Ostrichs

Lucia once told me accusingly that 'I was sending negative messages' to those around me, especially to our children. I knew what she meant and I knew she was right but I also knew that I could do nothing about it.

So I did not comment on it. I kept my mouth shut.
At the time I thought keeping my mouth shut was a smart thing to do.

What I am afraid of is that I might be an automatic machine for the fabrication and transmission of negative messages.

God needed one so He created me.
Don't question His wisdom by asking why.

At the bottom of my mind, though, there is still something responsible (whatever that means) telling me

     Rather than sending all those negative messages
     you should bury yourself in a block of cement.
     What you are doing is a crime, you know?
     Others need something positive, something
     to support them and help them go on living.

But then my automatic machinery takes over and I have a vision.

I look around and perceive the others as ostriches with their heads buried in sand and their asses high up, swept by the winds. I feel a prankish and totally irresistible urge to slap and kick those asses so I start slapping and slapping and kicking and kicking and I keep at it until I am exhausted, but they never pull their fucking heads out of the sand!

Finally, I fall from exhaustion and I sink into the sand and keep sinking deeper and deeper until it dawns on me that I should do something unless, of course, I want to reach the very centre of the Earth.

I think about it for a bit and finally I decide against such a long trip.
After all, Lucia is the one who likes travelling, not me.

With my luck, I might discover a yet unknown physical force responsible for a particular attraction between human shit and the centre of the Earth which makes the shit seep through the continental plates and through the outer crust and the inner crust and the outer core until it reaches the inner core and becomes its innermost kernel. On the way it gets transformed into a super-super-conductor and, due to the spin it gained on the surface of the planet, it gives rise to the Earth magnetic field. And so on.

Amazing Science aside, I don't wish to end up in that much shit!

So I start swimming and I swim up through the fine sand until I almost reach the surface again and, from below, I see all those ostriches bulging their eyes on me. I recognize that they see something in me, only I don't know what the hell it is, and I start worrying that maybe they imagine themselves swimming in the sand and looking into my eyes and wondering what it is that I see. The thought makes me dizzy.

I start suspecting that I might be an ostrich, too, and my head might be buried under a foot of sand and somebody might be kicking my ass.

I try to concentrate but I can't feel any pain. I can't even feel whether I do have an ass, much less whether somebody's kicking it. I try to tighten my sphincter but I don't feel it. So I try to tighten my balls and I can't feel them, either. These are two more problems to add to my already lengthy list.

I don't know whether this Reflection makes sense to you.
I would rather it didn't.
But today, on Monday, May 5, 1997, it does make sense to me.
Tomorrow it will probably not. At least, I hope so.

Part of the Reflections series.
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Copyright ©2004 Stanislav Sykora    DOI: 10.3247/elcl08.004 Designed by Stan Sýkora