> From: An Infinite Number of Monkeys
> Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2007 1:42 AM
> To: itsrainingmetaflo@hotmail.com
> Subject: SPAMlet Fellas
>
> Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee:
What the fuck are you doing?
You're hanging around my fuckin' neck
like a vulture, like impending death!
You think I'm funny? I'm funny to you?
I'm a clown to you? How the fuck am I funny?
What the fuck is so funny about me?
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of
me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my
mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to
the top of my compass: and there is much music,
excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot
you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Today everything is different.
There's no action.
I have to wait around like everyone else.
I'm an average nobody.
I get to live the rest of my life
like a schnook.
The rest is silence.
I
I have nothing particularly insightful to say about instinct. Instinct is a rock balanced on a ledge. Though you may be crushed if you happen to be in its path when it falls, that fact means nothing to the rock. It is just a rock balanced on a ledge.
What interests me is how the rock came to be on that ledge in the first place, and how I got you to stand in its path at the critical moment, against your better judgment.
II
I once drove down a steep, winding, mountain pass in a storm at night with no headlights or windshield wipers. My alternator belt had apparently broken some way back, and the engine light that was always on failed to alert me. By the time the headlights and wipers started to go it was too late – I was already headed down, and there was no shoulder on the narrow mountain path for pulling over.
I locked my eyes on the taillights in front of me and drove far faster than anyone should who cannot even see the road. But I was more afraid of losing that one point of reference than of anything else. So I stayed close.
To say that I was not afraid would be an obvious lie. But I was not afraid. Not yet. I had entered some primal zone where all that existed was that pair of red eyes staring back at me from the darkness. Steering without thinking. Dancing by smell.
It was a moment that stretched on in the crooked timeless manner of dreams. And I suppose a part of me may actually have dozed off – the part that knew better, certainly; the part that might have frozen.
When it was all over and I had somehow survived, I got the shakes something awful. But when it counted, there was only the dream of what had to be done, and the strange stillness when all of the voices in my head went suddenly silent, waiting to see what might happen.
III
The art of civilization is learning not to notice what you shouldn't. The art of love is getting credit for not noticing.
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