Everyday, we live in the presence of the skunk’s scent
We seem to live at a time when it’s easier to live with absurd but pleasant theories that contradict everyday reality. We live in a schizoid disconnect between what we tell ourselves and what we see right in front of us.
Near my apartment in downtown Oakland, here’s what I have seen:
At 4 o’clock in the morning, I go out for an early coffee at all-night convenience store a block away. No one is around. There is a great stillness, the peace between the night and the first grey light of dawn. And yet, there’s the skunk, a thick slightly sickening burning smell coming from the empty parking lot across the street. A security guard is doing his rounds and trailing behind him are these ghost-like clouds illuminated by the security lights.
Or on my way for an early morning workout, three guys are hunched by their cars outside the gym, eyeing me as I walk by, the curl of smoke rising up between us – the skunk is there.
At the laundromat, doing my laundry at midnight, there are some overly cheery men outside on the sidewalk, once young but now baggy and aged, and they’re chuckling about something nonsensical. Every time the door opens, the skunk wafts in.
And not just at night.
During the day, it’s coming off the clothes of people shopping in the grocery store. It’s drifting onto the sidewalk from the street where cars are passing by with open windows. On the freeway, at 70 miles an hour, my car’s air-conditioning sucks it up from some invisible nearby car and circulates it at me and throughout the front seat.
Baristas take longer to figure out my order and stare for a moment at the keypad for the price of coffee, trying to remember.
A mechanic at the auto repair shop gets lost in telling some hilarious random joke that the other mechanics can’t understand. They glance at each other with knowing looks, then look over at me to see whether I notice.
At Lake Merritt, a beautiful gem of a lake in center of downtown, families and friends sprawled on beach towels and blankets on the lawns, – yet the skunk slips its sour smell into barbecuing ribs and steak and turns the tossing beach balls into something uproariously funny.
I’m teaching a late evening class at a local university, and clouds of the skunk are rolling in through the open windows of our first-floor classroom, like a nighttime fog, and a student, without saying anything, gets up and closes the windows. No one seems to think this odd.
“Why are there so many students smoking marijuana outside my classroom at night? I ask an administrator.
“What are you talking about? We don’t have any marijuana problem here.”
A writer in a writing group reads a story of vague characters with no last names drifting from scene to scene in an aimless series of conversations in some vacation condo near some unnamed beach.
“It seems rather confusing,” I say.
“But I want it that way,” she insists.
Later, after the meeting, she offers wine, but doesn’t drink herself. “Marijuana is my wine,” she admits. Of course. The haze of the skunk must make confusion appear meaningful and emptiness seem to evoke things too profound to put into words.
She notices my look. “It helps take the edge off at the end of the day,” she says.
The edge?
The newspapers are full of chaos and catastrophe around the world. Whole societies are living under terrorist bombings, civil wars are breaking out, inflation is 50% in some countries, and even the wealthiest countries, like Venezuela, are collapsing. In the U.S., overdoses are at records, gun shootings are a leading cause of the deaths among children, thousands of rural towns have been gutted by the disappearance of work as factories go overseas.
What makes our middle-class life so difficult that we need “to take the edge off?” Why does it seem reasonable to numb the pricks of conscience? When will we start looking for real answers and stop pretending it all away with the lies we tell ourselves?
‹ ◊ ›