Today, I’m just a lil’ starfish*
Dispatch
07-31-02024
There’s a culture — or was one — that had a strange tradition. The first three days of their year were a gap in history, where nothing was recorded. Where time did not exist.
In this culture, if I am assigned something on the last day of the year and it’s due the next day, it’s really due in four days. But I can’t think of it like that because if I did, I’d slip back into time.
I searched the web for a bit, but could not find any info about this culture. I may have dreamed them . . . or read something years ago. I don’t know what this tradition meant, but it lets me imagine what it was like before I attached my life to a chronology, collective and individual. I can step outside history, and it feels like a step back into the world. I feel lucid, like time is a pill. I hid it under my tongue. I spat it out when history’s back was turned.
It feels like I’ve stopped aging for a moment. Astronauts age slower in space. It’s a true thing, the type of truth time likes, numbers true. After six months on the International Space Station, orbiting Earth at a speed of 7,700 meters per second, an astronaut ages 0.005 seconds less than they would have on Earth. It has something to do with how fast they are traveling. The key to longevity is feeling still, as I’m thrown forward faster and faster.
But then I hop into the space of this tradition an eerie comfort. that kind you feel when you arrive somewhere you have never been, but it feels familiar. Where was I before I had a story? Can I be in my life and in history at once?
Chronology seemed mandatory. Like the movement of a train along its tracks. But what if the train is at rest, and the view out the window is one of those moving backgrounds, the kind they had on old cartoons where the same tree passes by every five seconds. I’m told I live in historical times, accelerated times, times of change. I’m told I’m rushing towards an ill-defined soon-to-be. A soon-to-be that oscillates between utopia and dystopia so fast that they’re blurring together. The future is exhibiting all the symptoms of manic depressive. The future feels like that Solar-punk utopia anime short with all the Chobani™ product placements non-sequituring everywhere. Like two things pretending they can exist at the same time. The future feels like the present.
But every day, I pass the same tree, the same liquor store, the same trite mural with the quote about someone burying me and not knowing I was a seed. My day is a circle, and history tells me it’s a line. If I am a part of history at all, that part feels passive. I’m a consumer of history, and my participation is limited to my consumption
If I died in the nul-time of this culture’s tradition, they’d probably carve the first day of the year on my tombstone, but with an asterisk next to it. Visitors would know I’d died outside of history. I’d like that, it feels honest. I think history helps us forget that everything disappears . . . or nothings does, which amounts to much the same.
I’ve been stressing about thermonuclear war. For the first time in my life, it doesn’t feel abstract or hypothetical. It feels like the subtle squeak in my motorcycle clutch feels. It started about six months ago and is getting louder. I fear a catastrophic failure in the engine is approaching, and I can’t afford that. It’s an expensive problem. It’s expensive, which means its good for business, and what is good for business usually happens.
But then I fixed the clutch myself and felt better — it took two hours and cost about $60 in parts.
I’ve always had prepper sensibilities, but knew early in my 20s that I wasn’t the type to amass material resources. My creative skill sets perpetually command a low market value. Property in Montana, or an expatriation to Portugal has always been out of my price range.
I invested in my body instead. I took up weights, trail running, fasting, and meditation (I figured starving and being bored are as imperative as strength and endurance).
But it was about more than that. I decided that my body should reflect the life I desired. I wanted a life of action, movement, and readiness. Not the spreadsheet type of readiness, but the meta-readiness of real-time response to the cascades of change. I thought I would need a body ready to clamber over and break open the future, to ad hoc through it with duck tape and zip ties. I decided that a life would better seep through a body that reflected it, that my physical expression would bridge internal and external — world and soul. I redlined my body, chasing that impossible harmony. One time, I got rhabdomyolysis from trying to do 100 pull-ups between two 1-mile all-out sprints. My kidneys started to fail. My urine turned the color of Diet Coke, and the stubborn world stayed outside.
But the older I get, the more people I love. This formula exposes the naivete of my prepper workout plan. The more my individualism dissipates, the more faces come out of the mist. Continued indefinitely and I’ll love everyone, where does that leave me? It comforts me that the same problem would arise if I had gone the material resource route, because the only compound big enough for all of us is the world.
It comforts me further that I fixed my motorcycle myself.
This is spinning to a place with more questions than answers. An honest place, and a total cop-out. This place doles out cornball platitudes like Love is the Answer and This Too Shall Pass, like the Serenity Prayer or that ‘did not know we were seeds’ mural I pass every day. Platitudes that are all the more annoying because I know, if I can stomach them, they can save my life.
The Starfish one comes to mind. That story where thousands of starfish end up on a beach, dying — I’m not sure why; a beach seems like a place a starfish would have the hang of. Someone comes along, sees it, and is instantly prostrate with grief, pounding the sand in turmoil as the tragedy before them grows to touch the tragedy that weaves through all life. They’re wailing something like, “the suffering is too great, nothing I can do will matter!” They’ve lost all hope.
Hope and despair seem almost symbiotic. Despair, as a dark totality, provides a place to hallucinate wild delusions of better worlds. Hope is part of why I write, I think. Not a hope for a particular thing, but the hope lounging on a blank page. It’s a hope that what populates that page will continue to unfold me, and that unfold means I’m still alive. Creative writing is an awesome meta, because I’m populating the page with words just as time is populating my life with moments of newness. When those two creations line up I feel like I’m filled with a current beyond my wattage. Creation creating creation creating creation . . .
Anyway, back at the beach, someone else comes over and picks up one doomed starfish up. He frisbees it into the ocean, and says, “what I did mattered to that one.” Then, like, returns to his volley ball game or something. He knows that the alleviation of suffering is a task beyond completion. He’s learned how to play.
I want to say I’m the Volley Ball guy in this story, I really do. But today, I’m just a lil’ starfish.
I long for the sea.
Pick me! Pick me!