Watch Paralysis

To watch is to not do, I think. I think this after a day of people-watching at the local Costco and squirrel-watching in my backyard. Either party was frantic, heels/paws digging into dead leaves with either passion or obligation. The two are difficult to discern, blurring with the tears of the woman who hadn’t gotten there early enough to purchase a pre-seasoned turkey prior to the holiday. “They just seasoned it with garlic powder, salt, and dried thyme,” I tell her, choosing to participate in someone else’s narrative. She nods absently. I try to ask the woman slicing cheese samples if they still carry gruyere. She stares ahead coldly and I almost wonder if I have actually spoken, if I am even actually here. With any luck, I’ll wake up and find this was all some tragic, humorous nightmare.

And I just wonder if maybe passion and obligation are borne of the same thing. Surely the hot tears of the turkey-less woman can’t come from the same place as the survival driving the squirrels to run in panicky circles around my bare yard? I muse about this while I watch them from my second-floor window. Trying to tear myself from my squirrels becomes arduous. I try to write about my thoughts but end up staring at my ceiling, which proves much less eventful than my squirrels, and so I opt instead to return to them.

When did they become my squirrels? They are a part of my narrative, but I am not a part of theirs. They are my squirrels in this piece maybe, but they do not really belong to me. They aren’t my squirrels, they aren’t anyone’s squirrels. Squirrels is actually just a word we made up to describe them, and so they aren’t really that, either, except in my mind.

What frightens me most about watching is the way it makes me a slave to the law of inertia. I think about how I am subject to the same laws as the stars. I am paralyzed by it, floored by it, astounded by it(!), wanting to grab the shoulders of every person I pass by in the cereal aisle and shout my intense epiphany into their unenlightened faces, but instead staring forward and saying nothing. Watching the other people approach the empty fridge which just ten minutes ago had seasoned turkeys, and saying nothing.

-NG