There is always the desire to have things explained—to make sense of it all, even when it makes no sense and the fault lies with oneself. It is human nature to want an explanation. But so many things just don’t make sense, and so many others simply have no explanation. They just are.
Sure, in the infinite scheme of things, one could explain an event by pointing to the weather, a car shifting lanes, a patch of oil on the road, the sun hitting the asphalt just so, making it impossible to see until it was too late. The accident, the plunge off the cliff, the death of your beloved. Those explanations might sound reasonable. But if you weren’t there—if you had just had a terrible argument with that person, and they had ended the conversation hinting at self-harm—you might blame yourself for the rest of your life. You might think you were the cause, in some form, for the loss of your beloved, perhaps even for their decision to end it all that afternoon on the highway you had both traveled so often, where you had promised each other you would one day make your home.
There are a million other possibilities. And that’s just what they are: possibilities. Not certainties. Not even certain because those involved willed them so, but because, for whatever reason—a combination of wills, reality, the cosmos, or the divine—it happened. The results, and our understanding of them, have as many possibilities as the reasons for the event itself.
So when you have two variables, each with an infinite number of possibilities, and you combine them—infinite times infinite—you get infinity squared? Something like that. I’m remembering something from my calculus class, which I passed by the skin of my teeth: that there is such a thing, and that one infinity can be larger than another. And sure, that kind of makes sense, but not really. What I’m remembering now is that there are more infinities between zero and one than there are from zero to infinity—at least in real numbers, or whole numbers, or something crazy like that. Because you can split the space between zero and one, and then split it again, and again, and in each split, there’s a universe of infinity. Infinity split into infinity, which is… a lot.
But I was talking about trying to make heads or tails of it all, and the need to have things explained away so that you can put them in a box, place that box on a shelf in your life, to take down and review or never see again, but to know it’s there, with whatever explanation you finally settled on for the thing in question.
All of this is to move on. Perhaps to learn something from it—or not to learn, but to know that you could.
I blew up my engine going up the mountain. Moments before, I was rocking to some great rock song—which escapes me now—but I remember feeling pretty damn good about life, thinking it wasn’t that bad, and that that day I had accomplished enough to make it feel like a success.
I remember the two cars in front of me in the right-hand lane. I turned on my indicator to get into the left lane to pass, and when I did, I heard a noise—metal clanging against metal. I thought of all the possibilities for why that car might sound that way. I looked at the expression on the driver and thought he didn’t look the slightest bit concerned. I shrugged it off as good for him. But when I overtook him and was the only car in front, I realized immediately that the sound, now getting louder and louder, was coming from my own car.
The instrument panel started lighting up like a Christmas tree. I scanned the dash and tried to make a call. I found myself going around a turn with nowhere to pull over and two cars close behind. As I looked for a place to stop, the cosmos decided that curve was the spot. The engine cut out, the panel showed only red, a puff of smoke surfaced from the front of the hood, and I limped to a stop in an area I calculated was wide enough for a tow truck to park in front and hook me up.
It was quick. The math added up. And there I was.
The smoke grew more intense. I popped the hood to see what was going on, thought better of it, grabbed my phone, and started recording. Radiator fluid was coming out from beneath two large hoses. I did the math in my head: a radiator fix, a hose, maybe a clamp—a bill I could swallow. Then, in the next stride of thought, came the metal clanging. Valves slapping against the head of the engine, swollen with heat. Metal expanding, things breaking loose. The physics of metal and heat expansion, welding or fusion—like the welder I had been trying to get a bid from earlier for the four-posts job in Pasadena, the one requiring a registered welder certified in LA County. Except at that moment, except for the lesson in fusion, it didn’t matter much at all.
I knew the engine had seized. I knew the repair was $10,000 at best. And that, with the fact that the truck wasn’t paid off yet, made that pill that much harder to swallow.
There was a feeling of defeat.
Today, that gut feeling was the overwhelming reality that made it so. I try to think of all the reasons why—reasons that come from my own doing, reasons that come from others’ doing, and then the reasons that make no sense at all, but that we live with every day for the rest of our lives, sometimes blaming ourselves.
That is the torment: the unfair process we assign ourselves, the way we beat ourselves up sometimes to an infinity.
And yes — her favorite number was 8, because it was infinity on its side. There was something poetic about that. I know if I thought about it long enough, I could circle back to an explanation and give her the blame. But that exercise would just come up zero.
But life is life — to quote Opus, that eighties band with all the philosophical prowess of a Descartes. But perhaps now more insightful, and proof in the pudding of this argument or thought that I’ve concocted.
Shit happens.
And it happened to me.
Two days ago. And these are my new cards.
I can reshuffle them, and think of the infinite possibilities that will or might happen with whatever cards I get next, or hold, or see others playing. But this much is certain: they are mine, and mine to play.
BB Grey--musings 
Leave a comment