Lots of people have been writing in and claiming that I haven't been living up to my promise of providing you guys with material for a book, comic book, or movie to be based on my own life. I think that really the culprit here is a lack of imagination on y'all's part (every civilized language needs a second-person plural, and we Southerners are apparently the only ones who can be trusted to provide it), but fair enough. A lack of imagination, after all, is exactly the sort of thing that it's my job to anticipate.
Luckily a pretty action-packed thing happened to me this week—five or six things, actually, but I'm only going to relate one of them in this blog. Tomorrow I will write another blog relating a second one of the five or six things that happened to me this week, that were action-packed. Then the day after tomorrow I will relate a third thing, action-packed, that happened. Then the day after that I will tell you about the fifth, I mean the fourth thing (that was action-packed). Then on the next day I will tell you about the fifth thing that happened, that was action-packed. Then, depending on whether there turns out to be, once I really bear down and start counting them, five or six things that happened to me this week that were action-packed, I will tell you about the sixth thing (if it turns out that there were six) (six things, I mean). Of course I typically keep pretty busy and all sorts of stuff is always flying around in my life, so it may be that something action-packed will happen to me this week, while I'm in the middle of relating all these other things. In that case the business of relating these more recent things will have to get pushed back until I'm done with the preceeding five or six that I just told you I was going to tell you about, unless there's something about the things that crop up this week that makes it so that they really demand, or really cry out for, treatment right away, in which case I'll decide then whether or not I should break up the natural, chronological game plan that I've just laid (lain?) out for you here in this paragraph.
The first thing that I'm going to tell you about is really apropos. What happened was that I actually got shot in the shoulder while wresting control of a taxicab away from its meth-addled driver, who had totally freaked out and was going seventy miles an hour up the sidewalk and coming this close to liquifying all these pedestrians. The guy who shot me was in the backseat. Mes freres humaines, let me tell you how it happened.
My friend Giovanni and I were getting out of the Pierre Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (you really should go if you haven't) and we decided to take a cab to midtown, both as a luxurious splurge and because we had tickets for a show that was starting in forty-five minutes and, while we figured we would probably make it in time, we didn't want to run the risk of getting stuck in the subway for an hour while the train was delayed: unable to move, trapped underground, our (cumulatively) $300 tickets weighing uselessly in our pockets, like lead.
To be honest, I was the one who was worried about being trapped underground for hours with the expensive Broadway tickets going to waste in our pockets. As Giovanni kept pointing out, that kind of thing almost never happens. I insisted that it might. I was insistent about it.
We hailed a cab. Giovanni and I took turns hailing, and it was he who got one to stop. As the cab was pulling up to the curb, a very shady-looking character sidled up to us and asked if we were going to 45th and 8th. Why, yes, we were. He said that he coincidentally was going to the same place—was, in fact, going to the same show that we were—and asked if he could share our cab and if we could split the cost into three parts. What could we say? Naturally we assented. But as we got into the cab Giovanni and I exchanged perplexed and uneasy looks. Because there were no clear means by which this stranger could have known that we were on our way to see that particular show. Eavesdropping, even, was not a possibility: we had not referred explicitly to the show, certainly not by name, one time within the previous hour and fifty-three minutes, and we had not even entered the museum until an hour and forty-six minutes previously, and when we had mentioned the title of the show, an hour and fifty-three minutes earlier, we had been standing on the broad sidewalk by ourselves, with no one else within an eight-foot radius, more or less.
Giovanni and our nominally welcome guest got in the backseat, while the cab driver was kind enough to let me sit up front instead of forcing me to scrunch my way into the back with them. As we pulled away from the curb, Giovanni and I continued the conversation that we had begun in the Metropolitan, while looking at the Bonnards, and which we had continued as we left the museum, walked down the grand front steps of the building, traversed the sidewalk (now rather more crowded than it had been when we'd entered the museum), and hailed the cab. “The thing about Zeno,” said Giovanni, speaking of a local and rather recherche rock and roll band the progress of which it pleases him to follow, “is that they never seem to get ahead. They keep going and going, plugging away, putting all the effort they can into every song, every show, every CD. But they never seem to make real progress.”
I twisted my head so that my mouth, in a general way, pointed towards the backseat, sort of, but I kept my eyes front and on the road. Politely, I said, “Giovanni, I've been telling you and telling you that I don't care about any of this.”
“But I'm not asking you to sympathize. I'm pointing out to you that it is in itself an interesting phenomenon. Do you remember a few paragraphs ago, when you described to the millions of people reading this blog your fear of being trapped in the subway for hours?”
“Certainly I don't remember. I won't be writing that blog entry until several days from now, how could I possibly remember it?”
“Well, in any case. Imagine that you were hurtling forward with great energy, and still not making any more real progress than that subway car. I don't mean that you are expending energy and effort and not getting any results—I mean that you really are moving with a speed and force proportional to the energy you expend, and yet still you make no appreciable progress. What I'm talking about, The Silver Maker, is a paradox.”
“Okay.”
“And that still doesn't interest you?” demanded Giovanni, sounding frankly shocked. Then he went on to make some observations that actually were really quite fascinating, and which to be honest got me hooked on what he was talking about.
But a digression that interesting deserves more energy than I have available right now, as I've spent about an hour setting all this down and it's near my bedtime (I have to get up at two in the morning tomorrow). I'll lay it all out for you tomorrow, when I'm feeling fresher, and while I'm at it I'll wrap up the tale of the mysterious cab-guest, the maddened driver, the bullet, and the Broadway show we had those expensive tickets for (did we make the curtain? didn't we?).
Obviously this will necessitate some unavoidable tampering with the time-table I laid (lay?) out for you earlier. I know that many of you will object that I could stick to it, substantially at least, if I were willing to address two action-packed things in a single day's blog entry, but there is no way that my schedule, as it stands, will possibly admit of such a thing. Therefore, what with things being as, now, they are, tomorrow I will be discussing the first action-packed thing that happened to me, and not today; which is as much as to say, tomorrow I will be relating the first action-packed thing that happened to me, and not the second. The day after tomorrow, I will undertake to relate to all of you the second action-packed thing that happened to me. On the following day, I will relate the third action-packed thing. The fourth action-packed thing that happened to me this week will be related on the day following, with some discussion afterwards if time permits. As for the fifth action-packed thing that happened to me, that will be discussed on the next day. I must count up the action-packed things that happened to me in the past week; if it turns out that there were only five, then I will stop there; if there were six things that happened to me, that were action-packed, then in the next day's blog I'll tell you all about it (about the sixth thing). Life being what it is, it may happen that there will be some other action-packed occurrence between now and then, I mean the sixth (or whatever) day following from today. In that case, I will probably place that action-packed event aside, to wait its turn and be discussed after the five, or six, that I've already mentioned. But it may be that the new action-packed thing is so topical, or is of such an overriding inherent interest, that it cries out to be addressed at once. In that circumstance I shall break the hierarchy, and set the new action-packed event(s) at the forefront.
