“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s 9 on Thursday morning. I’m in the yard, bare feet in the fat green grass, as Angus, the silver lab, is having a seizure. My first thoughts are, naturally, that this is going to mess up my schedule for the day. I quickly punch myself in the face though, remind myself that life is so very brief and everyone and everything is dying/collapsing/melting/eroding even as we speak.
He has these seizures fairly regularly and there’s not much that can be done. Whoever is with him at the time (or whoever finds him on the floor when they are the first to come home to a humanless house), that person just has to sit with him and try to make sure he doesn’t convulse himself into a sharp edge or something. You talk gently to him (like we hardly ever do) and you tell him one thing over and over again which, as it happens, is a gargantuan lie that most of us tell ourselves over and over again too.
“It’s okay,” I whisper to him as he writhes around in the grass while his eyeballs roll back into his head and he appears to be straddling that fine line between still here and gone. “Just relaxxxxx,” I coax. “You are okay. You are fine, buddy. You are doing great.”
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Doing great?
Wtf.
I mean.
I don’t know.
We say stupid shit, don’t we?
How exactly is he doing great? I’ll tell you the truth. He’s not doing great. He’s doing the opposite of great. He’s pissing himself on the lawn and his mouth is agape and there is a feral angel standing on his ribcage/ holding the scythe/ picking her pretty white teeth with its bloody blade point. I take a deep breath of country air and I look down at my dog and its as if his long lost wolfness is returning to him at last, but only here, in this strange ephemerality, at the borders. Over the shallow river there is death. Like a desert. Like a hot void where nothing thrives. Like Mexico in movies.
I kick myself for talking jive to Angus when he might actually appreciate a bit of raw dog honesty. I could be telling him things much closer to the truth as his pupils dilate and his face is overcome by panic sheen only seen on the mugs in ultimate distress.
_____
In the news this week, I read a story about a 10 year old kid a few counties away who disappeared within minutes of setting out on a flooded creed in his kayak. He wasn’t alone. There were other adults and kids out on the water with him. But by all accounts they must have misjudged the swift fury of it all. People are lining up to heave their opinions around, blame the parents and all that crap. But the thing is: and we always forget this because we are either too caught up in our own paradigm or we are too rattled by what has happened to allow for any kind of acceptance without punishment: but the thing is: everything is random and floating like people’s yards slipping by you on the banks of a swollen stream. There goes their firewood, there goes there trampoline, there goes there shed, dude. Look at it acting so light and airy, riding the murky force of a dark thing coming.
_____
Watching Angus suffer, I offer up what words I can manage and they are enough, I guess. Even if they are totally phrases steeped in absolute untruth. Here we have a dog having a seizure and here we have his human rubbing the dog’s head, holding his paw, nails need clipping, and telling him that all is well. Everything is just peachy.
How do we stand up again after being felled so hard though? Not me, but the dog? The kid who drowned, his family? How do the living go on living even after they experience such profound and cataclysmic suffering or loss or all of it at once? The legend of life has been told for eons and often it is with the same rustic wonder in the voice of the teller.
We are all hellbent on happiness, they explain. And yet we have been volunteered for pain, by circumstance and chance, from the moment we first opened our eyes to the artificoal light blazing down on our helpless lumps.
Every day, every hour, every fleeting moment/ each and every passing second/ be they real or just a dream (and don’t try to tell me they are real, hoss…pffff….come on now), it is all streaming by us on the backs of angry rivers, on the beds of runaway trucks barreling towards some guaranteed ending.
Death is the ending. Death is the promise. Death, you see, is the only part of the bargain you can count on. It never misses a single soul. It never fails to do its job. Death is perfection. Death rules the land.
All of this living, all of this hurting from other people’s words, bleeding from their bullets, it’s just a set-up, along with every joyful instant/ every spontaneous smile/ every single orgasm falling down out of the tree of life, plummeting, sinking, lifting us even as it hurdles toward memory, all of it is simply an elaborate complex set-up for the grand finale coming down the road like some old tractor in a parade.
_____
Cruising creepy, oozing, coming
death’s up by the corner store
Tootsie Roll/ Blow Pop Blow
Limp bag of candy
Fire truck roar
mind your manners
take your pills, boy
help your neighbor
kiss the ring
two doors up
sweet death’s parade
gonna pack your skull
with silly string.
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We are leaving for the shore in two days and we are all looking forward to it.
Seven people. A Honda minivan with 196,000 miles on it. Boogie boards and toilet paper. A PS5. Wine from the liquor store and hemp oil from Amazon. Six kinds of chips. Four kinds of soda. Books about the Black Death. Ear buds and chargers and cracked screens and toothpaste.
If one of us were to not come back, I would want it to be me. Not because I am brave or because I would voluntarily give myself to the shark in order to save the other six people I love so much from the fate of being swept up by death before we think it’s right or anything like that.
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Okay.
Full disclosure here.
In all honesty, that is exactly why I would put myself in the jaws of a Great White or whatever, to save my people. To let them live I’d have to pay the highest price. And I would. Then I would be gone. No more essays for you on Friday morning, bitches.
_____
Might sound crazy but it ain’t no lie
Baby bye bye bye.
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• • •
Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
