Simplicity

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.”

I’m not exactly what you’d call a simple person. It seems there are some people, as far as my experience anyway, who have the ability to filter things down to a simple right or wrong, yes or no. Maybe ability is the wrong word; it isn’t like a muscle flexing inside their heads, revving the moral combine; it kicks on and off unconsciously, like TiVo, without expenditure of brain power. It’s easy. Some things are this way, some things are that.

I delivered pizza for several years; a circumstance often calling for moral ambiguity; but the relevance in this case involves a female driver named Agatha. I returned from a delivery complaining about a stiff, and without hesitation she asked, “Did you key their car?”

“Um…no?”

“That’s what I would’ve done.” No hesitation.

That thought hadn’t occurred to me. Obviously, her judgment lies on the wrong side of the moral scale, I think we can all agree on that. The point is, it was right there, on the front of her brain like a morbid hood ornament. Simplicity. There’s an odd beauty in that, maybe because it continues to be an exotic concept to me.

I met Sam in the first grade, and we stayed very close friends through elementary school. We got my dog Pearl stuck in my treehouse, and my Dad had to call the fire department to get her down. Our parents always made sure we were on the same baseball team in Little League. Later, he introduced me to my first game of Spin the Bottle. There were girls there too, assholes.

In 6th grade, Sam’s stepdad Morty (I know, I’m no good at making up aliases) started an after-school youth group. I wasn’t raised religious, but Sam was my best friend, so of course I’d rather hang out with him after school. Plus, the sanctuary of the church meeting hall felt like Xanadu after Glenn Memorial, which had become a strange mixture of Lord of the Flies and the Basketball Diaries.

Honestly, the Christianity part was rarely brought to our attention. For me to deem it an issue, as a person generally not a fan of organized religion, would be unfair and a cheap shot. So I’m not saying that. But this is what happened:

I don’t mind venturing to say that Sam was a popular kid in school. I definitely was not, but I’d been around since kindergarten (ATL, born and raised), so I knew a lot of people. The after school program grew to accommodate most of the popular kids, Christian or not, I’m guessing around two dozen altogether. Morty showed us a video. It was your standard non-denominational fare: some guy in a flannel shirt resembling Abe Lincoln used the platypus to prove why the Bible is historically accurate.

A discussion ensued. Atlanta is not like the rest of the Bible Belt; they taught us evolution. I think some people were slightly offended by the platypus theory (it must have been meant for younger, less educated kids), but some, like me, enjoyed a meeting of contradictory minds. Just one small battle against conformity since, as you probably know by now, conformity isn’t really my thing. At some point, I looked over at Sam and saw the despair on his face.

I tried to comfort him, saying, “We’re just talking.”

He slowly shook his head, looking at me with eyes filled with anger. “You’re all going to hell.” He meant it. It was the first time I realized I had a religious best friend. I mean, I’d been to church with him before, but that was the first time I felt, through my entire body, the divide, the separation. Heaven and Hell. Simplicity.

In 7th grade, Sam found out he was moving away. I can’t remember where exactly; North Carolina, Tennessee, I don’t know, but it was the Southeast. The point is, I wasn’t worried. I was sure I’d see him again soon. At least during the summer?

“There’s a 90% chance I’ll never see you again,” he said.

I was shocked and bewildered. To this day, I don’t know what was swimming through his head. Why 90%? I’m convinced that little 10% was for me, so that I wasn’t completely let down. His mind was made up. And he was right. That was our last conversation.

 

“Six of one, half dozen of the other.”

 

Every situation contains billions of possible outcomes, and really outcome is the wrong word because there’s never an end result. Time, or our perception of it anyway, chugs along at a fairly even pace no matter what you or I do or don’t do. Each moment, each dissected seed of time contains uncountable universes of energy, inspiration, birth and death. Simply introducing these thoughts into my brain is a promise for madness.

I attended Harvard Summer School right out of high school, a young gentlemen of great expectations. Out of orientation, I felt a little like a small redneck fish in the biggest pond my fish eyes have ever seen.

“Where you from?”        “New York”        “Cambridge”        “Gloucester” (they pronounce it “Gloster”)         “Argentina”            “Puerto Rico”     “Paris”     …     “Um…Atlanta?”

Lots and lots of New Yorkers and Bostonians. Lots of people apparently highly skilled at looking like they know what they’re doing. It looked easy to them.

It was fun to watch the cliques form, dissolve, and reform like raindrops on a windshield. There were a few decent people, especially the guys I found hanging around the pool tables in the rec hall, but these few were vastly overshadowed by “big fish” determined to make a splash. Put it this way: a lot of the kids there were taking Calc, Molecular Biology, Anthro, just to get ahead on credits. I took Screenwriting and Intro to Acting. It was summer, goddammit. I wanted to party and get laid, not study.

I talked to several girls out there (a bit of a breakthrough for me, to be honest), but one stands out in our current discussion. We’ll call her Agatha. She was a cute, somewhat chunky, light skinned black girl with a round face and round eyes. She lived there in Cambridge, but grew up in South Carolina, a piece of good news to me since I tend to be a friendly person and some Northerners seem to take offense to that. We ate pizza and messed around in the park next to her apartment building. The second night, she sat me down in the stairway and started the infamous “What are we?” talk.

A little early, dontcha think? I told her I don’t know, I live in Atlanta, I’m just trying to chill and have a good time. Honesty: the best policy, right? She burst into tears and said she loves me.

The beginning of the second date. Granted, I had her pants down up against a tree within three hours of meeting her, which is a fairly gigantic red flag, but come on. I saw her one more time, during which I think she realized, as we all do at least at one point in our lives, that the universe will not yank its strings in her favor just because it’s what she wants within that particular seed of time. You want so bad for it to happen, but it doesn’t.

“Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it.”

There’s a villain in Marvel Comics called Molecule Man who has the power to do basically whatever he wants, shaping matter to his will on a molecular level. Hence the name Molecule Man. Lazy naming aside, my thought is this: What if everyone had that ability? Can you imagine how fucked up the world would be if everyone fixed things exactly how they wanted? For one thing, a foot long dick would be considered small. I wonder how many people would pad their bank accounts (hint: if you can have anything you want, currency is meaningless). In fact, I think it would take about 30 seconds before someone realized existence itself is meaningless, and with a bat of his eyelash, we would all be gone.

Be honest: What would you do? Trim the love handles? Fast forward through a couple years of unpaid internship? Put new struts on the Mini-Cooper? Or would you go balls out and build yourself a platinum and manganese palace for your family? Make yourself a hundred times smarter than Einstein? Turn Mt. St. Helen into Jell-O? Dragonflies into little dune buggies with wings? Happiness into doubt?

You want to know what I really would do? I would make everyone but me forget they had the power in the first place. Dibs, I thought of it first!

This is fun and games, but it’s also a loaded question, considering the Fantastic Four thwarted Molecule Man several times. To be posed that question, essentially “What would you do if you were God?”, is the classic moral dilemma. Have you figured out the answer? You’re supposed to give it all back, you selfish know-it-all.

I’m going to work with this Molecule Man-Fantastic Four analogy just a little bit longer because, despite its inherent cheese, it happens to be very powerful to me. If you don’t know anything about comics, and I’m forced to assume you don’t, you must be wondering how the Fantastic Four defeated a man with the power to turn them into the Fantastic Fetuses if he wanted to. The answer is in the name. He’s just a man, packed full of fears and insecurities, especially in dealings with the opposite sex.

So we have the Fantastic Four, representing the four elements (you can figure it out for yourself), or natural force, will, against a man who could do literally anything despite the trappings of his own mind. It’s a reminder, to myself anyway, that potential is meaningless without will. Yeah, that nerdy comic book analogy turned out pretty fucking good, didn’t it?

It all works into this argument of simplicity. Everything should be simple, should be easy, but it isn’t. God bless free will, because I sure as hell won’t. It’s what got me into this mess in the first place.

“Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”

Simplicity deals with dialing down to a certain degree. You may have heard once from a friend or family member, “I’m trying to simplify my life.” That means things going away: old couches, crack pipes, people. People are especially violent little molecules that tend to bang into each other, challenging our quest for simplicity. After all, one man’s simplicity is another man’s broken-beer-bottle-bar-fight. When you think about it, even without Molecule Man it’s a wonder we aren’t extinct. We’re working on it, though.

That’s the real simplicity, isn’t it? No matter what we do, we’re all slowly breaking down. In three million years, after we’ve discovered how to crossbreed ourselves with insects in order to survive, your duplicitous simplicity won’t be a twinkle in their multi-faceted eyes.

Sure, you can shape your own tiny reality, until it comes into contact with another one.

When we collide, prepare for complications.

It isn’t because I want it that way. It’s because every moment of my life is a spider web of possibilities. To ask me to walk a straight, solid path is like asking a spider to build a railroad.

But I’m trying.