Category Archives: irony

On waiting

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Waiting is a very odd experience that is filled with both anticipation and frustration. Waiting in line is the ultimate human frustration because one never knows if one’s petition will be fulfilled or if one will be sent to the end of the line, again. Waiting in line at the grocery store to check out and pay doesn’t seem to bother most people, but if I only have a handful of items, why is the person ahead of me trying to go through the express line with an entire cartload of items? Getting in and getting out of the grocery store in a timely fashion is almost impossible because no one wants to wait. Waiting in line at the airport to do almost anything–check in, get re-booked, get on the plane, get off the plane–is a complete fiasco given the complexity of the tasks at hand, especially trying to get re-booked after a cancellation or delay or missed flight. Yet, waiting with anticipation for a package to arrive is an interesting state of mind, giddy almost. Waiting for the weekend can be both exciting and frustrating, especially if you are standing in line to get re-booked because your flight was canceled. Some people have an enormous capacity for waiting, or they have given up hope and are resigned to their fate in life–to wait eternally. Others are waiting for the end of times, which they see right around the corner, but of course, they are still waiting. Personally, I hate waiting at stop lights especially when I am the only car at the intersection and it’s 2 a.m. Waiting for the commercials to end and the television program to begin again is like waiting for Godot, and when the program comes back on I have frequently forgotten what it was that I was watching in the first place. Waiting for the bread to bake or the cookies to come out of the oven is definitely worth it–they taste that much better. Waiting for the bus on a cold winter’s day is no fun no matter how you slice it. Waiting for your date to show up and you are all alone and the whole world knows it is an empty feeling which needs no explanation. Do you wait for the mail with anticipation or dread. Can you wait to collect your first social security check. I’ll probably get my first one while I’m waiting at an empty stoplight in the middle of the night somewhere. Apparently, waiting in line at large amusement parks is not fun, and if you have no morals or scruples, you can cut the line. Waiting in a traffic jam, especially when you are late already, is liable to cause a complete breakdown. If you are waiting for someone to call you back about a job, stop waiting because they aren’t calling. I have a personal loathing for waiting rooms, especially if it is a doctor’s waiting room. I think we should be able to bill doctors if we have to wait more than fifteen minutes after our scheduled appointment time. Waiting to get your car back from the shop is nightmarish. Some people wait all alone in the dark, as Billy Joel once sang. I suppose heaven can wait. I am not a patient man, do not bear fool’s lightly, and I hate to wait especially when I’m not the problem. Yet, there are those people who wait patiently, smile, bear up, stay in good humor, and kindly wait until it is there turn. This is either an enormous virtue or a miracle, but I can’t decide which.

On waiting

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Waiting is a very odd experience that is filled with both anticipation and frustration. Waiting in line is the ultimate human frustration because one never knows if one’s petition will be fulfilled or if one will be sent to the end of the line, again. Waiting in line at the grocery store to check out and pay doesn’t seem to bother most people, but if I only have a handful of items, why is the person ahead of me trying to go through the express line with an entire cartload of items? Getting in and getting out of the grocery store in a timely fashion is almost impossible because no one wants to wait. Waiting in line at the airport to do almost anything–check in, get re-booked, get on the plane, get off the plane–is a complete fiasco given the complexity of the tasks at hand, especially trying to get re-booked after a cancellation or delay or missed flight. Yet, waiting with anticipation for a package to arrive is an interesting state of mind, giddy almost. Waiting for the weekend can be both exciting and frustrating, especially if you are standing in line to get re-booked because your flight was canceled. Some people have an enormous capacity for waiting, or they have given up hope and are resigned to their fate in life–to wait eternally. Others are waiting for the end of times, which they see right around the corner, but of course, they are still waiting. Personally, I hate waiting at stop lights especially when I am the only car at the intersection and it’s 2 a.m. Waiting for the commercials to end and the television program to begin again is like waiting for Godot, and when the program comes back on I have frequently forgotten what it was that I was watching in the first place. Waiting for the bread to bake or the cookies to come out of the oven is definitely worth it–they taste that much better. Waiting for the bus on a cold winter’s day is no fun no matter how you slice it. Waiting for your date to show up and you are all alone and the whole world knows it is an empty feeling which needs no explanation. Do you wait for the mail with anticipation or dread. Can you wait to collect your first social security check. I’ll probably get my first one while I’m waiting at an empty stoplight in the middle of the night somewhere. Apparently, waiting in line at large amusement parks is not fun, and if you have no morals or scruples, you can cut the line. Waiting in a traffic jam, especially when you are late already, is liable to cause a complete breakdown. If you are waiting for someone to call you back about a job, stop waiting because they aren’t calling. I have a personal loathing for waiting rooms, especially if it is a doctor’s waiting room. I think we should be able to bill doctors if we have to wait more than fifteen minutes after our scheduled appointment time. Waiting to get your car back from the shop is nightmarish. Some people wait all alone in the dark, as Billy Joel once sang. I suppose heaven can wait. I am not a patient man, do not bear fool’s lightly, and I hate to wait especially when I’m not the problem. Yet, there are those people who wait patiently, smile, bear up, stay in good humor, and kindly wait until it is there turn. This is either an enormous virtue or a miracle, but I can’t decide which.

On translating

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Translating by definition is falsification and, ultimately, betrayal. Languages are not parallel so all translation is marked by what is lost, not by what is gained. All translators know this because it is their job to understand, interpret, and compromise as they switch a text or discourse from one language to another. There is no such thing as a literal translation, and all bilingual people understand this chasm between languages that cannot be bridged by translating. Translation is about changing a text is such a way that it might be understandable to people who don’t speak the original language. All translation is about loss. As I look at an English translation of Dante’s Inferno, I can only lament the loss of rhythm, sound, and rhyme. We get the “gist” of what Dante is saying about sin and shame, ego and pride, but his art as a poet is lost forever: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. Translating and translation are about the translator turning a blind eye to the myriad and multiple meanings that cling to the original words and sacrificing the author’s creativity and originality so that the text might be accessible to others who fall outside the circle of the author’s language. Yet, translators prevail, get hired, and they do their jobs with little shame or humility. Translations are as ubiquitous as taxes and death. Could it be, all along, that translation is the world’s oldest profession? The problem, of course, is not translation, but the multiple languages the people of the world speak, that Tower of Babel from which we are doomed to inhabit forever. Yet, I am not in favor of making one language a required, dogmatic official language. The more common norm is for people to live in multilingual societies. Even today there are many areas of the world where people speak two, three, or even four languages according to the demands of the social situation. Being multilingual does not solve the problem of translation but it does eliminate the need for translation. If a person speaks Italian, reads Italian, then anything they experience in that language is self-explanatory even if the person’s first language might be German or French. Translation only occurs if the original language is a barrier to understanding the text, or conversation, or song. The only way to approach translation is to assume failure before you even start, and by assuming failure, the translator can only produce a new text which was inspired by the original. In a sense all texts are failed translations of other texts, and there exists no ur-text or Q manuscript which might have been original. Misreading, misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, lacunae, accidents, double-entendre, obscurity, complexity, prejudice, bias, and misinterpretation all plague the translator who cannot avoid or evade his/her own human condition as imperfect translator. In the end, all translators must recognize their failure, ignore the imperfection of their work, and move forward to the next sentence with the understanding that failure is the best they can do. In a larger sense, this is the existential question of the human condition–translator as failure.

On translating

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Translating by definition is falsification and, ultimately, betrayal. Languages are not parallel so all translation is marked by what is lost, not by what is gained. All translators know this because it is their job to understand, interpret, and compromise as they switch a text or discourse from one language to another. There is no such thing as a literal translation, and all bilingual people understand this chasm between languages that cannot be bridged by translating. Translation is about changing a text is such a way that it might be understandable to people who don’t speak the original language. All translation is about loss. As I look at an English translation of Dante’s Inferno, I can only lament the loss of rhythm, sound, and rhyme. We get the “gist” of what Dante is saying about sin and shame, ego and pride, but his art as a poet is lost forever: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. Translating and translation are about the translator turning a blind eye to the myriad and multiple meanings that cling to the original words and sacrificing the author’s creativity and originality so that the text might be accessible to others who fall outside the circle of the author’s language. Yet, translators prevail, get hired, and they do their jobs with little shame or humility. Translations are as ubiquitous as taxes and death. Could it be, all along, that translation is the world’s oldest profession? The problem, of course, is not translation, but the multiple languages the people of the world speak, that Tower of Babel from which we are doomed to inhabit forever. Yet, I am not in favor of making one language a required, dogmatic official language. The more common norm is for people to live in multilingual societies. Even today there are many areas of the world where people speak two, three, or even four languages according to the demands of the social situation. Being multilingual does not solve the problem of translation but it does eliminate the need for translation. If a person speaks Italian, reads Italian, then anything they experience in that language is self-explanatory even if the person’s first language might be German or French. Translation only occurs if the original language is a barrier to understanding the text, or conversation, or song. The only way to approach translation is to assume failure before you even start, and by assuming failure, the translator can only produce a new text which was inspired by the original. In a sense all texts are failed translations of other texts, and there exists no ur-text or Q manuscript which might have been original. Misreading, misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, lacunae, accidents, double-entendre, obscurity, complexity, prejudice, bias, and misinterpretation all plague the translator who cannot avoid or evade his/her own human condition as imperfect translator. In the end, all translators must recognize their failure, ignore the imperfection of their work, and move forward to the next sentence with the understanding that failure is the best they can do. In a larger sense, this is the existential question of the human condition–translator as failure.

On complaining

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I must admit a major failing in my character: I complain way too much. In an ideal world, all machines would work, everything would occur on time, there would always be an empty parking spot, the food would be hot and tasty, the drinks cold and refreshing. People would not text and drive. Drivers would pay attention to what they are doing, and waiters would always get their orders right. Yet, I don’t live in an ideal world: potholes are real, delays are common, waiting in line is the order of the day, so I complain. I complain about slow service, high prices, a lack of time. I complain about complainers. I got caught in a huge traffic jam on I-35 this afternoon through no fault of my own–seven cars had suffered a chain-reaction collision and the wreckage was blocking two lanes of the highway. My biggest complaint in life has to be a lack of time to do the things I really like to do, such as eat and sleep. Being both hungry and sleepy at the same time is depressing. I love to complain about the endless lines at check-outs in big box retailers, who don’t care at all about making me waist my time waiting to by a pizza. I have the same complaint about some doctor’s offices–not all are horrible, but some are just unbearable. We should be able to bill them for wasting our time. I endlessly complain about the weather. Bugs, enough said. Rude people everywhere. Students who cut class, don’t do their homework, fail exams, and then contact me because they are worried about their grade. I complain about the airlines, but I realize that airlines are complex and prone to scheduling disasters. I complain about the prices that certain professions charge: plumbers, mechanics, doctors, lawyers. Why should they have all the fun separating hard-working people from their cash? I complain about bumpy, pot-hole filled roads. I hate stoplights with a pure passion and have an endless series of complaints about how stupidly they are programmed–by people who never drive through them. All parking lots need to be complained about. I complain about how loud television commercials are, how stupid most of the ads are, how idiotic their arguments are for buying their products. Do the commercial makers think we are all cretins? Sometimes I complain about how fat the rest of the world seems to be getting, but that seems like a rather useless complaint when you look at all the food opportunities we have everyday. I hate the aggressive driving I encounter everywhere. Photocopiers are often the object of my ire. It bugs me when people cannot answer their cell phones. I complain about people talking and texting while they drive. I think it’s very thoughtless when a dog owner leaves the dog’s gifts where someone might step in them. I complain about politics, but no one wants to hear what I have to say. But does complaining actually help? I often complain without thinking about the pointless nature of my complaints, the fact that no one cares, that I am just making myself more unhappy by articulating, lustily, my disagreement with the world. I’m sure this is a short list–there are more things I can complain about–but by complaining, I can get my cares off of my chest, and maybe put some of it behind me. The problem is this: my complaints are often well-deserved but the wrong people are hearing them, which makes them irked and me sad. Yet, unless we complain will we ever change the world? Sometimes complaining can make a difference, and passive indifference will only make a bad problem, worse.

On complaining

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I must admit a major failing in my character: I complain way too much. In an ideal world, all machines would work, everything would occur on time, there would always be an empty parking spot, the food would be hot and tasty, the drinks cold and refreshing. People would not text and drive. Drivers would pay attention to what they are doing, and waiters would always get their orders right. Yet, I don’t live in an ideal world: potholes are real, delays are common, waiting in line is the order of the day, so I complain. I complain about slow service, high prices, a lack of time. I complain about complainers. I got caught in a huge traffic jam on I-35 this afternoon through no fault of my own–seven cars had suffered a chain-reaction collision and the wreckage was blocking two lanes of the highway. My biggest complaint in life has to be a lack of time to do the things I really like to do, such as eat and sleep. Being both hungry and sleepy at the same time is depressing. I love to complain about the endless lines at check-outs in big box retailers, who don’t care at all about making me waist my time waiting to by a pizza. I have the same complaint about some doctor’s offices–not all are horrible, but some are just unbearable. We should be able to bill them for wasting our time. I endlessly complain about the weather. Bugs, enough said. Rude people everywhere. Students who cut class, don’t do their homework, fail exams, and then contact me because they are worried about their grade. I complain about the airlines, but I realize that airlines are complex and prone to scheduling disasters. I complain about the prices that certain professions charge: plumbers, mechanics, doctors, lawyers. Why should they have all the fun separating hard-working people from their cash? I complain about bumpy, pot-hole filled roads. I hate stoplights with a pure passion and have an endless series of complaints about how stupidly they are programmed–by people who never drive through them. All parking lots need to be complained about. I complain about how loud television commercials are, how stupid most of the ads are, how idiotic their arguments are for buying their products. Do the commercial makers think we are all cretins? Sometimes I complain about how fat the rest of the world seems to be getting, but that seems like a rather useless complaint when you look at all the food opportunities we have everyday. I hate the aggressive driving I encounter everywhere. Photocopiers are often the object of my ire. It bugs me when people cannot answer their cell phones. I complain about people talking and texting while they drive. I think it’s very thoughtless when a dog owner leaves the dog’s gifts where someone might step in them. I complain about politics, but no one wants to hear what I have to say. But does complaining actually help? I often complain without thinking about the pointless nature of my complaints, the fact that no one cares, that I am just making myself more unhappy by articulating, lustily, my disagreement with the world. I’m sure this is a short list–there are more things I can complain about–but by complaining, I can get my cares off of my chest, and maybe put some of it behind me. The problem is this: my complaints are often well-deserved but the wrong people are hearing them, which makes them irked and me sad. Yet, unless we complain will we ever change the world? Sometimes complaining can make a difference, and passive indifference will only make a bad problem, worse.

On inspiration

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I don’t believe in inspiration, and my muse just scoffs at the idea. “Just bleed,” she said. She is a sucker for Hemingway, I should have known. She just went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. Lucky for her imaginary entities can’t get lung cancer. Inspiration is just another word. Whenever I write, there is a nudge in my gut about something, but that something often has little or nothing to do with what I might be writing about on any given night. I am dead sure that I am not the world’s best writer, but I know I am a thousand times more prolific that 99.9%of the rest of the world. Why should I care about who might be better than me–there is always someone with better style, more profound ideas, great poetry, or a more intricate philosophy or world view. Yet, most of those people are waiting for inspiration that will never come. Waiting for inspiration is a lot like waiting for Godot. You can wait, but the wait will be eternal,melancholy, lonely. Writing is more like mowing the lawn than most would think.Writing is a deliberate self-conscious act in which the writer must put aside his own image while creating something new. Whether a writer fails or succeeds cannot be the criteria for writing anything. Writers will never be able to predict their success or their fall into oblivion. Inspiration is a mirage, an excuse, a straw man that really doesn’t exist in any shape or form. All of our ideas–good, bad, or ugly–float up out of sub-consciousness, rumble around our brain pan before exiting onto a screen, or in more folkloric fashion, onto apiece of paper. Regardless of what one writes about, the muse is working overtime to pile up the nouns and verbs, images and tropes, motifs, metaphors and similes. All writing is essentially always a series of metaphors that pileup like drunken sailors while trying to climb Mount Everest in jockey shorts. Writing is hard, but not because of a lack of inspiration. Writing is hard because writers are afraid that someone might not like their choice of adverbs.My muse says that the best way to write is to turn off the internal editor–that OCD editor that sits behind your eyes and criticizes every word,every period, every strangely alliterated phase–and just let the words flow. Set them free. Yet just doing it once is not enough. You are only a writer if you continue to write on a regular basis. From time to time, you might come up with a sentence that really sings, that reflects your interest in life’s bigger questions,, its most profound questions. Nevertheless, the object of writing has never been to resolve anything. The object of writing is to discuss the problem and recognize that some questions, life’s big questions, don’t have answers, only discussions. In the end, a writer who waits for inspiration is not a writer at all. Only those who write find inspiration because they are not looking for it. As the words pile up, the creative process begins to reach critical mass, thoughts pop like lightening, creating new words, new thoughts, new ideas. Images dance through the discourse, rhetoric blossoms, and before you know it, you have a new piece of literary art, which may delight, teach, amuse, provoke, inspire, or question. It all depends on the writer dismissing their self-doubts and forging ahead, or as my muse says,”just bleed.”

On inspiration

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I don’t believe in inspiration, and my muse just scoffs at the idea. “Just bleed,” she said. She is a sucker for Hemingway, I should have known. She just went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. Lucky for her imaginary entities can’t get lung cancer. Inspiration is just another word. Whenever I write, there is a nudge in my gut about something, but that something often has little or nothing to do with what I might be writing about on any given night. I am dead sure that I am not the world’s best writer, but I know I am a thousand times more prolific that 99.9%of the rest of the world. Why should I care about who might be better than me–there is always someone with better style, more profound ideas, great poetry, or a more intricate philosophy or world view. Yet, most of those people are waiting for inspiration that will never come. Waiting for inspiration is a lot like waiting for Godot. You can wait, but the wait will be eternal,melancholy, lonely. Writing is more like mowing the lawn than most would think.Writing is a deliberate self-conscious act in which the writer must put aside his own image while creating something new. Whether a writer fails or succeeds cannot be the criteria for writing anything. Writers will never be able to predict their success or their fall into oblivion. Inspiration is a mirage, an excuse, a straw man that really doesn’t exist in any shape or form. All of our ideas–good, bad, or ugly–float up out of sub-consciousness, rumble around our brain pan before exiting onto a screen, or in more folkloric fashion, onto apiece of paper. Regardless of what one writes about, the muse is working overtime to pile up the nouns and verbs, images and tropes, motifs, metaphors and similes. All writing is essentially always a series of metaphors that pileup like drunken sailors while trying to climb Mount Everest in jockey shorts. Writing is hard, but not because of a lack of inspiration. Writing is hard because writers are afraid that someone might not like their choice of adverbs.My muse says that the best way to write is to turn off the internal editor–that OCD editor that sits behind your eyes and criticizes every word,every period, every strangely alliterated phase–and just let the words flow. Set them free. Yet just doing it once is not enough. You are only a writer if you continue to write on a regular basis. From time to time, you might come up with a sentence that really sings, that reflects your interest in life’s bigger questions,, its most profound questions. Nevertheless, the object of writing has never been to resolve anything. The object of writing is to discuss the problem and recognize that some questions, life’s big questions, don’t have answers, only discussions. In the end, a writer who waits for inspiration is not a writer at all. Only those who write find inspiration because they are not looking for it. As the words pile up, the creative process begins to reach critical mass, thoughts pop like lightening, creating new words, new thoughts, new ideas. Images dance through the discourse, rhetoric blossoms, and before you know it, you have a new piece of literary art, which may delight, teach, amuse, provoke, inspire, or question. It all depends on the writer dismissing their self-doubts and forging ahead, or as my muse says,”just bleed.”

On Henry James’ "The Beast in the Jungle"

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I first read this longish short story over thirty years ago, and I was just as floored then by the ending as I was last night when I read it again for perhaps the twentieth time. The complexity of the author’s discourse, a labyrinth of syntactic juggling and back-tracking, embedded clauses, and hyperbolic double-talk, is daunting because he manages to talk about love and falling into it for the entire story without ever saying anything directly. The story revolves around the dynamics of a couple, May Bertram and John Marcher, who definitely are a couple, but they never marry, have children, or formalize in any serious way their informal relationship. Everyone who knows them understands that they are a couple. May considers them to be a couple, but Marcher just can’t seem to formalize the relationship even though he participates fully in the relationship as if they were married, but they aren’t married, and are not having sex, which their particular society would frown upon. On the other hand, Marcher is obsessed with some imaginary “great thing” to which he will be exposed and which will change his life significantly. He has shared this delusion/idea/tragedy with May, and she agrees to “watch” with him for the horrendous event. He dismisses the question of love almost outright, but he enlists the help of May to help him watch for this “great thing” he is to experience. They discuss the nature of this “great thing” but one gets the sensation that Marcher is only ever more clueless about what this great thing might be, and one also understands, as does Marcher at some point, that May Bertram knows exactly what the “great thing” will be. She knows, he doesn’t, awkward moment. Over the decades through which the relationship endures they grow to love each other to the exclusion of all others, but they each maintain a dwelling, so they are never in an economic situation which might force them into living together–getting married, that is. Marcher is an independent fool who cannot get past his own ego, cannot understand that he is a man like all others, cannot understand that he is much more common than he pretends to be. He believes himself to be “above average” or “special” but the entire story only proves that he is of the most common type of man who lives under the delusion that he is in some significant way special. May, on the other hand, is paralyzed by the fear that if she expresses her love for Marcher that he will disappear and never come back. For her, his companionship is enough, going to the opera, the theater, out to dinner, eating dinner at her home. Their intimacy is mental and occurs through their conversations about Marcher’s “great thing.” Since their intimacy is not centered on sex, their verbal intimacy, based solely on their conversations, their shared meals, their public companionship, serves to bring them together in a way that is much more emotionally based than physical. Since they go together so well, their natural interactions are taken for granted by Marcher and treasured by May. Only when she gets sick and things happen, does Marcher realize what their relationship has been about all along, and he has been an all-too-willing participant. Whether the story is a bitter ironic comedy or a stone-cold tragedy is for each reader to decide. In the end, the reader is the only witness to Marcher’s comic/tragic suffering. Ultimately, one must decide to live in each day, never take anyone or anything for granted, and take great joy in relationships no matter what form they might take.

On Henry James’ "The Beast in the Jungle"

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I first read this longish short story over thirty years ago, and I was just as floored then by the ending as I was last night when I read it again for perhaps the twentieth time. The complexity of the author’s discourse, a labyrinth of syntactic juggling and back-tracking, embedded clauses, and hyperbolic double-talk, is daunting because he manages to talk about love and falling into it for the entire story without ever saying anything directly. The story revolves around the dynamics of a couple, May Bertram and John Marcher, who definitely are a couple, but they never marry, have children, or formalize in any serious way their informal relationship. Everyone who knows them understands that they are a couple. May considers them to be a couple, but Marcher just can’t seem to formalize the relationship even though he participates fully in the relationship as if they were married, but they aren’t married, and are not having sex, which their particular society would frown upon. On the other hand, Marcher is obsessed with some imaginary “great thing” to which he will be exposed and which will change his life significantly. He has shared this delusion/idea/tragedy with May, and she agrees to “watch” with him for the horrendous event. He dismisses the question of love almost outright, but he enlists the help of May to help him watch for this “great thing” he is to experience. They discuss the nature of this “great thing” but one gets the sensation that Marcher is only ever more clueless about what this great thing might be, and one also understands, as does Marcher at some point, that May Bertram knows exactly what the “great thing” will be. She knows, he doesn’t, awkward moment. Over the decades through which the relationship endures they grow to love each other to the exclusion of all others, but they each maintain a dwelling, so they are never in an economic situation which might force them into living together–getting married, that is. Marcher is an independent fool who cannot get past his own ego, cannot understand that he is a man like all others, cannot understand that he is much more common than he pretends to be. He believes himself to be “above average” or “special” but the entire story only proves that he is of the most common type of man who lives under the delusion that he is in some significant way special. May, on the other hand, is paralyzed by the fear that if she expresses her love for Marcher that he will disappear and never come back. For her, his companionship is enough, going to the opera, the theater, out to dinner, eating dinner at her home. Their intimacy is mental and occurs through their conversations about Marcher’s “great thing.” Since their intimacy is not centered on sex, their verbal intimacy, based solely on their conversations, their shared meals, their public companionship, serves to bring them together in a way that is much more emotionally based than physical. Since they go together so well, their natural interactions are taken for granted by Marcher and treasured by May. Only when she gets sick and things happen, does Marcher realize what their relationship has been about all along, and he has been an all-too-willing participant. Whether the story is a bitter ironic comedy or a stone-cold tragedy is for each reader to decide. In the end, the reader is the only witness to Marcher’s comic/tragic suffering. Ultimately, one must decide to live in each day, never take anyone or anything for granted, and take great joy in relationships no matter what form they might take.