The Absolutes

I have a friend who wishes that the world was full of "absolutes." He is a guy who prefers to thing in black and white. He wants a world where doctors give concrete and absolute answers. He wants a world without so much of the gray areas.

I have written before that there are no absolutes in this world. The only absolutes, in my opinion, were that everyone was going to die at some point. I guess that was the only one, really, now that I think about it.

I was thinking about that today, though, and I started to change my mind. I started to think that there are absolutes in the world, but most of them are negative. There seem to be things that happen at just the wrong moments almost every single time no matter how you try to plan for it.

Whenever you are running late, you will absolutely run into every single red light and run into traffic. No matter how early you think you are, when you find yourself actually running later than you planned, all of the traffic patterns you think you know by heart will be changed. There will be sudden construction on the route that closes down lanes and causes a nightmare. Or there will be a horrific accident somewhere that will cause you to be late.

Conversely, when you are trying to be late, say to a party, and you leave later and you think that later departure will make you late, you will catch every green light and the roads will be empty. This will be absolute true especially if you are my mother and you are trying to get to a movie and not have to sit there in the theater watching the commercials.

My family is notorious for being early. I am always the guy who shows up at a party when there is no one else there but the host. I even showed up so early at one point that the host had not even started cleaning her house or putting on the food. The shock on her face was priceless.

When you start doing well on a new venture, say, starting a new career asa freelance writer, and things are going well, something terrible and expensive will happen that will completely throw you off. This is an absolute. Your car will break down and cost about $2,000 to fix, for example. Or you will end up in the hospital for a week with an illness no one can figure out and that your insurance won't cover.

When you hear something from upper management at whatever company you work for, it absolutely will cause pain and disrupt the office environment. This is because the upper managers were all created on an island where, shortly before their birth, their heads were wedged up their hind-ends. Then, as they grow, by the time they reach their early twenties their heads are wedged up there so firmly they are ready to manage a company. Their ears are covered so they cannot hear what the other employees hear. Their eyes are covered so they cannot see the effect of their edicts. They are completely out of touch with real people and what real people do.

Whatever your projected date of retirement, the company you work for will absolutely do something to screw that up too. My dad retired from his company years ago, and yet has been back there as a consultant so many times you would think he never retired. More than likely they will change the retirement requirements. They will also probably change the ways in which you can access your retirement benefits such as your 401(k)

The government will absolutely be corrupt and illusion-shattering. I learned this when I actually believed that current Illinois governor Rod Bagojevich might actually turn things around within Illinois government. This was before he was under investigation for the same things his predecessor was. This was before he started initiating programs where he wanted to literally put a book in the hands of every child in Illinois despite the fact there was no proof this actually did anything to improve reading skills.

Whatever the government does there will absolutely be people who step up to defend it. I don't care if it is liberals stepping up to defend Clinton to the death or conservatives who actually still believe there are WMDs in Iraq, they will defend the every decision of the politicians they believe in. Nothing you do or say will change their minds. They will continue to believe in that particular politician or government until they are no longer in power and then will defend them long after they are gone.

No matter whether or not a person is liberal or conservative, they will absolutely believe that their side is right and nothing the other side is doing is. Liberals could come up with a plan that would save the lives of every person dying of every disease imaginable and conservatives will find a way to say it was the wrong thing to do. Conservatives could develop a renewable source of energy and the liberals will say that it is not worth pursuing and probably a hidden agenda. Regardless and no matter how much each side blindly believes what they believe, they will consider the other side to be "lemmings" while they themselves are not lemmings but just "right."

The people in the Arab nations will absolutely always hate Israel and be resentful of their presence there. I have no opinion either way, but this is a hatred that goes back thousands of years. For it to suddenly change would be so shocking that the entire planet might stop turning.

When you have to get up in the middle of the night, in the dark, you will absolutely step on something, stub your toe or bang something truly painful into something else. This will absolutely happen when you are trying your hardest to be quite so as not to wake anyone else up.

Whenever you think you have enough gas to travel a ridiculous distance, this will turn out to be wrong and you will run out of gas. See above about traffic suddenly changing.

Whenever you plan to be out in the sun it will absolutely start to rain or get cloudy. Then on the days when you bring your umbrella and a jacket because the weatherman says it will storm, it will absolutely do nothing while you are out.

When you are sick or in pain and call your doctor, he will absolutely not have an opening for at least a month. Whatever your problem is, they have dealt with it before and don't think it's as serious as you do.

No matter what pain you have or where it is on your body it is absolutely a symptom of a heart attack. When you look at the list of pains, it's amazing. Pains at the ends of your toes could be the sign of a heart attack. If people actually went to the hospital with every symptom listed as that of a heart attack the ERs would be so overcrowded it would be hopeless.

Bryan W. Alaspa's novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com. He also has two short stories available at www.amazon.com. You can also pre-order his new novel about haunted houses in St. Louis at www.amazon.com.