A Strategy


Dear Eugene,

I suppose if a person wakes up every morning without considering the compromises he's going to make in the next 24 hours he probably has nothing to fight for, nothing to lose himself into.

A person with an ideal knows every gain comes with a loss, and if she doesn't count the latter there really is no urgency or even necessity in and for the former.  A victor runs a tight ship of damage control and writes his concession speech first thing in the morning.

Yesterday when I was high up on the Skytrain (a LRT in the sky) I saw a man on the ground exposing himself.  He placed himself at a spot where the train swoops down for the audience to take in the spectacular.  Our stomach is supposed to drop with the sinking motion, and to get his high the man wanted to take us to a lower place.  It's very strategic; he certainly knew what he was doing.  If he could add music to the head of the passengers I am sure he would have done it to usher us into the epic moment, pulling no punches.

Yet he truly exposed himself by holding a beer can in his right hand.  He was paving his way to exit the stage unscathed.  You see what I mean?  The guy is only drunk; if he gets arrested, what's the worst that could happen to him?  But he wasn't drunk; anyone who can execute such a well thought-out scheme has a pretty clear head full of stuffs unpretty.  He knew what he wanted and devised a stringent grand design to mitigate his loss.

The show itself was a Meh, and most passengers were looking at their phone anyway (a fatal miscalculation on the part of Mr. Exhibitionist), but the backstage story mesmerized me.  The length people would go to lose himself into something, I thought, even something so very stupid.

 And what would a person do if she is living for an ideal truly worthwhile, like an once-in-a-lifetime treasure, the "one pearl of great price"?

 Yours, Alex

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading