Shall We Dance?
When I was 23, I wanted to contrive a “chance meeting” with a very beautiful girl that had recently moved in next door. Every morning at 7:00 am she headed out her front door to go for a jog, and I saw the opportunity to introduce myself. “Oh, hey, just walking the dog,” I would say. And, “Oh, she’s so cute!” she’d say, and then the nakedness and rolling around commences. Gigidy, Gigidy.
While waiting for this poor, unsuspecting girl to pass down the street, I began reading a pamphlet that someone had left on my porch. It was an abstract of a hippie cult that practiced the teachings of a “Master Yahshua”. From what I gathered, this Yahshua (master of what, I’m still not sure) is a New Age version Buddha wrapped in organic granola and roasted over the smoldering remains of Christendom. For his sufferings and infinite wisdom, Yahshua’s followers are bound to him in a cosmic framework of colors and classical elements like fire and air, and there’s some other B.S. in there about polygamy, I’m pretty sure. Needless to say, the whole concept of being “bound” to Yahshua negated the purpose of his solicitous pamphlet, I realized. But I saw the irony and felt warmed by its complete purposelessness.
Even more ironically, I had become so enthralled with the enlightened teachings of this Buddha-Jesus half-breed—who was in all likelihood conceived the back of a Volkswagen bus—that I missed the girl jogging down the street. She slipped by my watch unmolested, free to live out the rest of her day serendipitously. And then it hit me: how is it we rarely bump into the people we really want to bump into in the first place? Why can’t I be cosmically bound to this beautiful girl? Instead, and in almost every case, we bump into strangers we will never meet again, people who in all likelihood will not change or alter our course in history. I’ve tangoed with these strangers all my life, and I’m no closer to understanding it now than ever before.
It’s inexplicable: surely the stranger and I have been traveling on foot for a very long time (unless we were the fortunate victims of recoverable injuries), walked countless miles to countless places and within our lifetimes developed fine spatial orientation, coordination and intuitiveness. And yet, somehow, the stranger and I are magnetized to each other like opposite charges, checkmated at every turn, a yin to my stranger yang.
It’s always the same: you’re walking on a sidewalk or down a hallway toward the stranger, and then you charge, withdraw, charge again, withdraw… until one of you, the less entranced of the two, wakes from their sleepy little world and lets the other pass by. Sometimes you can see it happening when the other person is yards away, and it’s not as if you didn’t the time to readjust your space-time continuum and avert what you know is going to be an overtly embarrassing, albeit mildly amusing, head-on collision.
Is it circumstantial or a cosmic mishap? Should I act on it, strike up a conversation with the stranger and try to discover any likes or dislikes we might have in common and perhaps derive some conclusions? Or should I only experiment with the beautiful girl next door by trying to convince her (I’ll wager unsuccessfully) that our meeting was meant to be, true love or the like.
I don’t feel like arguing about fate with myself because I would have to go through the trouble of making qualifications for most everything I say, i.e. does fate exclude the handicapped because prostheses and similar devices are more announced, and that therefore handicapped people are easily eluded?—except for the handicapped that are really dexterous, like bionic ninjas—not easily eluded. No, I’m talking about the slower, gentler invalid, the kind I can run circles around. What about them?
Chance meetings, collisions, whatever, are spasmodic events, as laughable and fleeting as the aftereffect of a big sneeze or a fart in a bathtub. I’m probably the first to write about it, ever.
Perhaps it’s advisable just to know that the paths which two people take are never guaranteed and should not be trusted to avoid one another, and that contrived encounters—such as the one I planned for the girl next door—are a waste of time (and possibly a personal statement of character). Lately I’m convinced that what we do in our free time is tallied and then read aloud at our approach to the pearly gates, angels ready at the keep with buckets of boiling oil. I suppose I’ll play it safe and take my chances with the stranger. Shall we dance?
