Saying No

But why bother? If everything dies -- and too soon at that -- then shouldn't we just say yes?

Coming home yesterday to a particularly spectacular sunset I saw two men stopped on the sidewalk, looking west. I thought to myself: yes, yes to that! And when I got closer and notcied they were watching someone get beaten in the parking lot across the street, well, then yes to that, too. And the bag of weed you left could easily become a week's worth of lost thoughts. "There's nothing wrong with it," a therapist told me once, "it's just that it may be better to leave that private world now and then, to come out and join the rest of us."

But if we all said yes... why then it could be a community of private worlds! all rubbing shoulders and bumping elbows on wild train rides away from work, up from the tunnels and into the sun..."I quit" on everyone's lips... where kids can do their subway sports while the rest of us cheer them on or pull a gun saying "I have had enough." What a party it will be! Let there be music you love, and art; and let the moment last like that forever like the heat coming off our bodies, 24 hour party people, let there be no difference between you and me, no discrimination, no distinction, just the Universal Yes washing over to take us out to sea.

What the sea does not remember, we will not remember. And we will stay that way, adrift, until some God comes down from the sky to cleave us with his sword and so start creation again with a single word.