The Things That You Almost Carried

As difficult to recover as a lost file that was not backed up, the memory of when you became pointedly and forcefully reminded of the living, throbbing, ticking presence of duality, both internal and external, is not easy to pinpoint.  You recall one particular moment when, full-length mirror in hand, you walked southward on Crescent Heights Blvd. in more or less mid-town Los Angeles, heading across Pico Blvd, your intended goal a small east-west street named Chariton Pl., the home of a then girlfriend.  Even now, you are not sure about the etiology of the mirror or your intent, which was probably to give the mirror to the then girlfriend, but who knows? and perhaps the investigation would provide some interesting fiction.  You remember that you carried in addition to the mirror the reflecting surfaces of being broke, being hormonal, being frustrated in your attempts to achieve some plateau or other with your career, but truth to tell, you had other, greater dualities than that.  Truth also to tell, you recall that having crossed Pico Blvd at least three times, only to say something along the lines of The hell with it and with her, you reversed course, proceeded northward, once more crossing Pico Blvd. toward where you think you were staying at the time.  At this point, someone stopped you to ask if you were lost.  Although you knew the coordinates pretty well, you were indeed lost, just as you'd been lost to greater and lesser degrees in times before that, even with greater certainty, you were lost but not as lost as you would be at certain moments, large and small, yet unknown to you, not remotely imagined, that would befall you as the then became the now and the future.

Such are the ways of duality.

That's one damn fine story, you'd think, sliding the envelope with the manuscript into the mail slot, only to think, moments later, but is it fine enough?  Yet another example of how duality plays its soap opera script within you, a splendid metaphor because it is so much a part of your nature to listen to both sides (more, if there are more sides)of an argument.  When you were taking the ROTC courses obligatory at the time for male University of California students, you snapped to awareness and closed your hideaway book of the poetry of e.e.cummings when the instructor, speaking about map reading, discussed the aspects of triangulation, which posited in apercu that you could always determine where you were if you had two reliable points of reference against which to determine your present position.  If you were southbound on Crescent Heights Blvd. and had crossed Pico Blvd., Fairfax Avenue was X yards to your east and Robertson Blvd. was about an equal X to your west.  Etc. You jumped on triangulation at the time and since then because you are with such frequency on some grid or chart or map of decision.  You see yourself as laid-back, tense, eager, bored, angry, perverse, curious, amused, their outer garments hung recklessly in the cloak room of your psyche, the only governing process that of duality.  Will you, you wonder from time to time, cling to a position to the point where tenacity becomes stubbornness, and stubbornness, not content with being merely intransigence, becomes stupidity?  Will your ignorance of a thing lead you down the garden path to stupidity or can you rely on your curiosity and enthusiasm to lead you to that first tentative Googling of the thing then to the library, then to the effort of imprinting opinion and impressions upon your own hard drive?

Whenever you see some variation on the trope that things are not written, they are rewritten, is your irritation a resentment of the hectoring tone the trope has assumed within the hallways of your psyche, in which you are now approached by a hall monitor asking for your hall pass, or is it an awareness that you are called to not merely do but to be-while doing, to participate?

Small wonder we homo saps have a well-evolved duality within us, urging us at every moment to be present at the miracle of our survival.

Thus evolved, you agree to move forward to Chapter Two of The Secrets of Casa Jocosa and all the mirror carrying it may involve that you have yet to see.