Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Forces

Existentialists say that when people are confronted with the fact that the world is essentially random, cold, and unfeeling, they invent a narrative to fill that void with mythologies about benevolent forces, Gods, and afterlives to escape dealing with the fact that we are utterly and completely finite and alone. If mystic or spiritual narratives don't cut it for you, then, they argue, there is always commodity fetishism to pick up the slack.

A few days ago I came home to an apartment that had just recently been vacated by my roomate. As I scanned the room (and pondered my new air-conditionner, TV, and set of drinking glasses), I realized that those crazy existentialists were right on the money--literaly.

I may be an agnostic, but I sure seem to have a lot of faith in the sustaining power of commodity.

...to further my sense of alienation, I realized shortly after that my phone and internet connection had been cut, along with our TV. Rob and I had planned for the TV being cut off, but not the other two. Mix in the fact that my exhaust system fell out of my car the day before, and you have one agnostic who has become slightly nervous about the possibility of there actually being some force guiding us, demanding worrship, and smiting those whose hubris dares to question the existence of the one true god.

This involuntary sequestering from the world and from cyberspace did make me realize a few things though. In particular the 'transcendental certitude' of change, and that my initial feeling of isolation grew out of a hyperstimual dependancy (can 'hyperstimual' be a word?) built on years of absent mindedly using the web, the phone, and TV. I walked over to friends to make phone calls and to send out any necessary e-mails (mostly job related stuff). In a strange way I sorta feel like I caught a glimpse of what life may have been like before telephones were around. If I wanted to talk to someone, mostly, I had to be physically proximate. My communicative activities (especially in terms of the mundane communications) all had a phyical marker to locate thier reality in time and space. Of course I was only too happy to get the phone back after a couple of days...and I quickly jacked myself back in.

After re-connecting, I had the distinct feeling that the series of badly timmed inconveniences that I superstitiously turned into some ominous cosmic payback seemed to dissipate. I was surfing again, my car was fixed and life was good. Then, after work the following day I came out to find my car blocked in by two unmannered motorists who left me with about 2 inches of wiggle room at each bumper. Certain at this point that I should really think harder about all of this church stuff, a total stranger made a passing comment about how he has the same car as me and its rusting in the same spots. This in and of itself may not seem intriguing...so let me preface this by saying that I drive a '94 teal-green sunbird. EVERYONE owns this car or its GMC equivalent (the omnipresent Cavelier). This means that I've passed a million people with the same car, and the same rusting rocker pannels, but this dude picks this moment to mention to me something that has been obvious to millions of people for the past 10 years. A bit dumbstruck, I give him some advice about patching a hole in the floor (another common problem) and he helps me Austin Powers my way out of that spot.

...so now I have a choice: do I continue to feel peevish about those irresponsible motorists? or do I instead feel thankful that by some random accident a person decides that he'll tell the owner the 50th rusted sunbird he's seen that day that his car rusts in the same spot? When I think about it, its hard to rationalize any kind of cosmic guiding force, but at that moment it was hard to ignore that perfectly timmed stranger who came and helped restore some sort of 'luck' balance that had been sorely out of whack the week before.