The Martlet

I’m on a bus. The roads here are oblong and ill-maintained, so the bus goes bump, bump.

Here’s the thing:

Nothing really matters. I’m not very old, but I know this for sure. There isn’t a thing that is worth a damn on this whole blue earth. Those countless hours spent by the brutish and astute dwelling on the meaning of life, on the divine, on existence are all for naught. They won’t get anywhere and it wouldn’t matter if they did. We’ll all be ground to dust just the same. Don’t look at me. Blame scientists.

What a grand hoax! This life, this spectacular tragedy! What a startling surprise for us creatures of such spanning intelligence and reflec- tive fortitude to find that all our struggle is but a mean quibble on the finest freckle on the outer arm of a milky galactic behemoth, itself only one of countless like it. And what irony! To happen upon such a fact even as we prostrate ourselves before our mighty deities, whom we’ve assumed for so long to be more than just wild conclusions leapt to by some archaic cave-dwelling pre-Homos.

“Très drôle,” I say, as the bus goes bump, bump.

The pretty girl in the seat next to me turns and cocks an eyebrow be- fore returning her gaze window-ward. I’m not sure if she heard what I said and is confused, or perhaps I muttered the whole thing aloud and misused the French phrase “Très drôle.” I am not fluent in French, though I wish I were. Many of my friends these days are bilingual, having been immersed in a language throughout their grade school years. Once I asked my father why he never put me in the French im- mersion program, to which he replied:

“Why the heck would you want to learn French?” I don’t know. Mais je veux parler le français, papa. My father is a simple man, despite having a squishy orangey-pink thing in his head of considerable ability and complexity. I don’t believe he ever left his hometown growing up. He has never had a hankering to see the world, excepting the odd vacation to a resort in Cancun to escape the rat race. He and my mother go there once or twice a year during the cold months. It’s one of those fancy-ass, five-star places where they wait on you hand and foot and everything is free. You can eat like a pig and drink like a fish all day. I went down there with them once when I was younger and got a hell of a sunburn while I sat by the pool with all the other pink-bellies. I burned so bad, in fact, that I was forbidden by my mother from going back outside the following day. I was stuck inside, sticky with sweat in the Cancun heat. I went for a glass of water at the villa’s kitchen sink. As I touched it to my lips my mother squealed.

“Don’t drink that! You might get hepatitis!” I put down the glass. Why the Mexicans put hepatitis in their water was beyond me.

Bump, bump.

I go to a nice school, now that I’m a little older. The campus is pret- ty; it isn’t too large and has a road around it that is a circle, which I am fairly certain was put there because it is cute. I am a student, like you. Or maybe you’re not a student now, but if you’re reading this and it’s making an ounce of sense then you must have been at some point. If it’s making more than an ounce of sense you’re as bat-shit- crazy as I am.

I ride the bus to my nice school in the mornings because I can’t af- ford a car. I have a bike. It is a really neat old Japanese road bike from the seventies. I bought it because it was bright green with chrome fenders and I thought all the ladies would like it. The ladies do like it, but I don’t ride it much because it has steel rims that slick up in the rain and cause me to crash into things and break my foot. On the first rainy day of last October I was not yet aware of this feature, and I rode my shiny bike swiftly down an access ramp on campus that was shaped like a “U”. When I got to the bottom, I applied my brakes, as is standard procedure when taking a sharp 180-degree turn. The old pads pressed against the rim like wet fingers on an oily noodle, and I endured one of those stretching moments when you know shit is about to hit the fan. My handlebars hit the railing and I flew over them both, landing a few feet below in a holly bush. Like that wasn’t bad enough, my foot was still above me, lodged crooked between the double handrail and support post. It made a sick popping sound as I wrenched it free, and I proceeded to roll around in the holly, moaning like a guy who’d just fractured his ankle. Get a load of this: a girl came around the corner and the first thing she said was “Were you trying to do a trick?!”

Bump, bump.

When I get to my nice school I go to lectures and learn about nice things, physical things, and the way they have arranged themselves to function in the set of circumstances they find themselves in. For ex- ample, I learn about an arrangement of carbon atoms called the jewel wasp, who finds a poor cockroach and stings it in the brain where the venom eats away at the neural areas that give the cockroach free will. Once the mamma wasp gets rid of the cockroach’s free will, she grabs it by the antennae and pulls the poor thing into her den where she stabs her ovipositor into the roach and lays eggs in its abdomen. Even as the larvae devour the cockroach alive from the inside, the cock- roach doesn’t freak out or have a hissy-fit like anybody else who’s getting their insides eaten would. It just sits there passively because its free will is gone, until eventually the larvae burst forth to infect other poor cockroaches. Talk about a bummer.

I work pretty hard at school because I need to show everybody how smart I am. I need to show them so that I might get myself into a career that will make me seem like a person who’s worth a damn, and so that I will get the approval of people who I think are worth a damn. The fact that nobody is really worth anything is not lost on me, but I can’t help myself — none of us can. Besides, I owe the government tens of thou- sands of dollars for my personal growth and edification, and I imagine they’ll want that back soon. So I figure I’d better get my ass in gear and become a doctor or a lawyer. I used to want to be a teacher, but on that salary I’d be paying my loans back until my late fifties, and I’m not even sure I’m going to make it that far. But sometimes I still think it would be neat to teach kids about parasitic jewel wasps.

Sometimes after school I volunteer at the hospital in town. Volunteering is a funny thing, given that there is most likely no such thing as altruism amidst all our Darwinian dramatics. My hospital volunteer partner is a guy named Chris. Chris wants to be a doctor. He thinks its funny that he has to do things he doesn’t want to do to prove that he’s a good person and worthy of consideration and tutelage because of all the time he’s spent doing mundane and minutely rewarding tasks pro bono, when all he really wants to do is sit on the couch and eat potato chips until he’s too fat to move. Tell me about it.

I, myself, am a little fat, so I try to eat healthy and exercise often. I even just took up yoga as a way to both stay in shape and quiet the constant chattering of the thousand broken conversations that pinball through my brain every night before bed. I never thought I’d be a yoga-goer, but it is calming, I find, and if you’ve got a pinball-brain I’d suggest it to you, too. Plus girls with nice bums do yoga, so it’s a double-whammy. Bump, bump.

In the mornings I read the news. My complexion is such that I am concerned about the state of the environment and the population crisis and the plight of the developing world. I am concerned about the number of people dying of cancer and AIDS and the myriad other diseases and civil conflicts currently ongoing. I am concerned that the person who so skillfully stitched my garments is sitting in a stinking sweatshop somewhere, killing herself for a shiny dime a day. I am concerned about all these and more. I’ll bet you are, too. That is the gift of globalization, capitalism, and the media age. The gift of penniless studenthood is that you can do very little about it.

Sometimes this all gets to me, the state of things, you know? I mean really gets to me. And knowing that nobody is worth a damn and that nothing really matters is as consoling as a kick in the teeth. It makes me want to stay in bed all day long. The problem is every morning I wake to the inexorable thunderclap of conscious existence, just as you do. And since we’ll probably go on that way for a while (at least until things get really bad around here), it seems that we all might as well carry on giving a damn about the things we’ve deemed worthy of our affections in the first place. Even if in the end we’re just a cosmic fart. The bus stops. The doors go “cchhhh”.

So I’ll smile at the pretty girl because she is worth a dayum. I’ll go to class and pay attention because one day I might use that knowl- edge to help a person, and people are worth a damn. I’ll smile at the sun and the singing birds and the chirping chipmunks in the trees because they are worth a damn. And I’ll laugh out loud when it occurs to me that they’ve had it figured out all along.

I’m on a bus. The roads here are oblong and ill-maintained, so the bus goes bump, bump. Here’s the thing:

Nothing really matters. I’m not very old, but I know this for sure. There isn’t a thing that is worth a damn on this whole blue earth. Those countless hours spent by the brutish and astute dwelling on the meaning of life, on the divine, on existence are all for naught. They won’t get anywhere and it wouldn’t matter if they did. We’ll all be ground to dust just the same. Don’t look at me. Blame scientists.

What a grand hoax! This life, this spectacular tragedy! What a startling surprise for us creatures of such spanning intelligence and reflective fortitude to find that all our struggle is but a mean quibble on the finest freckle on the outer arm of a milky galactic behemoth, itself only one of countless like it. And what irony! To happen upon such a fact even as we prostrate ourselves before our mighty deities, whom we’ve assumed for so long to be more than just wild conclusions leapt to by some archaic cave-dwelling pre-Homos. “Très drôle,” I say, as the bus goes bump, bump.

The pretty girl in the seat next to me turns and cocks an eyebrow be- fore returning her gaze window-ward. I’m not sure if she heard what I said and is confused, or perhaps I muttered the whole thing aloud and misused the French phrase “Très drôle.” I am not fluent in French, though I wish I were. Many of my friends these days are bilingual, having been immersed in a language throughout their grade school years. Once I asked my father why he never put me in the French im-mersion program, to which he replied:

“Why the heck would you want to learn French?” I don’t know. Mais je veux parler le français, papa. My father is a simple man, despite having a squishy orangey-pink

thing in his head of considerable ability and complexity. I don’t believe he ever left his hometown growing up. He has never had a hankering to see the world, excepting the odd vacation to a resort in Cancun to escape the rat race. He and my mother go there once or twice a year during the cold months. It’s one of those fancy-ass, five-star places where they wait on you hand and foot and everything is free. You can eat like a pig and drink like a fish all day. I went down there with them

once when I was younger and got a hell of a sunburn while I sat by the pool with all the other pink-bellies. I burned so bad, in fact, that I was forbidden by my mother from going back outside the following day. I was stuck inside, sticky with sweat in the Cancun heat. I went for a glass of water at the villa’s kitchen sink. As I touched it to my lips my mother squealed.

“Don’t drink that! You might get hepatitis!” I put down the glass. Why the Mexicans put hepatitis in their water was beyond me.

Bump, bump.

I go to a nice school, now that I’m a little older. The campus is pret- ty; it isn’t too large and has a road around it that is a circle, which I am fairly certain was put there because it is cute. I am a student, like you. Or maybe you’re not a student now, but if you’re reading this and it’s making an ounce of sense then you must have been at some point. If it’s making more than an ounce of sense you’re as bat-shit- crazy as I am.

I ride the bus to my nice school in the mornings because I can’t af- ford a car. I have a bike. It is a really neat old Japanese road bike from the seventies. I bought it because it was bright green with chrome fenders and I thought all the ladies would like it. The ladies do like it, but I don’t ride it much because it has steel rims that slick up in the rain and cause me to crash into things and break my foot. On the first rainy day of last October I was not yet aware of this feature, and I rode my shiny bike swiftly down an access ramp on campus that was shaped like a “U”. When I got to the bottom, I applied my brakes, as is standard procedure when taking a sharp 180-degree turn. The old pads pressed against the rim like wet fingers on an oily noodle, and I endured one of those stretching moments when you know shit is about to hit the fan. My handlebars hit the railing and I flew over them both, landing a few feet below in a holly bush. Like that wasn’t bad enough, my foot was still above me, lodged crooked between the double handrail and support post. It made a sick popping sound as I wrenched it free, and I proceeded to roll around in the holly, moaning like a guy who’d just fractured his ankle. Get a load of this: a girl came around the corner and the first thing she said was “Were you trying to do a trick?!”