Stephanie


Um, this is a fairly vitriolic essay I wrote after playing at easily the most moving wake (or funeral) ever -- and as a piper, I've played quite a few.

But I really found out a lot about the difference one soul can make -- both for great good and great tragedy. Read on -- it's all true.

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I was in a room with the soul of a saint which was latticed through the lives of everyone in it. The one word which kept resurfacing was honesty, and let me explain something about Honesty.

Honesty is not necessarily about remaining physically true to your husband. Honesty is about being yourself so consciously confidently that your husband realizes he no longer needs a steady diet of drugs and booze to get through two adjacent hours of his life. He realizes that there is nothing to be afraid of except losing you in his life, and you reassure him that now that you have found each other, fear has been conquered. Where you eat lunch means little if you come home for dinner every night.

Love is about bringing everyone who shares your life with you into your heart.

Light is the soul which outshines not merely the squalid lighting of the redlight store where you got your start dancing, but also the hyperexpensive neon blue lighting of a room full of undersexed Asian investors who are paying thousands of dollars to believe for only one evening that they, too, are special to someone. The light of a truly exceptional soul will do all this while cracking super-subtle (but uplifting) jokes that the clients miss, but which make her homesick coworkers smile on the inside as well as outside.

Life is what brings us all together. If you don't believe that the unwashed, dreadlocked alcoholic lurching toward you with a leer of lust is a reflection of your own soul then you've been watching way too many Disney movies. Get the fuck out of the house more often.

And if you've never been frustrated behind the wheel of a car, then you've never driven.

And if you've never experienced frustration, then you aren't human. But if you've trained it out of yourself with patiently careful steps, then maybe you have a bit of Stephanie inside you after all.

But if you're the sort of self-absorbed, sympathetically blind homunculus who is not content merely to sail past an unfortunately overladen automobile when they finally get out of your way, but you feel the need to teach them a lesson about the sort of driver you feel everyone should be and so to vent this impotence not just because of an overpopulated freeway but an overpopulated planet you run the damn car right off the road and the passenger (who had just unbuckled her seat belt for an instant to get at a bottle of water behind her seat) is launched from the car that you just ran off the road, killed instantly, then why bother even trying to be human? Just shoot yourself.

Unfortunately, we can't tell if the guy shot himself or not, since he drove away. But he'd've done society a service if he had.

I've always held that good health is contagious. So are Love, Light, and Life, and anyone who is not a champion for these three ideals is, as near as I can make out, merely a mealy goblin rushing to become food for the necrophiliac maggots from which they came.

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