Tearing Up the Avenue

Losing It Planetary resident Albert Lucky was an excruciatingly normal man. He had a wife, two children, a slobbery dog, a bad mortgage, and a wan retail job forty hours a week that sometimes lasted seventy when the capricious conceit of his bosses whipped up. He was middle aged, middle class, middle management, and Midwestern, espoused middle-of-the-road politics, possessed a mediocre religious outlook, and of late had sprouted a paunch in his middle. Not surprisingly, he squeezed his toothpaste from the middle of the tube. In a bell curve sort of way, he was definitely one standard deviation from the middle either way on just about everything. But speaking of deviation, there was (as we shall see) an added, tantalizing pinch of paranormal and abnormal in his makeup that of late had exposed itself. And it was creating quite a ruckus. For forty-two years, Albert had been blithely hitching a ride on great Mother Earth (along with six billion other souls), but of late, he had really lost his way. No, it wasn’t the sort of thing where one is directionally challenged; Albert was actually rather good at that in a mappy, topographical sort of way. His visual nonverbal skills were actually pretty good. Rather, it was an issue of his interior—the universe between his ears. Some camps of thought described it as clogged chakras. Others said it was mucked-up meridians of energy. But that is pretty fancy, esoteric stuff. Simply, Albert was descending into a messy, mental chaos. A vapid miasma of melancholy and despair had washed up onto Albert Lucky’s cognitive shore. The long and short of it: Albert was losing it. A riot of moments, moods, and mental pictures of life that were not quite right, not quite the way Albert would have had them if he was in his right mind, had conspired and formed a fixed idea, an alien thought form, just about the size of a stretch limo Hummer (assuming one could actually measure such a thing). It had, after a fashion, parked in his consciousness. It was akin to, frighteningly, the relatives who come to visit for the holidays and decide they like it so much they want to make it permanent. This punishing view of life (it’s all relative!) was making him miserable and dark. And it was playing itself out in his head, or at least in the general location of his head. As a result, his heart was affected; a gooey web of sadness and spidery deceit enshrouded him. Dude was messed up. In its beginnings, this deleterious demise plodded along at a geologic pace. It was slow, like watching dust settle. It had been fashioned and shaped by the infinity of small and big events that compose the days of our lives. Events as subtle as the pained, empty feeling he had when, one day, he happened to look up at a cloud of a dark gray marble color as it was rushing by. It left him empty and bereft, and he did not know why. Events as grim as the unseemly force he felt from the perpetual stream of odious work that pressed in on him day after day after day, ad nauseum. Events as small and unpolished as the equal amounts of disgust and desire he felt when the disapproving glance of a beautiful, self-possessed young woman he had looked at for a moment too long made him aware he was ogling her. And as large and sad as the time when his best college friend experienced the onset of schizophrenia, and Albert watched in stupefied horror as his buddy started roaming the streets, bursting with paranoid madness, filthy and unkempt, looking in vain for his wife in strange people’s basements. And as heartrending and telling as the disconsolate despair he felt when he saw a man and a woman screaming at each other by a bus stop in front of thirty people. “Get your things out of my house!” “You never loved me!” “You never cared!” Their bitter sense of being betrayed, the loss of their dreams about and for each other, poured out of them and into him, Albert Lucky, on a gray, nondescript city street. Everyone who waited for the bus was affected: young mothers with their babies slung haphazardly on their hips; teenage boys littered with earrings and tattoos, who were quietly mouthing violent street raps; unsure old men and old women catching rides to doctors’ offices and libraries; and teenage girls with low-cut jeans and tops that exposed their belly button piercings (who were unsuccessfully trying not to pay attention to the boys). They were all caught breathless for a moment by the embittered cries of the shattered couple. Even the street, carrier of the human condition, buckled and cried out. And the human condition, in all its majesty, hypocrisy, and inscrutable wonder, was left to contemplate its state. Our life breath left as we were seized by fear And the belief that when things die It does not give rise To life That the incident grabbed him in the pit of his stomach surprised Albert, but on he had walked, largely dismissive and unaware of how this moment had lingered and turned on him. As these seemingly random but subtly powerful feelings and experiences do with all of us if we have lost our way and do not go about the business of tending to them, they had started to show themselves. And, sensitive and gifted fellow that Albert happened to be (as we shall see), the physical manifestations on Albert were strange and even comic.