Story and Photograph by Neville Cole

Did you ever have a really bad feeling about something that turned out to be completely misplaced? No, me neither. 90% of the time my bad feelings are eerily accurate. The other 10% of the time they are only slightly exaggerated. Never have I been so far off base that I later wondered: “What the hell were you worried about?” The funny thing is the statistics for my good feelings going bad are about the same. 90% of the stuff I feel good about on any given day goes horribly wrong.

How is it my bad radar is so accurate and my good radar so out of whack? Does that make me a pessimist because I can recognize oncoming misery so well? Or am I an optimist because I so constantly believe that things are going to turn out fine when time and time again they don’t.

My friend Russell and I talked a few months back about a film idea. It was about a man constantly besieged with troubles that he somehow only just manages to survive. He ends up homeless, broken, and utterly friendless but calls himself lucky because “by rights I should be dead a hundred times over.” I (the eternal optimist?) felt like we needed an ending where our poor Job tells his story to a reporter at the homeless shelter and gets a cut of the movie deal; but Russell nixed it saying it was unrealistic

I have a lot of very positive acquaintances. I can’t call them friends because I do seem to actually prefer the company of cynics; but these people do fascinate me because they have the ability to turn any bad situation into an opportunity for growth. These acquaintances are the type of people who will walk up to you at a funeral and say “God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle, you know” and “he’s in a far better place.” These people will tell you that trials are proof of God’s care. You see, God’s plan is to give you heaping tons of shit to deal with so that you can talk yourself into believing that something good has actually happened every single time and that you are – in reality – one of the lucky ones. Hmmm…maybe there is a movie in this, after all.

Movie storylines aside, the fact remains that I woke up with a bad feeling today and all I have to hang my hat on is that there is a slim chance that I will eventually recognize that it wasn’t quite as bad as I first thought. I probably should have reacted to this feeling by getting some exercise or cleaning the house or doing some yard work; you know, getting my affairs in order…but my immediate reaction was to make some coffee and fire up the laptop.

I would like to note that, at this particular paragraph, I have no idea where this piece is headed. Will I write myself to a convenient conclusion? Will I lose my way? Will I go for a cheap gag and leave my meaning up in the air? Who knows? But I’ll probably work something out eventually. That’s one of the great things about writing – the chance to make edits. We can’t do that in life, can we? There is no delete key for the stupid shit you do to your life. We don’t get to rewrite the ending or to suddenly introduce a deus ex machina. We just get the opportunity to try and make sense of and then make up for all the insanely bad decisions we made during some previous day’s existence.

That said, I think most of us can deal with that fact. Most of us know that if we make mistakes we are going to have to try and fix them some day. Most adults will accept the responsibly for their actions. The gray area becomes how much we are willing to take responsibility for the actions of others. How much are we willing to suffer for the actions of our families, our children, our ex-wives and ex-husbands, our friends, our co-workers, our communities, our world leaders? When and where to we draw the line?

You see, here is where I go astray. It is clear from just these few passages that my mind is apt to casually leap from my own personal struggles to the fate of the world as we know it. My initial reaction to any trial is pretty much to go the full Chicken Little. But I usually find that as the immediate panic begins to fade I will begin to instruct myself to focus on the issue at hand, to take baby steps… one day at a time. In fact, I will usually offer myself a hundred other platitudes until, in the end, I can once again resolve to keep on going, keep on trying, to fix what I can and let those things I can’t control work themselves out.

Maybe, after all is said and done, life is nothing more than a series of actions and reactions to real and imagined events both of our own making and others that eventually lead to disappointment. Then again, maybe life is a series of major disappointments that eventually lead to redemption. I guess it is quite possible, especially to a Hindu, that both options are true.

But I can’t worry about all this, right now. Right now, I just have to remember that all in all I’ve always been a pretty lucky guy… the other important thing to note about all this is that I wrote this several months ago and this morning as I sit here re-reading it I can’t for the life of me remember the bad thing I was so worried about. Maybe, in the end the real truth we have to accept is that life is indeed transitory and time really does heal all wounds.

Good luck to all of you out there dealing with the daily shit of existence.

Neville