ECKLEBURG
2004-09-24 - 2:51 p.m.
Do you ever have those fleeting moments, right in the middle of an otherwise good and happy day, which itself is part of an overall content and bright stage of life, where you worry that perhaps you can’t really live up to the position you are in?
It is like when you are riding on a really really big scary roller coaster and you have gone up the top of that first big hill and everything is still for a split second because you have stopped going up but you haven’t quite started hurling back down and in that second you wonder if you really should be here, if you are brave enough for this ride but of course it doesn’t really matter because even if you weren’t you’re already here and you can’t escape so you tell yourself that the only thing you could possibly do is keep going.
And at the same time you are thinking this you still have that second thought in the back of your head that persists in knowing that everything is going to be just fine. I mean, someone let you onto the ride and let you get yourself up to the top, right. If you really weren’t supposed to be here, they never would let you get yourself to this spot to begin with -- what with the liability risk and the insurance requirements and reputations to protect.
But here you are, along with everybody else on the car on the ride and then you worry that the people behind you will notice that you can’t put your hands up in the air during the drops and curves with the same vigor or skill as everyone else or that you perhaps crouch down in the car a little more or squeeze the safety bar a little harder.
And perhaps it’s all in your head. I mean you are to busy with your own concerns that you aren’t paying attention to how everybody else is reacting – and even if you tried, its difficult with the way the cars are shaped and the different angles. Really, you aren’t even sure that you are really doing or not doing these things more than what any human subjected to these forces would do, and by this time the ride is only half over and you still have the opportunity to change and redeem yourself at least partially.
And then the ride is over and you’re walking down the little exit path and you still haven’t figured out if you did it well compared to others or even if you did it well compared to your own possibly idealized self-perception of how well you should have done; so you talk to those who are leaving with you and you say something like, “Wow, that was intense” and super-analyze their response for clues and subtext to indicate how they really handled it themselves so that you can compare your response but even this doesn’t quite work because that person might be the outlier themselves or you might not have got enough of a response to read them and you want to ask multiple different people for second options and you want to ask follow up questions to have more material to evaluate but you can’t really because if you ask too many questions, well then the need to question itself could be interpreted as a sign that you’re more worried about it than the others, which is itself proof that you are below average, and even worse might advertise to others that you are the weak link because they must be doing at least a little of the same thing themselves, unless they are not, which would go again to show that you are thinking about more than should be and are below average. It is like a human version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in action.
Fortunately, your walking and talking and questioning is interrupted because you have run into the next attraction, a big Pirate Ship Ride perhaps, and your attention is taken away from the subject and you forget about it and you think about how interesting and exciting the Pirate ride sounds and you remember that you are actually are having fun and you are glad you are here, at least until you are strapped into that fake model pirate ship and it has also reached that moment of stillness right before that first big plunge.
