COLUMN: Something is off
My sub was 45 minutes late last week.
In my hometown, St. Clair, that's expected. Something about the layout of the roads must cause delivery drivers to panic. As if the entire town was a giant labyrinth with dead ends, trap doors and streets that never end.
Mount Pleasant drivers, with few exceptions, you can rely on. Some poor soul will be at your door, food in hand, silently begging for a tip, dependably on time.
But not last week. Something was off last week. Everything was off last week.
Case in point: Sunday night, there was a dumpster fire at Deerfield Village Apartments. They've gained quite a notorious reputation as of late. Dumpster fires, along with couch fires and a variety of other fires, have been the source of near-student riots recently.
But there wasn't a single soul surrounding this one. No loud music, no obnoxious dancing, no chanting. Nothing. Just a dumpster burning bright and lonely, and myself, sitting at a distance watching it with a glint of wonder, beer in hand.
I must have stayed there for 15 minutes. It must have been one of the more beautiful and peaceful things I've ever seen.
A dumpster described as peaceful and beautiful. That, in itself, is just off.
Also, my faucet won't turn off.
There is something off with the handle, and nobody in my apartment knows how to fix it. So it's been running at a steady stream, all day and night, for at least three days now.
It sounds like somebody taking a constant shower. But if I close my eyes and sit back, it, for brief moments, sounds like rainfall.
The moment it sounds like a faucet running, I tend to stop whatever I'm doing, furiously run up the stairs, and wrestle with the handle in a hopeless attempt to make the constant sound of running water cease.
Some days, all our efforts seem to be in vain.
But, let's not delve into the world of narcissistic philosophy in this absurd column searching desperately for a topic, it'd be almost too much to handle.
Like the time, when growing a tired sense of perturbation over the constant sound of running water, I walked outside to watch trash burn while waiting for a sub to arrive, and all I could think of was that the stars above me were only the visual remains of balls of gas that burned out millions of years ago. Just think of that; the light that guides us during the darkness of the night no longer exists, but at least there was the peaceful burning of human remains, and something good was coming my way – if just a tad late.
I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don't feel like finding it. This column is just off.
