So Be Happy and Don’t Worry
Even Sid Vicious sang about regrets that he had a few. If Sid could sing about regret before opening fire on an arena full of music lovers, surely anyone can, right? Well, not so much, unless you consider Sid’s short life to be great importance. Which, who knows, maybe it was, but yours probably isn’t so don’t bother:
“Unless you have a life of great importance,” she said, “regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.”
Not Loneliness, Mind You
They say there is being alone and there is being lonely. But neither of those things are deserving of metaphorical contemplation by a lonely divorcee. Instead, her contemplative thoughts to constructing metaphorical imagery dealing with aloneness. It’s different from the others:
“Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair.”
Divorce
Divorce seems to run rampant among these characters. Or, well, there are at least two major characters who suffering from failed marriages. But, hey, for every person sad about the situation, there is always that jokester who can turn it into comedy with just the tool of a metaphorical punchline:
“Oh, divorce will do that to you totally,” she said reassuringly. She poured him some wine. “It’s like a trick. It’s like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, ‘Stand there.’ And so you do. Then boom.”
Hell’s Philosophers
A wedding—which, of course, will almost certainly inevitably end in divorce—is interrupted by some gun wielding bikers. But then the bikers realize they have come to the wrong wedding and one of them valiantly attempts to explain their mystifying behavior using a number of different rationalizations, including an extraordinarily odd indulgence in just plan bizarre metaphorical language. No doubt the result of too much meth:
“The errors a person already made can step forward and announce themselves and then freeze themselves into a charming little sculpture garden that can no longer hurt you. Like a cemetery. And like a cemetery it is the kind of freedom that is the opposite of free.”
Maternal Love
Not a lot of the stories in this collection feature first-person narrators, but at least one of them is fortunately populated by the perspective of a character with the gift of metaphorical gab. She is the same divorcee who takes the philosophical flight of fancy on the meaning of aloneness and while still somewhat in the grip of the contemplative state, she rolls back the years to remember simpler days with her now-teenage daughter:
“Now tall and long-limbed and inscrutable, she seemed more than ever like a sniper. I felt paralyzed beside her, and the love I had for her was less for this new spiky Nickie than for the old spiky one, which was still inside her somewhere, though it was a matter of faith to think so.”
