in hopes that the images and meanings would not be lost forever.

That, in essence, was what I saw: An arm sticking out of a window far above the street, hammering on the frame that held the very panes through which the arm itself protruded. I’m tellin’ ya, though, there was something to this image!! You should have seen it and experienced it too; then we could talk about it and figure out what the fuck was going on!

If you’ve ever worked on a window from inside the windowed structure itself, perhaps you know somewhat the absurdity I saw— that shit is not easy! First of all, working through anything or generally away from one’s body is a pain in the ass. Doing so through a small space that is simultaneously fragile and mobile makes it even worse, and essentially guarantees that you will drop one or more essential tools in the process of completing your task, thus requiring you either to climb through the window to retrieve what was lost or, in particularly unfortunate circumstances, to stop completely what you are doing and walk AROUND the fucking structure to the other side of the goddamn window. If I seem bitter about this experience, it’s cause it fucking sucks, and I hate it. ARGH!

Now imagine doing all of this seven stories in the air, in a downtown/urban environment. You drop your shit, you’re done for. Yeah, this isn’t as risky as window-shit on the exterior of a skyrise (see pic below), but cut the guy some slack! The Bank of America building is probably the tallest building in downtown Athens, and we have no right to compare or to minimize whatever it was that this person was doing!



I think he might have been chipping paint off the outside of the window— he was using more than just the hammer in his hand, and was banging something. Was he driving a nail into the outside of the windowframe? Unlikely. I have absolutely no idea what he was doing or why he was doing it, but it really struck me, and I wanted to share that.

People don’t make any sense, nor do the things that they do. We try so hard to assign qualities to people and their actions but fail as thoroughly as one who tries to contain sand— there’s far more to a person and their actions than any quality or combination of qualities can ever hope to describe. I am not appealing to anti-intellectualism here— I do not believe that all pursuits with people and qualities are fruitless. I am instead reminding myself and perhaps anyone willing to read this that there’s always more. Always more what, one might ask; to which I would reply, “Exactly.” Always more something, period. There was more to the image of the Onceler arm and the window. There was more to my story. There was more to your reaction to both my story and the Onceler arm, too. There’s always more. I want to encourage myself and the reader to remember that. Maybe together we can experience or explain whatever the fuck it is that I’m referring to here— together we fare far better than on our own.

Where have I taken this post? Exactly where it needed to go. Through the window, through my mind, and through yours.