Where was I?
Perhaps the more profound question is: Where am I going?
I do believe that life has purpose and meaning, that there is a fabulous (and tasteful) design to our days in this troubled world, and that every one of us has been put here with an important mission that he or she must discover and fulfill. Should we fail to fulfill these missions, we might be forgiven and generously granted a studio apartment in Heaven, with chintz curtains and cable TV, or provided with another life in which to try again – or our souls might be ripped out of us like pits being torn from peaches, to be cast down into an abyss of eternal darkness crawling with film-studio executives and other things that feed on the damned.
Some of us may have humble missions, and others may have grand missions. Perhaps you are meant single-handedly to rescue 104 helpless young children from a burning orphanage, while I am here to write a few pretty metaphors using roses as an image. You might be required to negotiate world peace, while I am expected only to help two or three elderly women across busy intersections at certain important points in my life. We don’t know what’s expected of us. It’s very mysterious. What if I help the wrong elderly women across the street, and the one I fail to help is exactly the one I was meant to help, but she gets hit by a bus? Yet a fair God surely can’t expect me to help even enfeebled elderly woman across the street; I’d get nothing else done.
When I was a naive but well-meaning boy, I believed that I knew my destiny. I had no doubt that I was meant to work in a meat-packing plant, bringing Vienna sausages and white chunk-meat chicken to a hungry world. You cannot ever know the depth of my despair when I discovered that I lacked sufficient physical strength to operate the massive levers of the sausage-arranging machine, which inserts the little sausages in concentric circles in each can, and that I was not possessed of sufficient judgment to be trusted to route the chunks of chicken, according to size, into cans variously marked “regular,” “choice,” “supreme,” and “cat food.”
I became a writer, and a fairly successful one, but some nights when I lie sleepless, I hear the meatpacking plant calling to me, calling, calling…. On these occasions, a yearning of indescribable intensity fills me, rather like a gas bloat but poignant. Perhaps I have failed God by not making a life in meatpacking. But on the other hand, perhaps meat packing is my false destiny, and perhaps the plant that calls to me in such sweet melancholy tones in the night is owned by Satan, who means to mislead me from my one true mission into a frustrating and useless career in processed pork.
This is precisely the type of skull-busting quandary that has driven the great philosophers to fill libraries with their musings on the nature of creation and the plight of humanity. Therefore, I doubt that I will be able to resolve these weighty issues in a conversation with you, regardless of how long we sit here or how many lemon beers we consume. How much better if each of us had been born with detailed instructions tattooed on his or her buttocks. We would need a mirror to read them, of course, and an ability to decipher reversed images, but these would be simple problems compared to those we now face.
Which obviously brings me to Addison Heffalope, the doomed poet, who came into possession of The Book of Counted Sorrows in 1938.
Heffalope – Heff to his friends, Alope to his enemies – knew that he was doomed from the day he was born. His first word, spoken even before Dada or Mama, was simply death, in a most somber tone for a mere toddler. His second word was despair, his third was hopeless; and his fourth was brontosaurus, because even suicidally depressed tykes love dinosaurs. He didn’t get around to saying Dada or Mam a until he was nineteen, by which time he was already carrying a gold-embossed business card identifying himself as “Addison Heffalope, Poet (Doomed).”