Rogue Planets
“How was your shift?”
“Awful. Kent was managing again. He gets worse every time.”
“What did he do now.”
“It’s not what he does but what he demands that we do.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s lost all satisfaction with ‘assistant manager.’ Now he wants to be referred to as the Overlord of the Known Universe—or some such. And he will do nothing unless we all call him that.”
“Wow.”
“Some do it because they think it’s funny. Some actually do it willingly out of, I guess, some kind of natural fealty to authority. I refuse either and now he’s out to get me, I just know it.”
“It might be true in a way.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“It’s like he’s conceding ignorance. Within Kent’s frame of mind, the Red Lobster on Route 22 actually is the limit of his knowledge of the universe.”
“Why do I have to suffer for it?”
“That’s just how it is? I don’t know. Why do you?”
“Sarah, I guess.”
“Who’s that?”
“The other shift manager. Much better to work with. Her shifts have an orderliness to them, a kind of seamless process. Nothing ever goes wrong and nothing is ever held up. It’s actually kind of like a ritual. Yeah. I bet in an ancient time she would have been a Druid high priestess of terrible authority. The waitstaff are these fawns and she’s leading us along to her altar. And like good fawns we follow not knowing any better.”
“That sounds like only a slight improvement.”
“It helps that her breasts are like rogue planets careening across the galaxy by a codependent gravitational force.”
“See? Everyone’s known universe has their limits.”
Dead Butterflies
“Times like this, when the summer lapses into the cooler months, make me think of 1998. I don’t know why that is. I am, I think, like most people. I can keep high school just where it belongs in my memory. Off to the side somewhere for occasional, entirely practical reference.
“Not so with freshman year, which has a way of lingering more stubbornly. Not quite to the point of haunting but not as indefinite as something on the verge of fading out. Anything specific to that time, every concrete event, has been safely incinerated, that’s for sure. It’s the sense of freshman year—the feeling of it—that forces its way to the center of my mind. Always at this time. The air itself has the aroma of 1998. The end of 1998 as a year is for me the beginning of 1998 as a state of being.
“1998 is ever renewing, with the same butterflies in the stomach, the trepidations in the halls, and no end to the possibilities, good and bad; even if in reality the butterflies are dead, the hallways have darkened, and nothing is possible.
“The air also has a smokiness that makes me recall Halloween. Strange, as I didn’t go out on Halloween in 1998. It was not a good idea to do so as a freshman, or so it was instilled. You could fall into the snare of a senior and get dropped off before one of the many mouths of the unknown this state harbors. Maybe it’s a vicarious sort of feeling for my classmates who, lacking wits or good sense, stared long into the unknown mouth. I hope they’re okay now.
“Naturally I am troubled to feel this way. I don’t embrace it or take pride in it. I don’t feel more human or adult. But I’ve made peace with it. We must protect our heritage, after all.”
Toxic Blasts
“You know, there are some lines of personal reproach that should be harsher than they are. While some are overrated.”
“What is an overrated one?”
“Telling someone that they are a ‘bad friend.’”
“I don’t know, that seems pretty wounding to me.”
“Maybe within the right context, with suitable intimacy, and with a deliverer of confirmed personal authority. Also, I guess, the right vocal inflection. But not on its own. Its independent spirit is pretty feeble.”
“Okay, compared to what? What could possibly be worse?”
“Saying that someone is a bad judge of character.”
“I don’t get it.”
“No I didn’t think you would. It comes in a very benign-seeming package. But benign-seeming things often conceal a, let’s say, wider blast-radius of toxicity. Someone who’s a ‘bad friend’ is merely a social nuisance and can have redeeming qualities in different areas life, especially if they’ve mastered compartmentalization well enough. And they are also fixable by people who’ve mastered patience well enough. A bad judge of character can exact more damage in any number of situations and they often do so out of principle.”
“I don’t know, if they did it out of some deep-seated principle it’d be much more complicated.”
“How do you mean?”
“That implies a kind of choice. There are probably people who can’t help who compels them. That’s impulse, and not an easy one to untangle.”
“Fair.”
“But let’s say someone can help who they’re compelled to, are very good at partitioning good influences from the less good, but only so that they may associate with the less good. Then it’s not a matter of self-control, but of total self-mastery—of personal taste.”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“And that cuts close to an imposition of one person’s taste on another person’s. What is the harshness assessment of that, I wonder?”
Shrieking Horses
“No one who sobs in the open sobs for themselves. Private troubles are wasted on public tears. No good person, who values goodness rightly, finds it proper. It is exactly contrary to hearing the calls of free-roaming fugitive sorrows, answering the call most adequate for your strength, and availing your tears and body to its relief.
“You are never freer than in that process. Nothing weighs on you so lightly as your own petty sadnesses. Even as the sadness to which you give momentary captivity accentuates every muscle to marble rigidity, and strains your voice to the pitch of shrieking horses in a burning barn. All while in your finest suit, on park grass, amid the appreciative half-glances of Shake Shack customers and dog moms.”