~a column by Colleen O’Brien
When my friend was young, she longed for a pretend self who would go to math class and the dentist and show up after supper to do the dishes.
Escape is a human’s middle name. We start young with a pretend friend to hang out with so we can ignore our parents’ demand that we go to sleep. Then we grow up a bit and perceive that removing one’s eye glasses allows one to be invisible. When we age just a tad, we realize we’re fooling ourselves on that one, and we dream up a substitute person to take the math test. Then we grow up fully – adulthood at last – so we can help ourselves to the major pretend stuff – we drink, take drugs, sleep too much, overeat, talk too long on the phone, text while driving, watch TV till our brains fall out, read all night, listen to music in the shower as well as when filling up our gas tanks, walking past Ben Franklin, riding in an elevator. Apparently we fear something bad happening if we’re alone, so we walk around with our blankeys – our cell phones — in our hands, pockets, purses or dangling from a string around our necks.
The definition of a wonderful world is saying to ourselves — and having it work — : “Hey, you; you’re on, substitute friend. I’m outta here for the fun stuff.” Life would then be the chair of bowlies we’ve dreamed of since we were pre-verbal.
The idea of leading perfect lives untarnished by neglect, meanness, stupidity, anger, indifference — wow. If only Freud had been able to figure out that this is what women want, he would then have been able to segue into realizing that it’s what men want, too: no problems. And the scientists could just pull together and instead of making a new recipe for toothpaste, they could all work on nanobots (tiny robots to be inserted in our brains so we can get rid of some really bad behavior, not to mention terminal diseases).
Oops, wait a minute. We’d have to figure out something to do about natural disasters – falling meteors, Alberta clippers, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, fog banks, blizzards, ice storms, dust storms, wind storms, perfect storms; as well as the million and one accidents caused by human fallibility – wrecks of trains, cars, planes, boats and space shuttles; getting stuck in quicksand or lost in swamps; getting lost, period; falling off ladders, roofs, cliffs and mountains; falling into wells and basements and so forth; falling down drunk; just general falling down, from the time we first learn to stagger from chair to table, to falling off the front steps, tripping over our shoe laces, rakes and, strangely, furniture that’s been in the same place in the living room since we bought it; and last but hardly least, falling in love.
Now that I’ve made this exhaustive list of the things we can’t escape, I can understand why we have to pretend – life is going to happen no matter what we do, so we have to have means of temporary escape. Escape is our middle name because it comes directly from knowing that we have no control over much of anything. The Beatles told us “life goes on tra la tra la,” and I think it’s a good thing to keep in mind; I’m talking about the “tra la tra la” bit.
Since I can’t do much about anything, I guess I can “tra la” when I’m falling off the curb; or at least before I’ve done so (when I know nothing is going to happen) and after (when, as Joseph Heller told us, “Something happened.”).
They say ‘life’s all attitude, so get a good one.’ This is one of those trite lines we can never muster ourselves to do in the face of travail; it is a panacea to keep us in an equable state in the face of the accident to happen. That would be just about all of this sometimes glorious life itself.
Tra la.
