The ranting abstract essay I'm working on

This is something that I've been working on. I have no name for it, not sure if I'll do anything with it. I am still in my ranting, angry stage of the process. Don't mind any typos. I'll fix'em later. It's a finished draft, so this is the basic look of what it will be. -Bill



We used to party down by the river at a place about thirty minutes out of town.

In multiple areas located just off the road between Cut Bank and Valier. Kenny. Shane. Rich. A host of others. However, I was usually too intoxicated to recall who may have been with us during specific times and places. Not now anyway. Those days have morphed into one giant mistaken debauchery from a sordid bygone era. A continuous stream of women. Interchangeable. To guys like my friends, they were not much more than sex and beer money. Skeletons in the closet.

Although, I am not the most innocent guy on earth myself.

But, this is not about becoming entrenched in despoiled times.

The final time that I saw Josh was at a party at Indian Springs, along the banks of Cut Bank Creek. This was when I was with another set of friends different than the ones I mentioned earlier. This was the night when I nearly drowned in the river while fleeing from the police. A busted party practically all but cost me my life.

Before my friend, Jay, pulled me from beneath the rushing current, as I was going under for what would have been the last time.

My murky, drunken death, narrowly, escaping fruition.

And, Josh, he just returned home from a cultural exchange wrestling trip in France; the same type of competition where I had traveled to Bulgaria, a scant two years before. So all night we traded overseas war stories and drank fizzy cold keg beer. Exchanging experiences. Past victories. If any of my friends in Northcentral Montana shared my same love of wrestling it was Josh. There he was. Tall and skinny. Laidback and easygoing. Then me, short and stocky. Cracking jokes and telling a million stories a minute. With each cup of beer my tales becoming more grandiose and larger than life. There we stood, side by side. Separated by a foot in height. A Montana hi-line version of Abbott and Costello.

A bizarre version of the number ten.

Then the cops arrived and we ran. Each going separate directions. Jay was screaming at me to follow him as he forded through the river. On the other side were some cliffs, which we scaled precariously. Wet and inebriated. Cold and unsteady. From the top, we decided to head out on foot all the way back to town. Through cutbanks and valleys. Down bluffs and across the river again.

An hour later I was drowning.

A few months later Josh was dead. Right before his final wrestling season. Rappelling in the Sweetgrass Hills with another friend of ours. He ran out of rope, before falling down a cliff to an instant, painless death. And his mother wrote to me and said it was best that an athlete, so full of life, never had to the rest of his days in a wheelchair.

That we were lucky it never came to that.

_______


I envision bleakness. Pitch black. Interjecting Images. Flashing frames of light. Me on a stage with a microphone in my hand. Broken windows. Crushed metal. Shards of steel and glass, shimmering on a barren highway. Road lights glow death-like, while everything flickers in slow motion.

Assuredly, my imagination is packing in all the details that I have no discernible way of knowing. Most likely in a worse then they actually could have been. The unknowable has a way of turning into the very worst.

Blinding light.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

With snippets of darkness in between.

The clamoring compression of thousands of aluminum cans sear into my eardrum, screeching louder than deafening silence in the night.

Hip-hop lyrics. Flash. Twisted metal. Flash. Screaming voices. Flash. Blood. Flash. Hospital. Flash. Walking cane. Flash.

I freeze frame every detail.

Each flash scorched into my consciousness.

Car crash.

_______

He could visit at anytime.

It’s not as if you know he is coming, either. You do not wake up one day then find Death lounging on your couch, sipping on a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. He will not look up at you, smile then cheerfully state: “Well, it looks like you’re all fucked.”

Death does not leave choices.

When Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, grimly boiled a political prisoner to death last year, Death did not tell the poor bastard: “Oops, guess you should have went with the heart attack instead, pal.”

Whether you die quickly or suffer prolonged macabre agony is more or less the luck of the draw. This luck also applies to the specifics of who goes and when. Us mere mortals do not get to deal the hand. We just play the game then rely on fate. Inevitability. Chance. The notion that if we are inherently decent then this ensures good things will come our way. So then, why is it that I never drowned? Why did my friend fall off a cliff? Why do bad things happen in this day and age? The ones not necessary. Not rational. Not moral. I seek explanations.

Fate, simply, is not a good enough answer for me anymore.

The day my youngest brother was shot and nearly murdered was the longest of my life. Images of blazing gun barrels. Powder burns. Crimson blood pools. Dark. Black. Pooling in the dirt where he was left for dead. My mind filling in the worst details. Disregarding the slightest whim of reality. Agitation. Fear. Not knowing. Blindsided one beautiful morning by the outermost possibility that you never dreamed would happen. A mind never expects the worst. Yet, it works wonders at creating nonexistent details. A lesson in discovery.

That the shuffling off of this mortal coil is more fragile than it seems.

And this eats away at me.

On the same day I found out a friend of mine has a stalker and another nearly lost her life in a car wreck three months before. I never knew the extent of the first, nor did I ever know the occurrence of the other. Both fragile. Vulnerable. Inherently decent. One says she has a lot of anger in her life right now; she did not realize she would be at the mercy of statistics. The other has no recollection of the last several months of her life.

And, I worry about them.

Blindsided by irrational destiny.

As I write this, the death toll in Iraq for American soldiers is steadily climbing towards 400. Slightly more than a week ago, 15 of them lost their lives when a Chinook helicopter was shot down in farm country near the Euphrates River. Some of them were preparing for leave. They all had loved ones. Family. Friends. Imagine what they could have accomplished. What gifts could they all have brought to the world? To others around them? Because all of this matters. It means something to somebody. They are not just names. The same that Josh meant something to me. That my brother does. Like my two friends do. I see no rationale. I see no morality. I do not believe any of this needed to happen. There was no destiny. I do not have any answers. However, I know that I’m tired. Worried. Full of anger and trepidation.
That for some reason I needed to write about how much I despise fate, right now.

So, last weekend, my one friend called to tell me about her car accident. The last three months in a hospital. She insisted she was fine. Her full recovery was inevitable. That she felt lucky to be alive.

She was glad to not end up spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

So, I feel fortunate it never had to come to that.

That is about all I am sure of at this time.