November 6, 2002

Sad eyes

SOME THINGS IN life are sadder than dropping off your lover at the airport and driving away into the gray morning.

Like dropping off your brother and his ratty bike and bedroll under a bridge in Tennessee on a rainy night. Or shoveling up dead, dismembered chickens, or mercy killing live, lame ones with incurable diseases, and then you can't even eat them.

There are incurable diseases for people, too, and car crashes and plane wrecks and mining disasters, or old age.

What if your lover weren't coming back, for example?

Loneliness. Songs: "Big John, big bad John"; "Ground Control to Major Tom"; "Patches, I'm depending on you, son." Or maybe you were George Jones's muse. Maybe your life story inspired the saddest of sad songs, the song so sad it's funny: "He Stopped Loving Her Today." Which makes you dead, which isn't funny (to your friends and family).

Then what if biological or chemical or nuclear warfare accidentally only kills chickens, leaving human beings and cockroaches to scamper about on an utterly eggless planet?

The Giants lose the World Series after being so so so so close to winning it. Last time the Giants won the World Series was almost 50 years ago, against the Indians, and the last time the Indians won it was even longer ago than that. Or maybe you live and bleed with the Red Sox or Cubs.

Next year, of course, the Yankees are right back in it. Rents do not come down. PG&E takes over the world. Ten years from now, Boise, Idaho, has more soul than San Francisco. Maybe Oakland already does. I am living in Utah or Norway or I am not alive, having succumbed, finally, to a rare, incurable poultry disease.

Time changes and it's hardly ever light out anymore.

But, hey, you know what? Sadness itself doesn't have to be so sad, so long as you roll with it and keep more or less afloat. Don't drown, in other words. Spring, like next week, is right around the corner. Keep your chin up. See? You don't have to worry because your feet touch bottom. Always. That's my philosophy, but – dang – here comes a motorboat full of drunk and revelrous Rally Monkeys, not even knowing you exist until after their 225-horsepower V-6 two-stroke outboard has pureed the yin and the yang out of you.

Oh shit, as Bukowski once said.

Which reminds me of the realization of the dawning possibility that all the good books, such as David Copperfield, have already been written (by Dickens, in many cases). So what are you going to do?

CHORUS: I don't want to work. I just want to bang on the drum all day.

Yeah, but all the good songs have already been written, too, again and again and again. And all the good restaurant reviews ...

Or, in yet another scenario, let's say you drop your love off at the Oakland airport on a gray morning, and she won't be back for a whole week, and the Giants lost the World Series, and you have to pee like Tom, Dick, and Harry so you pull in to the first place you see, which is an all-you-can-eat Chinese joint called Green Garden Buffet, but it isn't open yet so you have to go next door to Cafe Salsa, which is a cold, fluorescent light-lit dive with two-tone mustard yellow and barbecue sauce red walls with three big, framed pencil-on-paper drawings of 1) a lemon, 2) a tomato, and 3) three pumpkins, also featuring out-the-window views of banks and hotels and chain link-fenced in vacant lots, weeds pushing up through the asphalt. Sign for the place, Cafe Salsa, advertises homemade breakfast, burritos, fish and chips, and teriyaki. Little bit of everything.

On the radio: "Without love, where would you be now?"

You have to eat breakfast if you want to use the bathroom. Besides which, you have to eat breakfast. You just do. In fact, you're pretty darn hungry, so you get the French toast and two eggs with sausage for $4.95. Not bad, dealwise. And it all turns out to be not bad otherwise, either. Four half-pieces of French toasted bread, mounded with powdered sugar, one sausage link, and one patty – no choice; indecision is presupposed. And there's a salsa bar for your scrambled eggs: a flotilla of no less than five fresh, homemade salsas, plus cilantro and hot peppers in a plastic tub o' melted ice water.

Afloat.

Woman running the joint offers to plug in a space heater. "Are you cold?" she asks. There's a space heater under the counter there.

But nothing, not even space heaters, not even breakfast, not even coffee, can warm you up now.

"No, thanks," you say, drowning your whole plastic plate full of syrup. "I'll be fine."