Beautiful things can be so disgusting. It burns me all up―makes me laugh and rage all at once. You see, there’s this thing that happens to me every once in a while where my chest gets all hot and heavy and I start crying and then laughing. It just comes out of nowhere, or anytime I think about the future. I can’t quite describe it, but its overwhelming. I have this sinking feeling that anything I do won’t add up to much, that any action I make is impermanent and meaningless. That all the things I care about, all the things I am passionate about, are just like lines of code in a video game. 

You know how you might play a video game where it looks like real life―like you’re suddenly a real cowboy or knight or whatever— and the computer makes you see this beautiful image: clouds shading the distant dark mountains that pierce the sky. The geese squawking above you as a deer frolics in the sun kissed meadow and a slight breeze makes the boughs of the trees dance as it starts lightly raining. It makes you feel like you’re really there, really capable of controlling any aspect of your life, like you can really experience true beauty, not only around you, but in your soul too―like you have choices and possess the power to make them. 

But then you look around, and your eyes stray from the screen and that illusion of beauty is cut off. You see you’re in your shitty apartment in Lansingburgh, half naked and buzzed on numbness, psychoanalyzing what it means when one line of code interacts with another line of code, and then you realize its all pretend, make believe, utterly meaningless. That you’ve wasted hours of your life in order to distract yourself from the miasma of indifference. Anyway, that’s how I feel when these chest pains come on.

It got so bad, I had to hop off my bike to breathe, sometimes that’s the only way to deal with these laughing and weeping fits. Thank God I didn’t fall off Helios―that’s what I call my rusty old bike― and die in traffic. I was able to coast over to this park by the road. I threw down Helios and hopped onto this bench to rest. These attacks always seem to happen when I’m on my way to work or trying to do something important.

At least the view is calming. There is this ancient canal here where the water has turned to green muck. The green of the tall trees block the hazing sun and I can hear the dance of mourning doves in the tree line―my chest clenches up at the thought of those brown doves and I look away, out towards the water.

I see some turtles sunbathing and I try to focus on my breathing. My chest is imploding and then expanding and then imploding again. I was weeping to start, but now, staring at the turtles plopping into the green muck, I start cackling. Goddamnit, this is a bad one. I hope I’m not late to work.

Another movement catches my eye in the green muck, and coasting with slow patience through the water is a blue heron. I hear the bird’s slow leg plop into the water. Its long head opens and a shrill, hacking sound emanates from its throat. For such a beautiful bird, it can make a really disgusting sound. It’s terrible. So many things in life are like that, beauty and filth wrapped into one.

The heron marches slowly with its confident, yellow eyes, its legs gliding through the water with the simultaneous energies of Buddha and Jesus, both masters of ugliness and and beauty. That thought lets my cackles calm down to a smile. 

 It helps to think of thoughts or memories when these attacks happen. I thought about when I was in college, before I dropped out, my Ancient History professor had us do an assignment where Buddha and Jesus met. Have them each discuss the other’s philosophies and such in a dialogue. It was a pretty interesting assignment but when I started writing it, I think I just thought that the two wouldn’t say much to each other because they spoke different languages, and even if they were able to communicate, what would two enlightened beings have to say to each other? Wouldn’t they just kind of chuckle loudly with each other, both already fulfilled? This itself was always funny to me. So instead of taking the assignment seriously, I just wrote a dialogue where the two laughed at each other the whole time. They didn’t say a word. 

After submitting it early, the Professor returned it to me and said to try again. So on second thought, I had the Buddha interview Jesus. He asked Jesus when he knew he wanted to be declared the son of God, what his plan to be an enlightened being had been(or deity or demigod or whatever version of Jesus you’d like me to describe).

I had the Buddha ask Jesus what his ten year plan was for enlightened success, and Jesus had responded saying he had plotted out his life with complete precision: At twenty three Jesus had decided that within ten years, he’d either be dead or convert the pagan Gods of Europe into a monotheistic religion. Turns out he got his cake and ate it too.

The chest pain then suddenly catapults through me again. My eyes leap towards the blue summer sky above me and my heart races. I just turned twenty three this year. Is it time for my ten year plan? Because I have got nothing. Nothing. 

As my heart palpitates, I try to find that heron again. It looks right at me, balanced between stoic beauty and sonic grotesqueness. I know the feeling. Its yellow eyes hold me in its vision as the forest behind it dances in the summer gleam. The bird trudges through the muck below it, and the feathers pine towards the blue sky above its head. It bats its eyes at me. There is sudden silence, and my heart slows. 

The heron starts to mutate and transform, bending the air around it. In a second, it grows to the height of six feet, its blue feathers morph into a blue uniform, something like a civil war soldier’s. The head is suddenly hidden by a large cavalry hat, and the yellow eyes turn into long blonde hair.

I hear a voice beckon from the shadowy humanoid-heron entrenched in the muck of the canal before me, “don’t become a dead, lost cause like me, Ralphie,” it says in its squawking cough.

I fall from the bench in shock and scramble from the water’s edge. A car wooshes by on the road behind me. I look back at the canal, and all I see is the heron flapping its wings to add its shade of blue to the vast sky above it. I hear the cooing of mourning doves, and then a beep from a horn behind me.

A car is on the side of the road. I look, and a woman’s face is sticking out of the window.

“Are you alright, man?” she calls.

“Yeah,” I reply, “just thought of something pretty funny.”

“What’s that?”

“A higher purpose,” I say with a chuckle.

“Oh. Okay,” the woman says, a bit annoyed. She rolls up her window and zooms off.

I stand myself back up, the woman’s voice distracting me from the pain in my chest and recentering me from whatever the hell I just saw in the old canal. I grab Helios, lift her right side up and hop back on the pedals, trying to think about the old college days to stay calm, to keep my mind away from yellow eyes and green muck.

I loved college, but I had to drop out. My mother was heart broken. You see, I was going to school to be a history teacher like her, but then, three years into college, after a night of getting drunk with some of my friends, we started talking about Hitler and Pol Pot and what the US Army did to natives out West―and I just thought: Do I really want to teach about all these evil, terrible people my whole life? Talk about them and keep those horrible things alive for thirty years? Then fall into retirement and then die? 

For Mom, teaching was everything; it was her life before she had to retire. Her eyes light up every time she talks about Billy or Susie or whoever she taught how to write— or how to think. It meant the world to her that I wanted to follow in her footsteps. But, I signed papers to take a leave-of-absence the next day. I had this gross feeling in my gut…This uncertainty. It’s when my fits started. 

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 teacher for thirty years. About once a week, I still 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, strong coffee, and punk music. So I’ll keep pedaling forward, even if it’s aimlessly downhill, going from job to job, looking for that Jesus-Eureka moment, I guess.

Now, I work at this ARC. I’ve only been there a couple of months, I don’t know if I love it, but I love the people. The name of the organization is a bit outdated, 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 but it makes the day go by. It 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.