by Celine Schews
Part One: GUN, VICODIN, MEDITATION CLASS, LIVING IN CAR.
There is the usual smattering of people you might expect showing up to this kind of thing. And they are for the most part the people I’ve spent a lifetime thinking are the type of people you would want to get involved with on some level. But there’s one thing I’ve learned about the people whom you think you should get involved with, and that is this: they are the people who will drown you. It is their zeal that attracts you, and their excitement to see anybody including you. It is their confidence in seeming to know what is best for them. It is the broad wave and blown kiss they’ve perfected to signal friends and acquaintances alike from a distance. All of these attributes – overzealous, excited, a delusional sense of confidence, the frantic waving of arms – are not so coincidentally the same attributes that lifeguards are trained to physically distance themselves from when rescuing a distressed swimmer in danger of drowning in an undercurrent or riptide. A distress that is, also not so coincidentally, signaled with a broad wave from a distance. If I ever have kids they are going to spend one summer guarding if only to learn this life lesson: the only people saved are the sufficiently tired, surrendered, resigned, barely-confident, lucid people who are not making the grave error of reaching out to you as if you’re a life preserver. I repeat: in this life, the gregarious will lure you near and then pull you under. And so there are a few of these people sitting in front of me and to the left and right of me, since I’ve anchored myself in the very back row.
Ah, the very back row: a sound hallmark of quality in an individual, isn’t it? I am so sorry to bring my nature to this place, but my beautiful children named the Heineken Sextuplets have made a thin amber barrier between me and these everyday, happy go lucky overachievers who have what it takes to meditate. Something inside of my head (alcohol?) challenges me to make contact. Like a sobriety test that my head doesn’t think I’m suave enough to pass or something. And I take to winning this challenge. There’s a guy next to me who I imagine is named Chad and who I also imagine is not daydreaming of buying guns while killing time in his car and tricking his wife like a tenth grader cutting classes daily. We’re all mimicking some kind of warm up stretch that someone somewhere in the room started us into mimicking; a meme whose cue and origin is virtually untraceable. My brain suggests in flinches and shudders that this could be a stretch started by the muscle memory of someone who was in this room a hundred years ago. Jesus Christ, I’m like a drunk who’s read three pages of Steven Hawking. That aside, here comes my moment of social grace and form. I feel my heart speed up just a little, which always means I am about to make some social contact. I turn my stretch into broad wave hello, aimed at the guy sitting right next to me and…
“Hi, how are you?” I venture
“Shhhh.”
I am now imaging the guy sitting next to me is named Dick. I pull my neck upward in our warm up stretch and look up at the others around the room with a kind of helpless ‘can-you-believe-this-guy-is-such-a-dick?’ look on my face, and they’re all looking back at me with a ‘what-is-your-problem-have-you-been-drinking-in-your-car-all-afternnon?’ look on their faces.
Oh, I’m going to mediate so well that I make all of you disappear.
