The Divine Sitcom

 

Some times you just have to wonder, don't you? I mean, you'll be scrambling eggs, stirring them around in the frying pan, you know, adding a little dash of pepper for flavor, turning the heat down to low, and all of a sudden it'll hit you: What in God's name am I doing? Of course you know you're scrambling eggs; that's demonstrable - ask anyone what you're doing and they'll be able to tell you plainly, "You are scrambling eggs." But why? Yeah, yeah, because you're hungry, because most people eat breakfast and you're no exception, but the question is what are you doing in a world where people scramble eggs for breakfast? What is this? A science experiment? A sitcom? A hallucination? Should you be concerned? Should you just go back to bed and hope you wake up tomorrow in a less mind-boggling cosmos? 

No, you should just blink, shake your head a little, perhaps laugh a bit for good measure, and get on with your life.

But somewhere in the middle of some other day or some other night or some other lonely desert it'll creep up on you again, that ticklish whisper of suspicion, that feeling that you are being watched, or laughed at or imagined, and you'll have to wonder who would cook up a universe like ours, where swarms of winged creatures shift southward across the winter sky, and underneath them swarms of two-legged beings bustle around thinking they've got everything under control, and below even that, the earth... the rock... the fire.

These kinds of epiphanies hit me every so often, occasionally even during breakfast. Some times when it happens I feel scared, want to cry almost. It's just the ghastliness, the unlikeliness of it all. Some times I feel like my life is a movie, long and dull and subliminally frightening, and then I realize I want to scream, want to run out onto the set waving my arms and sobbing hysterically, so the guys in the white coats will come and lock me up in a white room somewhere far away and I won't have to be the director of that film anymore, thank God! But that's when I realize I'm not the director; I never was. I'm just an actor. It's not my job to monitor the action or even to understand the story completely. I just have to act. I just have to follow the director's instructions and use my talent to make this scene all it was meant to be, even if all it was meant to be is hilarious.