It was the most perfect wedding, for the two most perfect people in the entire world. They came from perfect families who had identically perfect ideas of what the future held for their two perfect little spawns, bred in the most perfect little all American town, designed to produce perfect little American families. Josh watched Emily walk down the aisle towards him, just as they’d rehearsed. Her father looked like the picture of confidence and restrained dignity. Did some small look in his eye look like he wanted to murder him for marrying and… doing a few other things to his baby girl? Probably. They hadn’t done anything the rule book would have considered wrong to get to this point. He’d been the quarterback, she was the head cheerleader, so naturally the stars had aligned to doom them to strap metal bands onto their fingers and inexorably link them together. Who even was she? Josh looked at her and wondered who she was beyond those labels. Here he was about to marry her… MARRY HER… that rang with such a fatal finality he could barely stand it. They are two attractive people tying the knot as they were deigned to. And he realized he barely knew her. The vows came before he could even process how he’d gotten here. She eagerly said she did… and he… agreed. Eagerly. Her mouth agreed and her eyes… flickered with a sense of hesitation she was too afraid to indulge. They weren’t even pregnant. That typically brought couples together faster than the average shotgun. Running down the aisle. Waving to people they knew and pretended they knew… sure some of them were friends. They ought to be for condoning this. For an hour or two they floated around his consciousness… bouncing from bar to bar and trying to drown their sorrows in booze… how did this happen? Fairytale endings were for people too afraid to face what inevitably came after the euphoria of a perfect ending. The ending had come. After being sent off by friends and family for hours they found themselves in a luxury hot suite. Together. Just the two of them. ‘Emily?’ ‘Josh’ ‘How did we get here?’ ‘I dunno.’ ‘Should we… give it a try?’ ‘Sure.’ Perfect endings weren’t real. Endings only came with death… so why fast forward to that part? There was so much right and wrong and not and pain to expose experience in between. ‘I mean… you look pretty good.’ ‘You don’t look bad yourself.’ ‘That’s a start right?’ ‘Yeah. Yeah it’s a start.’ ‘What are we starting?’ ‘I don’t really know…’ ‘Oh…’ ‘You… wanna find out?’ ‘… yeah. Why not?’ ‘Why not indeed?’ ‘It could… all end in…’ ‘Yeah yeah. This is America. In the meantime why don’t we just make something out of this?’ The couple wrapped their arms around one anther, as if for the first time like they never had before. They did not live a happily ever after. Not by a mile.’
Stillness. If I could describe life in this middle west of America, that would be the first word that came to mind. Folks I’ve known from the south had the idea that all the weirdos lived up here. Shocking to me, as I’d always thought we were viewed as stereotypically boring ‘normal’ people. Sure, we have natural disasters like anywhere else… but they usually come from the heavens, not from below. My chair was shaking. My shelves were shaking. Everything around me was shaking. I immediately imagined someone on the west coast would just call this Tuesday, but for me the earth was trembling, and I was a little tiny little speck of salt in this terrestrial shaker. I never saw my boss as God, but clearly I had done something wrong calling in sick today when I wasn’t. I’d caused a Milwaukee earthquake. I would take the blame for something that far out of my control. Typical of any Packers fan. Why? I suppose it grants you some tiny illusion of control in your life as the world quite literally throws you around like a ball with no particular goal in mind. The floor is moving. And all I can do is try to take the blame? That’s either some deep self loathing or vanity in its purest form. Legions of tiny plasticine people standing atop my shelves teetered on the brink of the abyss. Many fell to their not dooms below. They weren’t burdened with having to live. I might not be so lucky if this shaking floor just happened to suddenly fissure open beneath my feet and swallow me whole. Stillness returns. And I am shook.
Somehow some way there had to be a solution to this somewhere that someone knew. And yet the kind of problems weighing on Hal’s mind didn’t even make sense to him, so if he couldn’t explain his own predicament to himself what chance did he have laying it all out for anyone else to help with? Simple, he wouldn’t. He’d just deal with it himself as he did with everything else and get the same… dubious results. Sometimes he proved to be his own greatest ally and other times his worst enemy, and it all essentially came down to a coin flip which way it would go. Confused yet? He asked his imagined audience of readers or listeners in the ongoing drama that was his existence, punched up in his own mind to make things even a little interesting to the party concerned, himself.
