If Anything

Recently I realized something unsettling about myself. The pleasure I get from watching things fall apart is unequivocal.

Perhaps pleasure is too morose a connotation than I am aiming for, perhaps it is merely a perverse fascination, or, perhaps, I have a small excitable engineer for a heart.

Watching breathtaking Buddhist sand paintings that take days to create get swept up immediately afterwards is an upsetting and profound reminder that it is just that, a pile of sand. But for that brief moment you forget its parts and imagine its whole to be extraordinary.

The opposite occurs when I watch building demolition videos. I imagine them like an opera set to Tchaikovsky. I forget that someone designed it, that someone's marriage inevitably suffered from long nights at the office there, someone there realized this was the wrong career for them, someone kept secrets there. All those stories tumble to the earth with the steel and concrete, but in the moment I only ever see rubble and dust, with Tchaikovsky undertones.

Watching the brain splicing of a frozen UCSD donor specimen researchers were making slides out of was an interesting one. You have this transition happening before your eyes where you're physically destroying one thing to turn it into something completely different while still, somewhat, maintaining its original identity.

Short stories function similarly. You take this one brief moment, this one thread of time, and immortalize it, give it retrospective significance that may not be entirely honest with the actual past event, if non-fiction. And in fiction, you wrap yourself in fantasy, you believe the imagined, invest in the figurative, and project a personal meaning onto another's words.

It's an interesting dissection of time and place, of illusion and reality. Makes me wonder what is "true."

If anything.