Falling Apart

Falling Apart

Samuel Bird

My great-grandfather whom I am named after, my grandfather my brother is named after, and my father all had the same type of pickup trucks. They are minimalistic steel trucks made in the United States of America. They are no-frills and designed to work, but a lack of focus on aesthetics gave them a stoic design. This resulted in them being rather handsome after all. Being designed to work, their frames and running gear were extremely rugged. Their engines lasted for many a mile, and when they didn’t they were easy to fix. More than just being a good vehicle, they were the venue of many important conversations. Bouncing down dusty country roads I would look out over the fields. Late into the night, we saw town lights and stars pass as I wondered what all I couldn’t see in the darkness could mean. When I was very little, my mother left us for a few weeks. My father worked eighty or more hours a week at the factory, and we would sleep under the camper shell of the truck in the parking lot. These vehicles moved from the object they were in fact, to something more in my mind. This sentimentality seemed to be a part of who I was. The mythos I saw myself was tied to these simple work trucks. 

Shortly after turning eighteen, I saw one for sale. It had a long flatbed and dual tires in the back. I pulled over and peeked through the window to see it had that same simple interior I grew up in. Memories were brought back and new adventures came to mind. It had the old four-speed transmission that I watched my father row through the gears on. I had nothing in terms of money, but I was willing to give all of it to have this truck. I talked to the owner who was a shrewd businessman. We settled on a thousand dollars, and he trusted me despite being a stranger to pay him back as I got the money. I drove her home and every day for years. That truck took me to work, to friends, and from adventure to adventure. As I had grown up in those other trucks, I became a man in this one. I started out as a punk kid and became someone I am happy with. Owning this truck was no easy thing. It had an old motor with lots of miles. It was strong, but small things would break here and there. I would see the rust on the frame spreading. Then I would find my seat broken. Slowly but surely, I found that this truck I loved so much was falling apart. I could do what I could to take care of it, but time had a way of pulling it apart. This deep battle in my mind for things falling apart spread to everything I owned. Small damages the eye can’t see would culminate in something being destroyed. Even the sun’s rays would eat away at the strength of something. 

This sense that everything is falling apart is something all decently aware people are familiar with. The pavement eats at the souls of shoes. Friction wears against our pant’s legs with each step. Socks just seem to vanish into nowhere. This is a fact of how the world is, however, there are things we want from the world. We don’t want to lose what we have, so we combat it. We plan our finances around replacements and take care of what we have. This can stay off the inevitable for the time being, but this dilapidation will have its victory. My mother described this as entropy when I was a small child. I have later found a more nuanced definition from physics, but I still consider this initial entity she shared with me. Everything is falling apart. I was sure of it as a young man. I now realize things aren’t falling apart as there is no transcendent form of what they are now. Rather, as everything is fluctuating, it will not stay in this state. This is not a sad thing to the universe, only in my appreciation for what was can this be unfortunate. Still, as value centric beings, this seems to be our foe. There is one thing in particular that is so vital to our existence that falls apart; our bodies and brains. 

As a child, the stresses I was under and the malnutrition I experience lead to me having constant heartburn. This pressure was killing me, and I could feel it. My stomach became worse and worse until at the age of twenty-two, I realized I could barely eat. My stomach would just burn and churn and my throat would clog with even the most simple and well-chewn of foods. I could feel what was wrong and loved a little foray into science. I found that what I was experiencing was called “Barrett’s esophagus.” It is when the acid from the stomach creates scar tissue in the throat that makes it hard to eat. I went to a list of doctors, but because of my age and this being common among octogenarians, they wouldn’t even look. I finally convinced one to just listen to me swallow my saliva. He heard the load-clicking sound and realized something was wrong. A few months later, I had surgery to stretch the band of scarring in my throat. It also resulted in them finding three hiatal hernias on my upper stomach. Young people tend to have a sense of immortality that I did not, but I really began to realize my body was falling apart. This sense of the body's deterioration has led people from my age to do surgeries on their faces, wear thick makeup, and dress and talk younger. This is all in an effort to hide the proof that they are falling apart. This fear of becoming old misses out on an opportunity to celebrate the twilight of a life. With every little scar, wrinkle, and wear, we are reminded that we are heading toward death. It was the end no matter what we did, and at best we could live just long enough to have more things to miss. 

A few weeks ago, I had a few hours to spend, and many things that needed to be done. I left the grocery store and headed to purchase gas. When I pulled my car to the pump, I found that I did not have my wallet. I searched all over my person, the car, and around the pump in case it fell out somehow. Having no success, I called the store I had just purchased my groceries at, to see if anyone had found it and returned it to them. They told me that I had pulled out my card, not paid for my food, left it, and then taken my food. They thought it may have been theft, but then were not sure why I left my card. I told them I was deeply sorry, and raced there to fix it. In my family, there is this mental decline that sets in rapidly. It eats away at our relationship with reality and weakens our processing faculties. This disease without a name combined with many blows to my head that resulted in brain damage, leaves me with a messy brain. It still serves me well and can do some special stuff, but I am aware that it is falling apart like everything else. This is why I titled these writings as “ramblings.” I am aware that the flow of my thoughts and their expression can be messy enough to make them nearly unreadable. I hope that my readers will have the grace and talent such to read on. I appreciate you for listening to a madman. If it helps, this madman cares for you. Every great story has an ironic pain. I am sure yours does too. Mine is that I want to change the world with my thoughts, but my mind is crumbling. This gives me a sense of urgency that combined with my love turns into passion. If you are aware of the shortcomings of what I offer, I want you to know I am too. To some, I question whether it is really a failing or simply a missing of some type of social expectation such as poor grammar. In those ways my writing and ideas miss the mark, I am deeply sorry. I want you to know I do see the mark, however. I want you to know I am aiming. I hope you can be more gracious with me than I may deserve. I have found that reading a book gives powerful input, but the most important thing transpiring is the dialogue in my head. This is not the meaning taken from the pages, but the meaning inferred. This allows me to learn more than is taught. It also allows me to be charitable to a writer and come away with not what the words literally meant, but what they seemed to implicity allude to. I ask you in all my finitude to do the same for me. 

I, like you, am falling apart. The honesty of this affords me a more pure view of the facts before me. I don’t feel a need to dress young, talk young, or learn recent fads. I am aware that I am falling apart out from under myself. Each moment leads me to a world that I won’t be a part of. Much of philosophy is an attempt to understand this dilemma and even some tools to respond to it. Esse Maxim is designed for one to prepare for their life coming to a close by engaging with it now. There is this shift that occurs as we age where the potential becomes the actual. We will never have all the dreams we swore we would bring into the world. If we work hard, we can be fortunate enough to bring in a few of the things that matter most to us. I call these my “non-negotiables.” They are what I will now allow life to keep from me. Having a life that actualizes these values, is a powerful consolation. We will still die all the same, but we can say that with what time we were afforded, something great came of it. This is my case for magnanimity. We can always be unhappy with the outcomes of our lives from facts we didn’t know. What we can always appreciate is that we were committed to our lives. This gives a vitality and necessity to living deliberately. If we fail to be engaged with our existence, that fact will haunt us in our last moments. There are other methods to deal with your slow death, but an honesty and awareness seem to be the best place to start. 

I still have that old truck. It's every bit as worn as it ever was, plus the wear of a few more years. The engine blew up on my brother when I was gone on one of my adventures. It sits in a field across from my home. Each day, I watch the sunset on that old truck and am reminded of who I became with it. I hope to save up enough money to rebuild the engine and breathe life into it once again. While I want to do this, I am now at peace if I can’t. Any resurrection would result in prolonging the inevitable. Moths will eat the seats and rust will chew the chassis, leaving nothing of something I hold in dear sentiment. Then I am confronted with the permanency of dilapidation and a goodbye to a symbol of a life I once lived. Staring across that field, these words came to me:

Trees blossom then fall with the freeze

Sun rises but sets opposite the east

World created, then crumbles and cease

Where can I run, to escape dilapidation

Watch the rise and fall of empires and nations

To sit outside time and freely view the impending end of creation

All ends, and I am in all

Then in the past tense, I will fall

But yet a Godsend sense,  leaves me in awe