A vignette
I like games.
Not just games. Games implies winners and losers. Or at least completion and failure states. At a more basic level I guess what I like is maybe puzzles? But no, that wouldn’t include the joy of wordplay that just appears without real thought. It wouldn’t include the beauty and whimsy of spontaneous improv. Maybe that’s fine. So what if I have to specify both Type 1 and Type 2 pleasure.
Why do I even feel the need to distill the breadth of my experiences into a short statement in the first place? I am legion, I contain multitudes, blah blah blah.
Anyway, not important right now. All I should be focusing on is right in front of me. I’m going to move this damn rock.
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How do you exercise a muscle you don’t even know you have? I suppose babies just sort of flop around for a while. Maybe that’s all they can do until their little brains start to correlate previously random signals to particular proprioceptive states.
But what if you don’t even know if the muscle exists? How do you start the flopping process? Mother Nature probably cheated. She didn’t have to figure it out, she just kept the ones who figured it out on their own. No good. I’ve only got one “me”.
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The night Johnny died was supposed to be awesome. Well I suppose it was awesome. Awesome doesn’t necessarily mean good.
It really did seem like a good plan. We needed motivation. Something primal. We had to find a hack, a way to cut through all the habits and reflexes.
Ugh, hack, cut. Not the whimsical word choices I take pleasure in.
There’s no way we would have set it up like that if we didn’t know it was possible. Like, obviously we knew it was risky, that was the whole point! But we didn’t really believe it was a risk. It was such a clean solution. It had to matter, otherwise it wouldn’t work.
Rock on table. Hatchet on rock. Balanced, but not well. Any breeze, or someone bumping the picnic table, or even just walking too fast nearby and that hatchet was coming down. The likelihood that it would actually hit Johnny’s hand was super low. But it was a possibility. Again, That Was The Point.
The first couple of times it fell it went straight back, completely opposite from where Johnny’s hand was tied down, hammer style, with the handle scooting the rock away as it fell. Damn we were nervous. Everyone laughed. Johnny harder than the rest of us. Then he set it back up with his free hand and slowly, carefully lifted a cheek and
shoved that hand back under his butt to make the situation dangerous again.
It wasn’t even that sharp. It was probably more likely to give him tetanus than to make him lose a finger.
The titters after each drop started dying down. You could tell he was locking in. We all were. And we were dedicated too. No one thought it was going to be quick. We knew there had to be an element of luck to it. We must have watched him set that thing up 30 or 40 times before
it actually came close to getting his finger. He was able to ball his fist up so it missed, but you could tell he was pissed at himself for giving in to the reflex.
After that he completely stopped reacting to the rest of us. He just looked like a machine. Eyes glued to that rock. If the hatchet started to wobble and he could make the rock move to tip it the other way – away from his hand, we would be able to tell. He would be able to tell. But I swear, your mind goes squirrely after too long looking at the same thing. I can’t be sure now, but towards the end it almost started to look like the rock was moving before the hatchet started to
fall. I didn’t say anything. No one did.
Then it happened. The hatchet tipped over and it was absolutely clear it was going to get him. Not just the tip of a finger, something had made it twist enough that it was going straight for his wrist. Or maybe the back of his hand, but there was no way it was going to miss. And then… it did. His hand anyway.