Karma (Five) (Last)

Hindu concepts of speech, action and livelihood glide clumsily like a dirty lazy-susan as I try to focus on an order of which pre-determines the others of the triad most significantly. 

I don't think you can find a lot of consistent trends in nature that are entrained by or passed onto humans in any lasting or meaningful way with regards to our livelihood, so then attention is directed toward speech and action. 

Speech and action, while certainly associated with concepts of identity and social status, do however extend themselves to the subliminal, the ancient, the primitive.  Speech and action, that is, predate any group, any cult, any nation upon the Earth. 

They are both gestures. Gestures intended to express more than the ordinary sum of their components. And both have certain advantages in the concerns of convenience and impact: while action undoubtedly holds more currency in the immediate, speech contains a mobility to rival time itself. 

(If this all feels like an infinite game of rock-paper-scissors to you: Good; that makes two of us.) 

Factor in anatomy. Factor in anthropology. Factor in cosmology. 

And you start to appreciate how much a person is saying when they're talking about themselves.... 

When Erin spoke about herself, it was as someone caught indefinitely, perpetually between the High and Low poles of abandon. She could be solidly wonover by the charms and graces of people in general, or she could be crippled with distraught confusion as circumstances delivered another in a series of losing hands, and in either case its opposite was sure to succeed it. 

She was promiscuous, she was shameless, but she also had a conscience in her own fashion. She held no value, no opinion for the word 'slut' whatsoever. It was like some crayon in a box that no child ever in the history of children would bother using in a drawing: slut orange, demimonde gray. And Erin was altogether brimming with confidence since her mid & late-twenties, a trend the majority of her generation was moving in the opposite direction of. She drank, she slept around, she got high when she felt like it. In her own words, she had an addictive personality. But she was vehemently against the sense of persecution that people that described themselves like that so routinely, so pitifully espouse as a treatment for their condition. 

Erin might've been little more than commonplace trash with lusty exuberance and a knack for memorizing obscure details...but that certainly didn't put her at the beck and call of the shiftless ne'er-do-wells and bitter old people who'd see fit to hold that against her. 

When she spoke about guys like Clyde Henry or Ted, she spoke about them like they were characters in a book or a movie, whether they were right there or not. They were all obsessed with the size of their dicks or how much their trucks cost and essentially none of them cared how lame or foolish anything they said sounded as long as it wasn't the lamest or most foolish thing said that particular day. They lived in some impossibly-large narrative where they were destined to triumph in the harsh face of deplorable odds. According to Erin, you could support it for all you thought it was worth, or you could walk away no differently. 

I still don't know if she was wrong or not, even though she's not here while I'm writing this. 

My eyes scan the parking lot for anyone coming, any nomadic junkies or wild animals picking at the leftovers of civilization. It's quiet, and I could stay here until I withered to less than a memory, but there is something of great importance further north up the road. It's there in my hands, it's in everything. 

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