Waiting For Endings
To Begin.... Something Must End
Reminder: The Wondrous Wonder Scroll is at the very, very, very END of this missive. Read through the hoo-ha and the beginning of a not-so-short story to find three wonders in our still wondrous world.
Spring is currently announcing winter is maybe-hopefully ending—otherwise known as Lucy and the Football season in the Midwest. Coats are piled on every chair in my kitchen. One for temperatures above freezing, another for below, a third for rainy days, and a fourth, fifth, and sixth for layers. Winter boots in a corner have two pairs of lighter sister boots stacked on top. Next to that pile are gnarly sneakers for hiking after it rains and a decent set for the road. My kitchen looks like a pit stop somewhere on the Appalacian trail. Without pots and pans hanging above the counter, one would have difficulty discerning between the two.
Lucy rarely announces when footballs bring rain, snow, or hail bombs that’ll require more than pink earmuffs—on a table and away from a dog who shreds them to pieces—primly reigning atop a plethora of supplements on an overwhelmed screaming lazy susan. Lucy eventually tires of spring keep away and allows warmer temperatures to appear and soon my kitchen will cease to be littered with hybrid-weather gear.
As a species, humans ought to have Lucy and the pre-ending football understood. The word “deathwatch” has been used since at least 1660-70. Not-so-oddly in this current hellscape, the word use is at an all time high. Seriously. More than double than when it originated.
Consider that information an AI “wonder” and okay, there are some positives to robots giving us data no human would spend time averaging.
I won’t offer my thoughts on why the “deathwatch” numbers are more than double. Suffice to say, they are impolite.
Endings take as long as they take.
I’ve spent a big chunk of my life pining for endings. Be they the subsequent deaths of a badly wounded animal and my grandma locked in an unwakeable coma. Or, the symbolic endings of a final therapy session and the removal of a king wanna-be—still fidgeting in the waiting room over here.
I’ve been “Waiting for Godot” more minutes than not.
A link to the movie in case you never saw it…
I’m starting to understand that “waiting” carries a dagger—a nameless dagger. Waiting for “blank” removes participation in the *now* and does so without being *told to do so*. There is no slap across the face or smack to the head by a cabinet door announcing one is dithering away life minutes while waiting for an ending. Though, I do acknowledge that after slamming a cabinet door several times in retaliation the last time one injured my head, I didn’t miss the background grumble that if I’d been paying attention the injury would’nt have happened.
There is living to be had while waiting for the unknown. I’ve often projected the afterward to an ending. More often than not, I’m wrong.
In a collection of books, Harry Potter rode the threshhold both well, and at times poorly, as he moved into a future that had a death knell foreshadowing every step.
A conversation between a nearly or wholly dead Harry Potter and a ghostly Professor Dumbledore is a good example as well as a prelude to the beginning of a short story I have included below.
Harry: “Professor, is this all real? Or is it just happening inside my head?”
Professor: “Of course it’s all happening inside your head, Harry. Why should that mean it’s not real?”
In the first chapter of my longish-short story below, creatively jumpstarted by a dream, waiting for an unknown behind a door is the underlying theme.
The second chapter will be included in the next email bucket of words. Thank you for subscribing and following along until the end….and the Wonder Scroll afterword…
To Begin, Something Must End…
In a job with a meaningless element, “el” had labored through enough days it had shaved away the belief that life could be interesting. The workplace was within a mall filled with other meaningless tasks—sorting paper and fish being two. el’s job middled them, leaving behind paper cuts and a penetrating odor as bleak exclamation points. The effort involved wrapping individual fish in paper. The fish smelled and looked the same, each eyeball staring reproachfully at el as if to say “Look at you, mindlessly wrapping one carcass after the other as though a piece of paper can separate you from reality.”
When reproachful fish thoughts came to el, it felt ludicrous and not because it meant something inside el’s brain was breaking or broken, but because nothing separated el from the tedious work. Everything smelled the same. The laundry, the air at home, even the interior of el’s mind carried the wreak of thousands of hours spent at the mindless task.
A vitally important aspect to the day was the hundreds of times el glanced at an announcement sign high above a central open area. Similar to a mechanical train station sign, there were moving tiles that rapidly flipped every fifteen minutes. In this version, tiles did not convey locations. Instead, names of individuals summoned “passengers” to a pair of turnstiles leading to mystery doors on the far side of the open area. Turnstiles were specifically appropriate as the entry point for a “turn” to leave a meaningless job and dash toward the unknown. There was an allottment of two minutes between when names showed up and making it to and through the whirly gates leading to enormous, double doors.
During after work hours, it wasn’t rare for shrieks of despair to startle el from sleep. These might have been echoes from when people hadn’t seen their name until it was too late. When they tried to move through the turnstiles and the gate wouldn’t allow them through, their howls of anguish had a vibration that hummed into the root of el’s tongue. At night, unable to return to sleep, el imagined there were times when the tiles had stopped flipping and displayed “el” and she had been too lost in the eyeball of a fish and the smell rotting her insides. If despair was described by smell, it would be decaying fish.
Waiting and waiting and waiting.
Life stood still and contrarily, aged.
On the 99,999th day and el’s forty-seventh glance of the morning, tiles on the sign dropped one at time— e…..l. The second hand leaped into ticking down two minutes. The eyeball in el’s hand solemnly stared at her. It took several loud heartbeats for el to drop the fish and sprint for the turnstyle. A dozen or more people piled up at the whirly gates. Anxiety in that cluster reached a silently fierce frenzy. It was not uncommon for people to be hurt during this part of the process. Today, that didn’t happen. Perhaps, like el, the others had waited decades and the shock pushed them into a dazed politeness.
As the gate clicked el through and before the next person, there was a weird reverberation in her belly. It came in as a thundering pronouncement of a giant gear shifting beneath her feet. It hadn’t been felt on floor two of the mall where el wrapped fish. el wondered if enduring a tedious task was safer than going through a doorway that didn’t have a window or label describing what’s inside. An obvious worry, one that el should have considered long before now.
A few feet from the turnstyle, the pair of enormous wooden doors opened without a creak or turning of the knob. The small crowd stepped forward without being told. There wasn’t a greeter or a sign, nothing to command anyone to move, and yet, they did. When the last of them crossed the threshold, the doors shut as quietly as they had opened, the only change being that the room suddenly felt vacuum sealed. Dark wood covered the large space floor-to-ceiling and did not feel at all associated with the mall—an escape pod detached from the mother ship or an entirely different universe separated by a shell and a thin layer of albumen.
el had escaped decades of known to enter a world where anything was possible….
Part Two *COMING SOON*
You Are Now Entering The Wonder Scroll Portal…
While it may seem our neanderthal period has as many sequels as the Godzilla series (30), that crude and cruel era is on life support. Someone put a stake through its heart and set the body on fire, already! The human brain evolves even when entrenched culture shrieks that it must regress.
Sorry “the Middle Ages were great” folks, that ain’t possible.
Which means what exactly? For me, it means conserving energy and adding to my reserves by spending less time lookie-lou scrolling the sinking of the Titanic. Instead, I’ll focus on helping those I can help and picturing a world that avoids war and harm, and grows sunflowers and people who care.
It’s easier to picture that kind of world after wonder scrolling. Here are a few wonders I found this week:
The Ink: A Substack Newsletter written by Anand Giridharadas. My favorite follow this past month. Anand has given me the juice to stay present.
“The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together. The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living—free, colorful, open—they want to snuff out. So when they dehumanize, you humanize.”
Hamish McKenzie wrote an essay about the chaotic state of the news media or as we oldster’s used to call it “the nightly news with Walter Cronkite.” I’ve been in mourning for long gone Walter for several years and I know I’m not alone. On top of missing the way news used to be, I have wondered where the hell the current form is going. I appreciate McKenzie’s pondering in essay form:
“This media flux is more than just the swing of a pendulum. It’s the beginning of ecosystem change. We are moving away from the era of centralized institutions to a time of massively distributed voices. So far, it has been messy as hell. But not all chaos—presuming it doesn’t last forever—is bad. Indeed, chaos is often a necessary stage of evolution.”
Would You Opt For A Life Without Pain? As soon as I asked myself this question I changed my mind. The video has a timely twist. I highly recommend.
Thank you for reading. Chapter Two of To Begin, will smack your inbox soon!
OK! Can’t wait for part 2!
OUTFREAKINGSTANDING…I’ll be munching on this one for AWHILE! 😋😊❤️ ✍🏼