Phantom Desires:the un-natural natural
I was driving home from the Quicky Mart today suck’n on my purple squishy, a Leonard Cohen love song playing, which is both sarcastic and deeply moving. I’m not sure if it was the Purple Squishy, the cool Fall air or Mr. cohen, or that i had left my wife at home watching Peggy Sue, but I started reminiscing… and I just don’t do that any more.
“I don’t like Nature, it’s very un-natural, Dreams seem much more natural.”
The last day I saw a good friend came to my mind. It has been at-least 15 years, and I haven’t thought of him in 12. He was about 16 and I was hovering around 18, and at that time in life where you start to think about actually doing something with the time you have on earth. We hadn’t seen each other in a few months, and kinda both “over” each other, though still good friends. He was bat ass crazy. So much so, that you probably wouldn’t believe the stories I could tell about him. Usually the cops where chasing him, sometimes in a big OJ Simpson slow chase down the highway, but this day, this last day – he just looked like a kid full of life. I had never seen him with a girl, or a truck/car he hadn’t swiped or stolen. But this was his truck, and his girl.
I worked at a Gas station that was the center of town. I walked out and gave him a big hug and we talked a bit about life. His girl was beautiful, she kicked the creaky door open and yap’d at him to hurry, then slid back on her back with her toes barley touching the dusty lining of the truck celling.
the whole moment felt surreal, maybe because of the perfect cool weather, which was strange in that season. I was all about the weather at the Gas Station, because the shop was usually unbearably hot, and cool, or rainy days would linger in my mind for days.
He jumped in the truck, waved, kissed his girl and they were off. I remember being sad when he left, like it was the end of an era. I knew from our conversation that we didn’t have much in common any more, and probably not seek each other out ever again.
When I got home from the station that day I got a Call from one of my best friends, that HE was dead. The happy little kid in the truck with a new girl, was dead. He had gone to hang out on a parking garage that his Father owned (these are the kind of things we did around there), and while jumping from skylight to skylight he fell 5-6 stories to his death. This was incomprehensible… he was crazy dude, nothing could touch him, and now a stupid skylight gave out and poof.
Everything in this world, in nature of Human desire, seems to have it’s equal fulfillment in some form.
Within a month another of our Gang was dead by the same skylight… we never got a satisfactory answer, some said it was murder, suicide.. I still am not real sure what happened. But, thats not really part of the story.
If death is apart of the natural order, which it certainly seems to be, why does it seem so un-natural. I’ll have to paraphrase, but my favorite Bob Dylan quote is “I don’t like Nature, it’s very un-natural, Dreams seem much more natural.” That about sums it up for me.
I usually have my books in front of me so I sound more intelligent than I am, but I don’t have access to them, so I’ll try to say this off the top of my head. Everything in this world, in nature of Human desire, seems to have it’s equal fulfillment in some form. Such as hunger – there is food. Sex, thirst, love, and on. They all can be fulfilled in a general form on this earth, in the natural process of life. But there is one desire that there seems to be no equal counterpart for.
I’ll leave it with that because many greater than me have tried to describe what this seemingly mutant desire that we all have. But, really, we all know that it’s there, and we know, if, only in a glimpse, in a moment at a Gas station with a pretty girls touching their toes on the truck lining, that there is absolutely nothing, here on earth to gratify the phantom desire, like a amputated leg, still cramps and longs to be.
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