Yer blues...

An editor of mine sometimes takes me to task for the lack of redemption in my stories....his phrase, and one that never fails to enrage me. I was so puzzled by it, this word redemption, that I took to searching out different dictionaries in order look up the word. I never found a definition I could accept. What I suspect my friend really means is that literature should contain a nugget of crunchy goodness...the notion that every experience is worthwhile, or even worse, that events, particularly terrible events, make us better and wiser. Clearly, life doesn't share that idea. Some happenings are perfectly dreadful and the sooner we can forget about them, the better off we are.

Some years back I was mugged in a parking lot, in broad daylight and wound up badly injured. My hip was broken, my rotator cuff snapped, and my left side was skinned like a field-dressed deer. During my weeks of recovery, I had to sleep sitting up, my legs strapped into a flesh-colored chunk of foam. Except that I didn't sleep. Despite heavy doses of pain-killers, a ferocious insomnia took hold of me. It was the sort of sleeplessness that usually ushers in brooding self-recriminations. I didn't indulge in that. Instead, I remember being wide-awake, saying to myself, again and again, fiercely: There is no lesson for me to learn. There is no lesson for me to learn. There is no lesson for me to learn.

My own view of the world is that it is endlessly expansive and nutty. Its humor boils up into full view when you and I believe we have a grip on what's going on. This self-confident sense of things is usually a hot-pot of our own desires peppered with a hefty sense of our own self-righteousness. It makes jerks of us every time.