Story

Three years after Asgor's released from the prison where Asgor was serving time for stock fraud, and two years after Asgor married our father's second wife in a ceremony that was the talk of Moose Jaw, Canada, we found ourselves seated next to Asgor quite by coincidence on an airplane headed for Santiago, Chile, where we were slated to give a speech to a medical conference on existential oncology.  Asgor remembered us, but told us quite frankly that he was not interested in us, he said, "Some people might find you interesting, but I'm not one of them."

At the conference, we met a fellow who told us quite frankly that he had never enjoyed a single instance of happiness over his 78 years of life.  He also told us that he was quite vigorous and in exceptional good health and that his doctors told him that he could expect to enjoy many more years of hearty living as his internal organs, or so they said, and he insisted that these were their exact words, "seemed almost unused."   

Unless we're mistaken, scientists have yet to come up with an exact number of the myriad species of human unhappiness, or even to venture a ballpark figure.  Coming out of the elevator at the medical conference, we ran quite literally into X., whose beauty is of the sort that makes our teeth hurt, but who is married to a man so brilliant that he is to Heidegger as Heidegger is to Carrot Top, times two.  We run into her (although not quite literally) two or three times a year, and whenever we do we experience a pang of unhappiness that is as debilitating as it is unnameable.  If we had to come up with a name for it, we would call it "breath sorrow", but that does not really capture the frisson of panic that is a component part of the unhappiness.  Anyway, we spent a few moments speaking with her, and then she walked off, and then we tore a frond from a large and healthy plant sitting in a native pot in the lobby and beat ourselves with it, the smile we showed her upon parting still plastered on our face.

If life is invariably fatal, cancer is a kind of accelerant that God squirts on you, His human charcoal briquet. 

As a medical person, we can say with authority that happiness is a symptom of derangement.  Outside the airport, we saw a woman climb into an orange Yellow Cab.  She looked very much like an old unrequited love of ours, and we had a Proustian moment.  Then we remembered Asgor, who on the plane told us that whenever he wanted cheering up he flew to a city with a very high suicide rate and spent a day or two walking the streets studying the faces of passersby.  Invariably, he said, this course of treatment succeeded in returning to him his high spirits.  He added that should he ever commit suicide it would be in a place with a very low suicide rate, as such places tended to depress the hell out of him.

Life is very economical in its way.  Thus it is rare that a large commercial airplane falls from the sky onto a person standing in a field.  Life knows that only a small piece of the plane would be required to finish off the person in the field, and acts accordingly.  Similarly, this is why people with cancer rarely simultaneously come down with leukemia and Ebola Fever.  In cancer circles, we say that "God doesn't use a sledgehammer to kill a gnat.  He uses a gnathammer." 

Comments

[Phil Core]

I liked the story and hated all my comment thoughts. Yeah, life hurts then you die. With just this mantra, the whole thing seems totally futile. There are other mantras, we just don’t believe in them like this one. We are determined in this, at least today.

The name ‘Asgor’ begged a Google search which turned up the following translated essay. I’m not sure that was deliberate, I’ll assume so [Asgor is the God of death, the darkness, the despair and the fear.]
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.iphpbb.com/foren-archiv/3/169600/168640/asgor-80523248-9396-188.html&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=8&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dasgor%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG

Galadriel who handles Frodo’s ring, has an epiphany, and says, “Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!”

[Karindira]

"breath sorrow"

Good one. Oh, some people just make you ache like that.

[UF]

Weird, Asgor is a name I came up with off the top of mah head. Thank you, Karindira.

[Jeffers]

The top of your head wants to watch the Lord of the Rings, apparently.

FROOODOOOOOOO.....FROOODOOOOOOOOOO

[Sam Gale Rosen]

Hi, I'm writing from Open Source, a public radio show based in Boston, and distributed around the country.

Two years ago, we started what's become a yearly tradition for us called Blogsday: http://www.radioopensource.org/blogsday-2007/

Based loosely on Bloomsday, which celebrates James Joyce's "Ulysses" as an evocation of the world in a single day (in Joyce's case, June 16, 1904), the idea is to create a mosaic portrait by reading excerpts of blog posts written all over the world on the same day, for one night, for one hour, on live radio. This year, we chose this past Tuesday -- June 5 -- to collect posts from, and the show will air Thursday night from 7-8pm EST.

I'm writing because we really liked your post on the 5th (a listener brought it to our attention), and it's on the shortlist to be included among our Blogsday Best of the June 5th Blogosphere collection.

On Thursday night, we'll bring in two accomplished and agile actors to read excerpts from our collection of posts on the air. I can't guarantee that your post will make it onto the show at this point (we're still knee-deep in our favorites), but you're a finalist.

We can't pay anything -- this is public radio after all -- but we can guarantee a respectful treatment, a national radio audience, and a link on our blog.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'll try to send another email if I can confirm that your post will definitely be on the show beforehand, but if things get too crazy we may just let you know after the fact.

Best,
Sam G.R. (sam radioopensource org)