Retrocausality And You

When I gaze into the gypsy's crystal ball, I see my past, not my future. And no tall, dark stranger appears, just someone short and bald instead. And it is me. What's my old self doing trapped inside this occult sphere? 

I'm at the The Gare de Lyon, September 2012, ordering a ticket in phrasebook French, and neither the ticket nor my terrible accent will get me very far. The weather in Paris is even cloudier than the crystal ball, so I've decided to head south. Monte Carlo or bust, or something like that. And there I am in the scrying glass, plodding around the platform with a load of luggage.

The gypsy had a face like Moses on magic mushrooms when I first crossed her palm with silver. But reacting to this non-event in her crystal ball she seems as bored as Pharaoh's dyspeptic aunt trimming her own toenails. There's no mystery, no drama, not much of anything happening at all, except me on the train, trying to force my oversized suitcase into an overhead bin.

I can sympathize with the fortune teller. After all, she expected to disclose to me epiphanies of a deeply personal nature, only to get stuck watching my Euro vacation slideshow: "Here I am again in the buffet car, ordering my third cafe au lait of the morning. And this is one of me later on, asking the train's conductor for directions to the second-class carriage's toilette." 

And now I recall, it was back then, in that very train toilette, that I beheld a phantom image of my future self while staring into the mirror bolted to the compartment wall. My face, thirteen years older but zero years wiser. 'Don't forget to wash your hands,' my future lips had mouthed back at me. 'The hand towels are below the sink in that metal container.'

And so they were. But did I really need to be told this by a spectral vision? Apparently, the future self is father of the former self, if only on the most banal and mundane terms. Bathroom etiquette reminders are fine, but hardly as relevant to me as do-or-die information affecting the ongoing unfolding of my existence. Dante was blessed with a visit from Virgil; all I get is the equivalent of a handwritten sign in a restaurant's employee restroom. 

People in magazines and books receive all kinds of valuable communications from whatever clairvoyant they visit. Messages from beyond the veil about money, health, potential danger and other vital human interests. All I get is a constant reminder to wash my hands, as if I'm trapped in a paranormal hygiene loop, my fingers dripping with messy ectoplasmic sauce. It's like being haunted by the ghost of a headless Miss Manners, or Jacob Marley dragging chains of all the bacteria he failed to scrub away in life.

The irony, of course, is that for all their portentous pointing at hot water taps, never once has one of my anachronistic apparitions explained how to operate a public bathroom's plastic soap dispenser thing. Now, the divine revelation of how those stupid contraptions work would be a truly sublime demonstration of unbelievable psychic power.

'Perhaps consulting the Tarot will tell you more?' the gypsy proposed as I prepared to leave her caravan. Yeah, maybe: a card depicting my younger self as The Fool, sitting in his bath tub surrounded by rubber ducks, reaching for a bottle of cheap shampoo. Thanks, but no thanks. I already know the future that card foretells, and examining it now won't prevent male pattern baldness.

What Can You Hear

It's becoming increasingly clear that the Music of the Spheres was composed for the banjo; that angels play bongo drums instead of harps; that the sound of heavenly choirs is just the chintzy ringtone from an anonymous burner phone.

I've always thought Orpheus was tone-deaf. It's just that ancient melodies were so plinkety-plonkety discordant that nobody back then ever suspected the truth. Virgil can say what he likes, but this is clearly the real reason why Eurydice returned to the underworld: she preferred the relative peace and quiet of Hades to her husband's endless cacophony. 

Frankly, we'd all be better off sitting in silence than listening to the caterwaul of the world. There's always the song of the wind; the natural rhythm of the rain; the symphonic sweep of the sunrise and sunset's great aria; even an October day's mellow concerto for tuba and trombone. 

Well, we could enjoy those consolations if the wind's song wasn't stifled by the sonic boom of rockets and guns, if the rain's rhythm wasn't washed away with the staccato spittle of TV's talking heads, if the sunrise and sunset's operettas weren't silenced by thick blankets of brown smog; if October's brass band hadn't already been told to put a sock in it by the consumer scream of industrial Halloween.

Personally, I try to avoid the mournful echo of my own disenchantment by listening to recordings of the past captured on audio cassette. I've been slowly soundproofing the Memory Palace where I live so the belligerent bellowing of nowadays can't be heard. That and noise canceling headphones are pretty useful modern tools.

What Would Keats Think?

The first of October's leaves fall in a flurry of gold, forming a carpet of crisp Krugerrands; a pumpkin-lined path lit by a low sun leading towards Hallowe'en. Well, at least that's what the leaves do in an unemployed poet's mind. The putrefying truth is very different.

Actually, their fall is more like the slow drip of dirty brown water from a rusty tap into a broken sink, its drain long since blocked by a shapeless mass of slimy human hair and soap scum. But we lyricists must keep the Autumnal myth alive in this so-called 'Spooky Season' of frauds and hollow fruitlessness.

Alas, Johnny Appleseed now orders online from the comfort of his climate-controlled condominium. 'Made in China, our new indoor apple orchard provides enough apples to bake fifteen ersatz apple pies or ferment fifty gallons of apple cider vinegar. Your choice, it's a free country after all.' Johnny chooses to do the pies. Unfortunately only one is Instagram worthy so the rest go in the garbage. 

Indian summer and I'm loitering at the edge of an ornamental pond, as aimless as the breeze buffeted ripples on its surface, when the gloomy face of an ancient carp appears in a gap between two leathery green lilies. His big rubbery lips open and close soundlessly, as if he's trying to mouth fishy secrets to me without being overheard by those migrating birds. If only he could speak in sign-language with his pectoral fins, I might learn a thing or two about survival as a bottom feeder.

Meanwhile, cute Miss Cranberry's garden is full of inflatable phantoms and plastic skeletons covered with silly string DayGlo cobwebs. Three weeks before the kids emerge to collect their buckets of candy and her house is already haunted by crass commercial decorations. All the parents are worried that it will rain on the neighborhood Hallowe'en parade again this year. Even in Spooky Season, there is nothing scarier than Mother Nature's weather whims.

And so, at sunset, I watch the first leaf fall into my front yard. Did it jump or was it pushed? It seems concerned that none of its friends have followed it down. But I suppose we're all somewhat confused nowadays. Autumnal mist has turned into dense fog and we'll need to replace our jack-o-lanterns with real flashlights to see where we're going.

The Milky Way

'Imagine you're an astronaut experiencing significant gravitational force during blast-off,' I told myself while almost horizontal in the dentist's chair, my poor face exhibiting a ridiculous rictus grin. 'Per ardua ad astra,' as they say in sky pilot circles.

Being called from the waiting room certainly felt like exiting Earth's atmosphere; and entering this surgical room a good approximation of climbing into some NASA rocket's capsule. 

Now, after the novocaine, I'm drifting in outer space between hitherto unknown nebulas and hazy stars. That overhead lamp has become double moons, quickly eclipsed by a Martian warlord wearing mint-green scrubs, who approaches with his science-fiction tools of tooth and gum torture. 

But I am Captain Fez, trained to withstand any pain in the known Universe, even a root canal like the one that made Flash Gordon cry. 

Meanwhile, in another stratosphere, strands of silvery dental floss are sucked into a Black Hole that resembles an open mouth. An electric bristled toothbrush hurtles through time on its mission to discover hard to reach cavities. But I'm in suspended animation and wouldn't notice a Supernova if one exploded in my face.

"I'd like to probe you again in about six months," the Martian warlord says when his interrogation of my molars is finally over. "Please see the Venusian slave-girl at the reception desk to make an appointment on your way out."

And so I return to Earth, still feeling slightly weightless and unable to do much other than mumble and sigh. 'One small sigh for me, one giant smirk for my dentist's bank account,' to paraphrase Neil Armstrong.

Paper People

Sometimes I feel like an old library book: a musty hardback that has lost its dust-cover, with yellowed pages and coffee stains, and a few confusing sentences underlined in ballpoint pen. There's an abandoned bookmark inserted at chapter twelve, as far as most readers get before giving up. After all, the hero is not that engaging, never mind actually heroic. The plot is pretty much non-existent and you know who is the murderer is when you're only about halfway through. So it's more of a Why Would Anyone Bother rather than Whodunnit type of mystery. Last borrowed in 1975 according to the librarian's stamp, apparently by mistake. Still, even though it's just a predictable novel about nothing in particular, at least it's a book.

And it's better than feeling like the local supermarket circular, with which many citizens I see out on the street must secretly identify. Stare into their eyes and you will see 'on-sale' coupons for fruit flavored cans of soda. Look into their hearts and it's a package of cured deli meat, pre-sliced. And there are other people who are a daily newspaper with the cartoons and crossword missing. Just a gloomy front page, police blotter, classified ads, and a Sudoko puzzle filled out incorrectly. An entire community of waste paper that would be more productive if used to line the bottom of a pensioner's underwear drawer, or folded into the shape of an airplane to keep the kids amused. 

Goodbye To All This

As the leaves make their final farewells to the trees, I also bid adieu to Cedar Street. I was watching the world from my window when I made the decision to depart. There has to be a room with a better view than this, I told myself; a superior rectangle of world somewhere else that's more inspiring that this present portrait of quotidian ennui.  Perhaps it was just the net curtain irritating my face again, but I knew it was time to move on. Just take a look for yourself:

Commuter traffic struggles over the speed bumps in the street. The mailman shuffles down the sidewalk with his burden of unwanted consumer catalogs and credit card bills. Screaming children are dragged to school by exhausted parents. A homeless man collapses on the curb wondering where it all went wrong. All the neighborhood front and back yards have been paved over, so the early bird can catch no worm, fluttering aimlessly from wire to wire instead. And in the nooks and crannies of the cul-de-sac, a stray dog that's lost all sense of scent slams its head against the wall. Even the local rats seem confused by the haphazard sewer system that runs beneath the road. Where do all creatures great and small go from here?

I'm thinking the seaside. A brief thumb through the magazine called Coastal Living convinced me to check out ocean real estate. After all, I've always been fond of sand dunes and salty air, as the old song goes. I could haunt the harbor, watching what remains of the fishing fleet come and go. I could carve effigies of marine life from driftwood and sell my creations to tourists for cash. I could drink rum cocktails every night while watching the sun set over the bay. I could stack battered buoys and wrecked lobster pots against my house with a little plaque above reading "Ahoy there, matey. Welcome to the Captain's cabin."

I could do all that. But I'd be satisfied with merely seeing eternity reflected in a rock pool and the echoing sound of crashing waves. I'd bring the stray dog with me, too, because he'd enjoy all the smells of the beach and chasing gulls along the shoreline. We'd share a plate of fried cod and a side of clams then wander off home down the coast road. Contentment can be so easy.

Blue Sky Thinking

I never understood why the protagonist in 'Eat, Pray, Love' traveled to three different countries to sample food, transcendence, and romance. Elizabeth Gilbert could easily have experienced all three in Naples and saved on her airfare. 

After all, Napoli, besides being the home of pizza, is also a city of many fascinating churches and Sophia Loren. Its centro storico is quite different than the lungomare or the affluent neighborhood of Chiaia, so Elizabeth could at least feel like she was visiting three different environments despite remaining within the confines of the capital of Campania.

But I would never presume to find fault with the logic of an international bestseller (although such editorial changes would certainly have reduced the budget of the movie adaptation).

In fact, with enough ITA Airways air miles, a smart person could Eat, Pray, Love for free in Napoli. Well, the pizza would be about ten euros or so. Entering the Duomo is free but you'd surely leave a donation of about five euro. The price of love? Well, that's up to you, I guess. Although I would not recommend economy in that department. Nevertheless, I think the total gross expenditure would be a lot less than Elizabeth shelled out for her epiphanies.

Of course, the male equivalent of 'Eat, Pray, Love' is probably 'Drink, Watch Sport, Ogle,' and to indulge in those venerable if somewhat questionable activities I'd advise Mr Gilbert to also spend an educational weekend in Napoli.

I think the average guy could learn a lot from a combination of Italian amari, the Serie A championship-winning soccer team, and all the fashionable ladies sauntering along Via dei Mille. Perhaps I should write a book?