LETTERS 

The night before the writer had scrawled on a loose piece of paper this thought, 'what is a day but the base of a new myth?' The writer always wove a tale or two on lost opportunities, lost aspirations, lost memories and how he attempted to tie them to the discipline of the day.

He was frustrated. All his good intentions were being met with by blank stares, cynical laughter, unmoving scenes that whirled around him predictably just as he had seen in visions of his naivete. Those who saw where things had come from soar to a height difficult to maintain. Not only did they soar but they had to circle in ever expanding circles to encompass what could be known.

There was an absolute where ideas dissipated into the vanishing cold of the cosmos.

He discovered three weapons against the dissipation's of the society; concentration, organization, and a finger on the remote control.

'Writer,' his boyhood friend had told him, 'you sound like a damn nurse-maid. Accept the fact that the world moans from its own rubble, giggling at its flaccid state as it tries to celebrate itself.'

'No doubt I was shocked by the implications for myself in the world as you have described it. But, the culprit is the huge effects the machines have brought into being. It goes from machine, to organization that builds the machine, to the pressure applied to the individual in relation to what he must build. I always assume the old human is obsolete. Aren't machines constantly screaming at us, 'we don't want the old humans we want new ones! Praise to the effort and its resistance.'

'And you are bringing in the new ones?'

'I could resist them as much as bring them in.'

The writer had understood the attempt to create history as the attempts of a baboon to fix a stone to a stick. The next century, he thought to himself, will look at us as a sorry lesson to be unlearned. They will bend over their books and videos and shake their heads at the arrogance.

'And you thought you knew the future!'

Events, the writer was convinced, would occur that would destroy all the comfortable illusions. He didn't want to witness them but was convinced that they would take place.

A question that gnawed at him was this: is human nature potential only limited by circumstances? Or is it innately limited and, out of necessity, lives in its own time with all the fabricated laws and taboos that the future will not understand? The writer accepted these questions as academic and a hold over from his college days that had been spent in rock and comedian clubs with a pitcher of beer. The question fascinated him while standing in long lines for the postage or a movie and he could smell the hair of a woman two persons up the line and imagine her as something he desired. What was the potential of this circumstance?

Ah, eternity!

David Eide
December 21, 1999
Back to Jobs page
Back to Letters
Back to Laughing Sun
Back to Oasis