Saturday, December 8, 2012

Thematic Explorations



"It was very likely that the person responsible for stealing all of Oggy’s clothes was building a cocoon for a stuffed animal and simply needed more material. He’d seen weirder things and only the precipitous situation, his rumbling stomach and the arrival of chilling darkness with no more than his ragged cotton serape to protect him, prevented Oggy Bleacher from pondering the long list of weirdness that had been his assigned lot in life to witness since his arrival in the blighted land of Santa Cruz. Oggy’s focus hovered between the two metaphysical lips of a wide chasm of philosophy. What was more important at this very moment? The study of the human condition or the survival of the human? And what consequences wrought by the crime and punishments of time would follow Oggy’s answer? Not even the advancing arthritis in Oggy’s shoulder and back distracted him from silently debating this secondary-topic. To focus on survival at the cost of philosophical reflection was brain death. The unexamined life is not worth living, is it not?
But to suffer through the merciless lashings of another Santa Cruz night because he had done nothing to protect himself, was this not partly mad? On the other hand, mused Oggy as his teeth began to chatter a morse code of misery, was it not irresponsible to attach so much importance to this fleshy shell, so often too weak or thin or instable, a temporary organ destined for a dusty tomb? Indeed, this very debate had nagged Oggy for months and was a considerable obstacle to his development as a philosopher. If he could not resolve the debate about which path to take, physical or metaphysical then he would never advance to the stage of investigating the deeper metaphysical or physical realms. He sighed and once again started the process of weighing each side equally and objectively with no prejudice in his heart or mind. It was a maze, he told himself, and a complicated one but to resign yourself to the land of Caramel Mocha coffee and pencil pushing simply because you could not navigate the maze was unacceptably irresponsible, repulsively lazy, loathsomely common, simple, blighted and was certainly the source of Mankind’s erratic and unpredictable behavior. Solve the riddle and humanity will free itself from this intractable rut of drunken suffering and unwarranted theft. Paradise was at stake."

 I found this passage and it's a hint at what I was trying to accomplish with the Santa Cruz romance novel. Basically, the process of debating what is worth debating is a process that can take forever. But the result is whether the community garden is bulldozed to make room for Costco or not...so it's not an idle topic. At least not to Oggy. A parallel theme is the vortex that Oggy is pulled into when he tries to learn more about the vortex.

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Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.