Shitluck

Luck is a kid jumping off a swing at the height of its curve and a forty-year-old folding a pair to rags. There seems to be a point in most people's lives at which it no longer feels natural to risk something essential in order to create a moment of perfectly reckless ecstasy. In short, most of us learn that the essentials are the essentials and that those muscle-driven explorations of space and declarations of war on its boundaries must surrender to the brute force of time. We learn that those battles are fought inside time's frame, appearing as a two-dimensional mess of color without meaning to those looking on from outside.

Yesterday, I noticed I was driving forty mph on the freeway. It was raining, I was a little sleepy, and I was being paid by the hour. These are good reasons to drive cautiously, which I habitually disregard. Is it time for me to begin paying life insurance out of my experiential bankroll?

A half hour ago, in the rain, my truck fishtailed, ran off a freeway onramp, and almost tipped. I got out of the truck and checked the damage. The woman in the car behind me pulled over and asked me why I was laughing.

There is a reason that these moments are moments and nothing else. They are framed in time for the same reason a picture is framed in space. If these tangles of intensity were not contained and set apart from the rest of our lives, they would bleed through time, diluted by the slow dull hours from 9-5 and the fast dark hours from sleep to rise. Constraint creates concentrated energy.

A moment being a point in time as a particle is a point in space, it is interesting that the more specifically defined in time a moment is, the more extreme the experience of it usually is. When we consider our experience of last year, it was always much less intense than our experience of the most powerful moment of the year. The more a moment is restricted in time, framed, defined as separate from the rest of time, the more energy that moment must hold. If it is not framed in time, its energy is lost to the automatic averaging of extreme highs and lows that our minds perform.

FUCK CONCLUSION. FIGURE IT OUT.