Beautiful things can be so disgusting. It burns me all up―makes me laugh and rage all at once. Can you help but notice how many things are so truly radiant and yet also, so gut-wrenchingly horrendous? It’s in everything. Like, have you ever heard the sound of a blue heron? It’s terrible. 

I’m sitting here staring out into the old canal. It’s the middle of June and hot as a dog’s asshole―is that a saying? I think I’ve heard it before… Anyhow, the sun is out and either the smell of distant garbage or the stagnant, putrid smell of the pink lilies is wafting into my nose. The big summer sun is gleaming down into the dark browns, blues, and bright greens of the swampy forest of Vischer Ferry State Park. There are some lilies above the filth, some daisies and a lot of invasive species. Flies keep nipping and darting at me like I’m their personal heavy-bag. 

Anyhow, I’m looking out and I see this heron. It’s beautiful. Big and gray and sort of blueish, too. A majestic, mighty orange beak. Powerful legs that plow through the shallow, mucky waters. It looks like a ballet-ninja dancer. 

And then I hear someone coughing and/or puking at the same time; Or if an orc had arisen from the dark depths of the swamps and hollered out a mating call or a war cry. I look around to see what terrible monster is here to eat me, but I look and see nothing. So I look back at the heron, and I watch it open its powerful, kingly beak and cackle out this sound of rusty saws imitating a witch’s laugh.

“Goddamnit.” I say, to no one really. Just angry at how something so pretty can be so ugly. Mom says that a lot, “Everything that’s ugly has something really beautiful about it. Everything that’s beautiful has something terrible about it.” For the heron, it’s its voice. It’s terrible. 

I hop back on Helios―it’s what I call my bike. She’s a beat up old thing. This rusty teal road bike from the 70s. Made of steel. The thing is as heavy as a Sherman Tank and as fragile as a wine glass. It works well enough, somewhere in between those two things. There are so many rust spots all over it that I can hardly read the ‘CCM Targa’ on the side of it. But Helios is a trusty old gal. A rusty, trusty old gal. 

I’m surprised she still works. The front shifter is stuck, and like I said, she’s a heavy old gal, but she gets me to work on time. I’ve upgraded her with some clip-in pedals and shoes. Aside from that, she’s a junky mount, but my only hope. We like to wander; and that is the beautiful thing about ugly old Helios. She helps me wander. From park to park, job to job―hell, sometimes its the only thing that makes sense. 

I moved here―to Troy, New York―about a year ago. I’m twenty-three, ten years away from being Jesus’ death-age. I don’t know why I tell you that. You either already figured that or you feel like that hasn’t got anything to do with anything. I don’t know. I had a professor say that everyone makes a big realization in their thirty-third year on the planet. I don’t know about that. I’d sure as hell like to realize something sooner rather than in ten years from now. If there is a God, it’s a little cruel to make a man wait thirty-three years to get some advice, isn’t it? Or is that just me?

Originally, I wanted to be a teacher. A history teacher. I was good at it in high school, and I liked to talk about Hitler. I’m not a neo-nazi for God’s sake, I’d like to call myself a punk, so fuck that fascist prick, but Christ, we all like to talk about Hitler. Think about how many times he comes up on the news, in society, in conversation in a month…. How often in a week? Some of you probably think about him once a day. And no, not in some fetishized the-South-will-rise-again bullshit way, but in a ‘holy moly someone actually did this crazy awful shit to his own people?’-kind-of-way. 

I want to point out that every society has some kind of a Hitler in their culture…for the most part. The Romanians have Vlad the Impaler, Russia’s got Stalin, China’s got Mao, America’s got General Bob E. Lee, or Columbus, or Nixon, or Colonel Armstrong Custer. I mean there’s someone terrible everywhere.

I was three years into college and one night, after getting messed up with some of the boys―and yeah, we were talking about Hitler in a screw-that-guy kind of way―and I just thought: “Do I really want to teach about all these evil people my whole life for thirty years straight and then move to Florida for retirement and then die?”

I signed papers to take a leave-of-absence the next day. I couldn’t picture myself with a tie on for the next thirty years talking about Hitler. I had this gross feeling in my gut. My mom used to always say, ‘Ralphie Niegolewski Bender, you have to do what you love on this earth, or there’s no reason for living.’ This was a very high standard to live up to. She kept saying my worries were in my head. I knew she’d be a little disappointed with me dropping out. You see, she was a history teacher for thirty years. About once a week, I call her phone and leave a message to apologize.

But how the hell do you do what you love if you don’t know what the hell you love, or what it means to do work and to love it? The only things I’ve found to love are, in order: my mother, Helios, bike lanes, walking past the pierced-tattooed-hipster-women of Troy (it’s like looking at the raw power of God), and punk music. So I’ll keep grasping at the hollow straws of life. Pedal forward, even if it’s aimlessly downhill, going from job to job, looking for that Jesus-Eureka moment, I guess.

Again, that’s why I’m here at the park, at Vischer Ferry. I want to watch what the birds do, to find something to love, to see what’s left from the old canal days―maybe there’s something to love in these old gray block bricks. Maybe there’s something in these dead tools of upstate New York that rot like ruins. 

I especially like to watch the mourning doves here in the afternoon, before work. They’re so petty towards each other. They all look exactly the same, but they know who’s who. Their cooing is so piercing; like the heron, they’re beautiful birds with such an ugly call. It’s not quite a cackle, more like just a coo! coo! But they love it, the petty feuds over branch and broad. It’s like a badly written teenage reality show. Maybe somewhere in their brisk flights, between the swaying elm tree branches and the cricketing symphony of the bugs and tree frogs, along the tall stems of the reeds, and the slow mumbling whisper of the Mohawk, there’s a real purpose in there. A love of the simplistics of the everyday. Maybe they find love in the present, a purpose in the abyss. Or maybe they don’t think about it at all, those lucky bird-brains.

I readjust Helios’ seat and check my watch; it’s two o’clock. I had better get moving towards Schenectady so that I can get to work on time. I’m working at this ARC. I’ve only been there a couple of months. The name is a bit outdated. I can’t believe they haven’t changed it in over sixty years; it’s the Association for Retarded Citizens. Ugly name, kind of a beautiful mission statement. I’m a support staff for special needs adults. It’s like a little nursing home with about thirteen individuals that need special care. It’s low wages, makes the day go by, and almost feels sort of worthwhile; for now, anyhow. I mean I do wipe a lot of asses for this job. A lot of asses. That’s not figurative. 

I take one more whiff of the salty, stinky canal air, one more listen to the coo, coo of the mourning doves, and wave goodbye to the golden sun and the slow slosh of the swampy canal bed. A little boxer turtle pokes its head out of the muck to say goodbye to me, I swear it winks at me. I clip my feet into Helios’ pedals and start yanking away at her old rusty cranks west towards Schenectady. The wind is in my face, and it makes my eyes tear a little bit. I prepare my hands, and especially my mind, for an eight hour shift of wiping ass.