The List is out again and the important part goes 5) Stalin 4) Snyder 3) Limbaugh 2) Jake for the eighth year running, and everybody’s buzzing about Gaddafi’s leap back into the top ten. Everyone except Jake, anyway.
That 2 gnaws at him. Realistically, he can’t compete with an icon; Ol’ Number One isn’t going anywhere. But the kids beneath him know that too, and they’ll gun hard for his spot instead.
Mere fuckuppery can’t keep him competitive forever. Jake feels old. Maybe he should try his hand at film or genocide? That community college catalog just came in the mail.
At times of deep self-loathing, Jake discovers, Maslow’s hierarchy is reversed: sleep evades him, and peanut butter tastes like a dead thing in his mouth.
“You’ve failed me for the last time, Maslow!” Jake shouts.
“No, Mister Jake!” cries Maslow, covering his head and scurrying for cover. “The Maslow is so sorry!” Jake whips him around the house with a willow switch anyway, but it doesn’t make his food taste any better.
“Why do you let him treat you that way?” asks Amy, dabbing Maslow’s forehead with a cool cloth.
“The Maslow has needs too,” says Maslow, shivering with delight.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
“We’re not the same person,” says Jake at 29. “The self is transient, and every atom of our bodies cycles out within seven years.”
“We’re not having that argument,” says Jake at 48.
“I’m not you,” says Jake at 29, “and I’m definitely not–” He curls his lip at Jake, 21.
“Ignore him,” says Jake at 48, with kindness. “Your pain is real; your fears aren’t illusions. You’re living through the crucible that shapes us all.”
“But why doesn’t she LIKE MEEE,” wails Jake at 21.
“No one likes you,” glares Jake at 29. “And what the fuck are you wearing?”
On the eve of his twenty-ninth birthday, Jake sleeps, and finds himself surrounded by mementos mori and melting clocks.
“This is it?” says Jake. “This is your symbolism? This is the best you could do.”
Like a dog in the cookie jar, the dream freezes and tries to distract him with ladies in knee socks. Jake scowls. “Those aren’t even my fears! I mean, skulls? Really? Have you been borrowing from the collective unconscious again?”
The dream explodes with white doves labelled INNOCENCE.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people dream of headless skeletons, and put it down to anxiety at work.
There’s short-term and its 7±2 little cubbyholes (well, -2, honestly), and then there’s long-term and its swarming depths, its endless opportunities for recrimination. But in between lurks a zone of Heisenbergian instability, like the part of a drain one can reach but not see. It’s murky down there. You could as easily rake up a fistful of glass as a goldflake, or flail for an hour and find neither, and you never know when it’s going to get flushed.
And that’s where ideas go when you don’t write them down, Jake reminds himself, scowling at the stupid bus window.
Swallows dive-bomb the park, picking insects as they rise out of cooling grass. Jake dodges when they strafe by his knees.
Consider the eye of the predator bird: an instrument hundreds of millions of years in development, perfected while you were still a tree shrew looking out both sides of your head. Forget what it’s like to be a bat. Birdsight, like the Hubble, strains photons bouncing gnatwise from the deep field of dusk.
Jake’s headphones have stopped working. He pulls them off and runs on, puffing, a red-faced struggle to stay out of the ranks of the old and sick.
