THE SASSY CARCASS

now with audio and free hot sauce sample

I was lying on the porch, doing that thing where, because you’re so tired, you go ahead and hope that whatever really needs to happen can somehow be accomplished from a prone position. My son came up next to me and his head blocked out the sun, and when I reluctantly squinched my eyes open, his shadow said, “oh hey! Who’s this sassy carcass?” as if he’d stumbled on a trash-talking roadkill.

Reader, I felt seen. I even felt a little honored that he perceived enough residual giddy-up in my countenance to warrant the term “sassy”— it felt like the kind of generous, mild upgrade a good friend might dole out, perhaps a tiny bit aspirationally. I will— let us be clear— take what I can get. I really, really will.

There’s a stripping down effect to aging that I think has more to do with a dwindling of aspirations than a dwindling of realities. Let me explain. The tree from which I pluck and hoard my hopes doesn’t actually bear fewer fruits, but my eye has learned, and can’t unlearn, how to tell the ones that will taste bad from the ones that will be sweet. In short, I’ve narrowed my own field of vision and possibility by “learning” from having eaten a lot of worms and mold.

But the catch is this: I don’t actually know what’s inside each fruit. (To be clear, yes, we are riding this metaphor hard, in which a fruit tree represents my sense of what’s possible, and the fruits themselves, which in my mind resemble pears or quince, are individual experiences, people, and/or desires.) I’ve come to believe that my trial-and-error learning system has collected sufficient knowledge to serve as bouncer to my party, filtering out the bad actors, when in fact it can tell me only what has come before. I know that a gray spot once foretold a worm; I know that a brown patch once belied rot. And that is all I know.

*

My daughter asked me recently why her boogers look different from her brother’s. I said every body is different, and responds in its own way to what it encounters. She thought for a moment and concluded that “Brother likes cucumbers, and that is why his boogers are hard.” She found another thing that was different about him, bundled it together with the novel one, and felt that the sameness of his two differences from her sufficed as explanation— in a sort of recursive, “safety in numbers” approach to logic, a model in which one can manufacture truth by reaching a critical mass of like things.

Even as I laughed, I could hear that her system of logic wasn’t actually far off from my own botched and careening mechanism. Both of our takes propose that simple addition (for her, the putting together of boogers and cucumbers; for me, the accretion of past failures and disappointments) can tell us anything at all about the present reality.

Admittedly, it’s good to pay attention to accumulated data, such as “every time I run past that house, that dog tries to kill me” and adjust your running route accordingly, or at least bring a spray bottle full of vinegar (the hippie pacifist / hasty shopper version of bear spray, which, like hippie deodorant, doesn’t work, but makes you feel good about yourself).

The observation of patterns can certainly save us from the full force of our own stupidity. But it can also shore up that same dim organ. Consider, for example, how problematic the word “every” is. So too “always,” “never,” “nothing,” and “everything.” We have got to be seriously delusional to think that a) we can even perceive absolutes, which would require knowing ALL THINGS, and that b) a pattern observable to our ant-like, scurrying consciousness somehow automatically constitutes a fundamental truth.

Perhaps, instead, a pattern, like the repeating crosshatch of a weave in cloth, creates a structure through which the reality of events can be loosely categorized and understood, roughly parsed. But, like cloth, a pattern is also porous, foldable, and can rip or disintegrate over time.

In other words, maybe I spend too much time understanding things by way of how they fit what I already know. I spend myself observing and re-observing the ways in which events fit the existing weave, and not enough time appreciating the wildness and variation, the unpredictability, of my life— the ways in which experience can flow through that established cloth, even change its color, or wash it blessedly away.

It makes sense that, at the likely half-way point of my life, knee-deep in Instagram ads for wrinkle cream and enduring cortisol spikes from parenting that would cause seizures in a crocodile, I’d want to weed out some stuff, pare down what I’ve got to pay attention to. What’s also becoming apparent, though, is that the impulse to clear the decks and filter shit out has brought with it enough momentum to accidentally foreclose on some of the sweetest possible sources of nourishment— the surprise post-frost rebudding, the unusual satisfaction of crabapple tannin, even the things you eat when fruit runs out entirely, like a hind-leg balanced deer, peeling back the outer bark to find the tissues that carry a tree’s clear, ever-rising blood.

*

My daughter was asked at preschool what her middle name was. She, the more cautious and contemplative of my children, replied, with conviction, “Danger.” That seed had been planted by her brilliant nanny, who had observed a while back that the child felt fearful about her new scooter, so she promptly appended the new middle name, used it often and with sports-fan-like enthusiasm, and voila, a scallywag was released into the wild.

At first, Danger was borrowed. Now it is her own, and in a very particular way that only she, among all humans on the planet, can live it. Imagine if she’d only used the data she’d already had to make a decision about her scooter (that she’d fallen, that she felt unstable, that her brother on his bike was riding circles around her, perhaps even that a scrape and some blood, some tears, were involved). For now, I’ll borrow “sassy” from my son. Soon, it may be my own. Oh, and the carcass part? Well, no one can blame him for being accurate. This, too, may prove moveable.

Having the courage to say no based on bad-smelling data is very important. I’d wager at this particular point in my life, however, that the courage to say yes, to get sassy with the goddamned filtered dregs of your stupid little life and tease them back to their imperfect and often deeply painful full-flow, is necessary—fundamental, even—to a life worth living.

carcass goes back to the trail after a year of not running / happy place / yes it hurts