ONE TURN AWAY, PART 3 Well, at least it was over with now. At least he *didn’t* get arrested. And he was away from those two old bats. Actually part of him expected to have a third run-in with them. On sit-coms that’s exactly what *would* happen. The story needs a third act and a running gag is the classic way to do it so in all likelihood when he tried pulling out of his parking space a moment from now he’d find himself able to back up no more than halfway, his path being blocked by a beat-up Oldsmobile pointlessly stopped dead in its tracks. Then through the half-open window he’d faintly hear: “EDNA, WHAT’S THAT??” “I believe I used to have one of those. They call ’em Dodge Swingers.” “OH COME ON, EDNA, YOU CAN’T CALL A CAR SOMETHING LIKE THAT!” “It’s true! Brand names these days are positively shameless! Do you know what Haagen Dazs actually means in the original Cantonese?” Roll end credits. As it turns out he *did* have an encounter with the person he least wanted to meet at that particular moment. It’s just that he didn’t know until it actually happened just who that person was. He hadn’t thought about his old high school friend Greg Uriah once in months. Perhaps this was blameworthy considering that the last time he’d seen Greg the man had been stumbling sheepishly out of the front door after that lecture on how dangerous a road it was he’d been forcing everyone to watch him head down. Rumor had it in those days that there was hardly a single recreational substance in existence which did not at least occasionally find its way into Greg’s bloodstream, if only three or four times a year. Many did three or four times a day. Back then Greg’s face had been so pale and haggard that it was easy to forget how popular he’d once been with the ladies. There was no hint of that visage to be seen in this one. Greg’s natural handsomeness had been fully restored. “Holy shit,” he said as he walked by George in the parking lot and did a double take. “Long time no see.” “I...yeah,” George replied slowly. He resisted the urge to find a way to work in an exhortation to walk and talk. Probably no one was really going to call the police, or at least not now. “How’ve you been?” “Better than ever, man!” George piped. “I guess I owe it mostly to you, now that I think of it. ’Cause I haven’t touched cocaine, or marijuana, or heroin, or *any* kind of drug at all, in years. I started going to Narcotics Anonymous. I even started volunteering there. I’ve heard, you know, on the grapevine, that someday I could be running meetings, helping people out myself. Isn’t that awesome?! And it’s just like you said: all it took was a little bit of patience. All it took was for me to realize that nothing that ever happened to me could be that big a deal.” “Uh, right...exactly,” George said. He felt like someone had ripped the soul out of him and replaced it with a cheap Styrofoam substitute. “You’re great, man,” Greg said, grinning from ear to ear. “Hey—as long as we’re here, you got any words of wisdom for me right now?” George had hardly felt less wise in his entire life. He did not, however, want to let his friend down. For perhaps an entire minute he was silent, his head bowed as if in Zen meditation. Then he raised it again. A look of seriousness bordering on severity was on his face. Greg could almost detect the guilt in it but he was fully consciously aware only of the gravity. “Greg,” George said, “the thing about impatience is that it’s kind of a form of injustice, I guess. Take pet peeves, for example. Say that people play bad music really loud around you five hundred times. Now obviously it’s not going to bother you much the first time, and if you saw somebody shouting at the person doing it then, you’d think that shouter was the biggest asshole in the world. But then after five hundred more people do exactly the same thing...well, the pressure just builds and builds, and finally you snap. Not just once either. You start snapping every time someone *ever* plays loud bad music. Because it just keeps on happening. And we call that a pet peeve. “But it’s illogical. You’re pulling a double standard. You’re behaving just like that asshole from before—and you remember how much you hated *him*. But then again *he* had probably heard it five hundred times before too, if you put yourself in his shoes. The real injustice here is that you’re punishing that five hundredth person for what the four hundred and ninety nine people before him did, not mainly for what *he’s* doing. You’re letting your baggage decide things for you. That’s what our emotions do to us. They fog things up. They get in the way. It can make you do the most horrible, horrible things. And maybe miss the best opportunities in life too, who knows? But I guess we have to move on. Let go of the baggage then as well. You’ve learned that already, though, haven’t you?” George had barely finished speaking when Greg grabbed him in a tight and extremely painful bear hug. It was amazing that a man with such a lack of visible muscle tone as Greg had could manage a grip like that. The meaning of the embrace wasn’t really within George’s comprehension. Evidently his little speech had carried more resonance than he’d intended. Maybe Greg *hadn’t* already learned to move on after all. But there was no time for clarification because off Greg went into the store without another word, and at quite a fast pace. Oh well. As George entered his car and started the ignition he found himself thinking once again about the girl behind the checkout counter. *Might* something have happened had he not pulled his awful little stunt? Might they have someday gotten married and had nine children? How many potentially life-altering opportunities get missed—perhaps daily for all we know—because of the slightest mistakes? Or even things that *aren’t* mistakes for that matter? Had there maybe been at some point an occasion on which he had, upon deciding to take a shortcut to this very store, walked through the doors five minutes too early and as a result not met a supermodel he might have spent the rest of his life with? Or happened to turn his head at just the wrong instant while walking past an alley and failed to see ten million dollars lying in plain sight? Conversely how many times had he taken a wrong turn while going to McDonald’s or somewhere and narrowly avoided being killed by a drunk driver? He was so lost in these thoughts that he almost backed up right into the car behind him. For a second or so he panicked...but it was a perfectly ordinary car. A Nissan GTR by the looks of it. George halted immediately, waved apologetically and gave the angry middle-aged man behind him ample time to leave. You know, he thought, the garden’s fine without that piece of screening anyway. THE END Hello, government. You may remember me as the guy who wrote “A Second Reunion” (noavatarjokeshere.tumblr/myfiction), the story the preceding was a sequel to. The situation is the same now. When I heard from geekosystem/dhs-list-of-buzzwords/ that there’s a new list of generally commonplace words you’re using as a guide for your eavesdropping—the apparent idea being some laughable attempt to find enemies of the State posting in plain sight on Facebook (presumably announcing their evil plans right between the pictures of attention-seeking fourteen-year-old girls making a duck face in their bikinis and the insipid Neil deGrasse Tyson quotes)—I selected forty-seven words out of this new list to disperse throughout my story. (I wonder how many the readers can spot. We could make this into sort of a game.) In the words of Victor Meldrew, “Noting these details I took the liberty of inviting you round here today just so as I could deliberately waste your time for the best part of an entire morning.”
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:33:48 +0000
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