Civic Duty

What follows, an account of a day inside the Machine.

7:50 am. Arrive at gates. Empty pockets into plastic tray, pass backpack through strange machine. For vague reasons, small padlock, in backpack, is confiscated.

8 am. Arrive at waiting area. Fill out demographic form. Trade form for card enscribed "Panel #12, Seat #14". Sit.

8:30am. Ushered into new waiting area, this one front-facing, suggesting a place of worship. Told if we leave without permission we will have to come back again another day. Or will have a warrant issued for our arrest. Or will have a fine of not more than $2,000 levied against us. Watch film about the honor and gravity of our legal system. Fill out new form regarding race and ethnicity, reminded again of penalties of leaving, told to take a break for not more than 20 minutes.

9:30 am. Told we will know our status by 2pm. Not told what knowing our status will entail.

10:15 am. Suspicions of being trapped in Kafka. To avoid own obsessional tendencies, search out reading material. Find fantasy novel, cast away in adjacent waiting area, purporting to be the tale of a mad necromancer who seeks to overcome death so as to restore his wife, tragically slain.

11:30am. Another break. Again instructed on potential penalties of failing to be present at 12 pm. Eat cold Poptart from vending machine. Use bathroom.

12 pm. Return to waiting area, continue on fantasy novel. Learn that desire to overcome death is inherently corrupting and will certainly lead one to undertake unholy experiments on hapless, innocent villagers. Also, introduced to ironic hero, barbarian hunter of supernatural beings, who has contracted lycanthropy, thereby becoming an example of the very thing he hunts.

1pm. Reminded about penalties of failing to be present when role is taken and then dismissed for lunch. Wander to BestBuy, play a videogame involving driving a dirtbuggy around a track. Much prodigious jumping and crashing.

1:20pm. Shooed from videogame by angry gaze of desirous preteens. Return to courthouse.

1:45pm. Return Commiserate with woman whose purchased M&Ms won’t fall from their coil in the vending machine. Discuss shaking machine, but consensus is that high local concentration of law enforcement officers makes this unwise. Select Coca-Cola from soda machine, but root beer is dispensed instead.

2pm. Return to pews. Finish novel. Necromancer’s evil schemes thwarted thanks to a gypsy curse, the heroic barbarian, and a well-meaning but naive pair of apprentice necromancers. Fate of barbarian promised to be revealed only in a future work.

3pm. Told that all cases have settled before trial, due directly to our presence. Told about a card we will receive in the mail which is our proof of our service. We will receive this form in duplicate. One form is for our employer, and entitles us to a day’s wage. One form is for our records, and will excuse us from further service for a period of 3 years. If we are summoned again and have lost this form we will have to serve again. Thanked, and told to leave.

Turnings, musings, a glimmer of a new health. Allure of drugs and drink, fading. Rustlings of courage, maybe? Scent of something new on these balmy summer days—

Well. There have been false lights. But—let’s not be fatalistic here. If I really turn towards it, it will be done. If in half steps.

Let’s speak it clear: I’m talking about being brave, about not allowing my life to become a box of the regular, the norm. Where my only flights are in my head.

Meeting women is one part of it, because so much of my courage or my failings congeal there, in women, love, sex, flirtation, my body, hers. But also just speaking with more truth and more heart to whomever is there. And moving with more purpose, and less. More fluid, more natural, more ignorant of the lines, coloring all over the page.

“It is foolish to be angry with a fact”, says Krishnamurti, simple plain funny wisdom. For me one fact is I’m not as beautiful, not as thin as I wish I was. Hairier, a bit clumsier, a bit bigger, a bit softer. Yes, well, those are facts, and like the man said, foolish to be angry about them. The truth is that at my best I’ve been radiant for long periods and all I have to do is find the brave, get used to it again. I wonder if E can be a part of it. My relationship with her is fraught with the peril of her beauty, her allure (Ah! Her stomach! When she stretches and the pants are riding low and the line of her hip, the crease above the thigh, ah! Sexier now that she’s not quite as skinny, not quite as hard bodied, more softness there to want to sink into). It is easy for me to start wanting her, usually because she will come to me with all that openness and physicality, and then when I start to want her she’ll seem to recede, this is a pattern that isn’t healthy, isn’t fair to either of us. Anyway. Beauty demands a high price, what we finally talked about, if not quite directly, lying on the blanket in the calico late afternoon light. I called it her subtle egocentrism, what I mean is that being beautiful can be, like any other power, a corrupter, it makes you crave it, consider it your due.