Paranoid about Yahoo making me change my password every other month on my email account and NOT so paranoid about anyone stealing this story, so Im gonna post it here for any and everyone. At the Airport. Written with love for Louis Paul Fristensky III and William Bradberry, two star-crossed lovers that drop meteoric literary bombs on the reg. OK Here we go... Havent I seen?.. It couldnt be. Probly not.... ...but then, the face did seem the same. the thought arises of the almost unrecognized... Coulda been a mistake. Not someone that I really know... Looks just like a combination of... hmmm... How many people out there resemble other people that closely? In any given town, it seems similar characters are forever emerging from the drunken thickets... this phenomenon of thinking that you recognize, and then being almost sure that you dont... warrants rambling investigation. People are the same all over, people love to say, but the general vagueness is unnerving. The bland vacancy of the statement is like the people repeating it. Maybe some people just gotta make things simple so as to slamem inside of their egg-carton brains (not egg-shell, mind you. These are tough eggs, from rough and tumble times). Maybe sometimes there are only so many different colors to paint the doors. But this fleeting deja vu of human faces, this haunting feeling of having almost recognized, but not quite, is like an item found but never needed; an ancient and mysterious grocery receipt recovered from the depths of your own billfold. Is it Chinese? No... the ink is only stained. A faraway, forgotten diner. Within the realms of the tangible and tacit, there are different possibilities at an explanation. Maybe its true! Your initial intuition is on target. You have seen this person before. Somewhere else. Sometimes youll question the stranger. Have I maybe seen you down Atlantic City way? Well, no... Terra Haute? At the moment you want to, out of your confoundment, point blank ask for personal origin and brief history, youre already seeming like a psycho whos striking out. With your alien and incongruous ideas of having possibly previously met, you may mutter and stumble away, suddenly a step out of place. Why do I even care? Perhaps you were mistaken. Feeling the need, like most of us, for the sake of sanity, to immediately tie up any mental loose ends, you walk away solid in your conviction that it was a genuine recognition (or not). The details were simply muddled somehow by your mechanical and inefficient mind. A major possibility in the world of the readily accessible is that: No, it wasnt a person that you recognized, but... Humanity may have an eery inclination towards redundancy... a repetition of the mundane. This is a perfectly plausible cause at face value. Howard Johnson. Waffle House. In every bluejay-hopping cowtown truckstop, the greasy guy in the blue plaid flannels firing up his BSA (real rare motorcycle, he tells strangers, The S.A. stands for Small Arms, ya know! Gun manufacturers, I mean!) in the far left parking spot. He is, so much like the throbbing amoeba of suburban sprawl, a gregariously opportunistic creature of habit. Are there still not enough colors in the rainbow? Is there ultimately an idiots order to even the hodge-podge Jackson Pollack mess of genetics? The whole of genetic theory is, alas, comprised of only four separate symbols. Always one a those, but, when examined with a higher power, these surface similarities dive deep within the fibers of the poly/cotton blend. At a bar, a total stranger approaches you and, far from mistaking you for someone else, has the gall and audacity to proclaim, spewing like the fountainhead of idiocy theyve thrown gushing into your path, that you look JUST LIKE someone they usta know! During sometimes painful subsequent superficial conversation, they are often continually impressed with the differences that they immediately discover in you and this other person that you apparently resemble. The Born And Raiseds, people is pretty much the same everwhere you go, might be right. Perhaps the cabbage grows pretty thick. But, while being a useful tool to tie up the fragmentary remains of unconnected circuits, to clear the cobwebs from our caffeinated minds, the societal template theory actually holds little water, is overloaded with variables, and is at heart unprovable. Simple human error? Faulty grokking of the pheremones? Are these the kernels of aphasia barely stirring in the pot? A murky delirium brewing? The edges of dementia? The event horizon of your so-called soul? Lets consider some points essential to my personal opinion on the matter... According to my own, closely kept, third-party, self-compiled anecdotal observations and interviews, we see that the number of people one meets in a day or a week, at their living and breathing places or social outlets, has little if any effect on the incidences of these recognition fails. The rates of befuddlement, puzzlement over particulars of these living portraits that pass above and below us (indefinitely and unstoppably), seems to occur at close to the same rate for a good portion of the population. The cases of deja vu Im speaking of are NOT mistakes, and NOT the result of an overly-homogenous populace. These are supernatural events. These are the dwindling sparks. This is when the bottom falls out. Why would this individual stand out? What would spark such a forlorn echo in this apparent strangers face? Perhaps youve scurried away now, afraid to touch them with your sad senility. But your last glance tells you that a shade of it has spread, already, to their face. They know now, too. They are the unplaced, the not determined. Their brief pause is enough, and the ghost in the bunch moves on, the glitch in the collective consciousness moves forward, and for a moment your sublime stranger becomes something thrilless but weightless. They are the simple background fuzz, the start of a new roll of wallpaper. All this introspection upon the individual course is unhealthy, though. We can only catch so many fish in that little boat. The blur begins at daybreak. The breaking surf of the throbbing beast. The antdune-like complexity that forces your poor eyes to unfocus, as you peer through the individual grains of sand... these personal particles that make up the amorphous whole fall, fall delicately through the vortex of the hourglass. The seas of endless features... the little girl with the big red apple on her shirt, the serious matron clutching her camisole, the pilot with the wide brown moustache whos readjusting his tie perhaps a bit too often. With or without judgment, the truth of these passing personalities becomes evident in a millisecond blip. You know too much. If re-examined, these frozen frames are too dense for credit allotted, for the time allowed. The boy with the coke-bottle spectacles and the Mickey Mouse hat points his 3D Viewfinder at you, clicking forward to the next picture on the disk. And yes. In a moment, she catches your eye. Of course. Perhaps not purposefully... in fact her gaze is averted, but her eyes leave her in quite the best position to be Recognized. Open shades on open windows. You see a slight disappointment in her face. Conversation at the ticket counter. Who is that? I must know her. Red hair. Blue eyes. Striking blue windows without any blinds. You feel a smidge of embarrassment. Youre a peeping tom, staring down this solitary individual in the bubbling crowd. Trying to start a romance, perhaps? Am I attracted? But why? Its more. You follow without doubt. You never ask. She moves, regimentally, through a separate corridor at a sudden juncture. Naturally, you have different gates of departure. And Shes Gone. Shes already beyond, behind the white escalator, leaving an empty bubble hovering momentarily in her place. With heavy heart, traces of your sentimentality still salting your furrowed brow, you begin the very winding, very short road down. What a ruby of a rube she was. Thats for sure. The Rube Goldberg machine of intellectual attachment is neglected, its standby light green with envy. Shes as good as a princess in a fairy-tale, forever slumbering in the mosquito-net folds of your memories, and infernally twisting the Rubix cube of your prefrontal cortex. After all, this is only a story, so why not a princess? Why shouldnt she be so sparkly? ...for some long moments, wrapped in the elements of oblique observation, you study methodically each of the morose and displaced as they adjust the little plastic straps on their carry-on bags. Each of their pouty, half-adjusted, silent maladies join as one to comprise a tragedy, a true despair, an aching pain of this disconnect. The shiftless shuffling masses are now in focus, a physical emotion to accompany the dragging at your soul left behind by the unrecognized red-headed girl.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 03:14:04 +0000
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