Lost in Transition

On Wobbling

Wobbling. You know how it is.  The table you sit at in your favorite bookstore café always wobbles. You can never tell if it’s the top segment of the wood, attached to the neck, or the legs, lacking some support on one side. It seems to change every time you come in. Maybe they switch the tables? Maybe they fix it one day, and it breaks the next? Maybe your life is just a sad excuse for a soon-to-be-cancelled sitcom? Who knows? Either way, it fools you every time, because you never actually think the wobbling is going to be a problem. You figure, “Hey, it’s just a wobble. I still have a table, don’t I?”

 

That’s your first mistake: it is a problem.  That’s the insidiousness of wobbles: they hide the severity of their station from you in the innocence of their appearance.

 

You set your coffee down on the table and it sits there, not at all precarious, entirely at peace. But then, upon trying to shuffle between the gap separating your table from the next, your hip ever so gingerly bumps against the white, glossy counter top. The table, startled, jerks down and the coffee burps a dribble of hot brown over your school papers. Now you have to wiggle back out from your seat, hunching awkwardly to avoid another collision, and slump across the café in shame to grab a napkin.

 

But it doesn’t stop there. The wobble pursues you in your work.  As you write, it humps up and down, mad like a young ox in heat. It careens to the left when you relax on your arm, and then stumbles back to the right when you relieve the pressure, causing your pen to streak across the paper. You become continuously aware of the wobble; it provides you no relief.  In an attempt to appease it, you pull back, hoping to coax some stability out of it by foregoing contact. But now you can’t see the book. How are you supposed to get your work down when you can’t see the book? Or the notes, or whatever you’re working on?

 

So, with utmost care and significance, you lean forward over your flimsy combatant and slowly, so very slowly, begin to breach the gap between you and the edge of the table with your fingers. You bring them down tenderly on the edge of the thing—just the most precise, insignificant quadrant of the vast wooden surface.

But no. A vast cosmic conspiracy has played itself out. The stars are not appeased with your offerings—wobble, burp, more coffee on the table. The walk of shame recommences.

 

You spend the rest of the afternoon locked in this struggle with the table, replaying that age-old conflict. You will get your work done, wobble or no. But not until after a long day of will versus wood.

 

Even after leaving the table behind, though, the wobble follows you. Except now it’s no longer a physical disruption, it’s an assault on your consciousness. You begin to see the various wobbles that plague and populate your life: The creak of the wooden floor, the grunting of the stairs, the high squealing of your chair in class, piercing its way into the silence of a lecture.

 

The way a handle sticks or wiggles on a door. The way the drawer in your desk will inexplicably and viciously refuse to budge past halfway. You steadily begin to observe in your life a whole cavalcade of wobbles in all forms and varieties. You come face to face with the uncertainty of the mechanics operating underneath the smooth veneer of the world around you.

 

Out on the street, the road and sidewalk are full of cracks and frayed edges. The margins are populated by spattered broken bits of plastic and derelict fragments of peoples’ days. Construction sites are always hammering against the earth; giant, brightly colored bulldozer and cranes—themselves full of various mechanical disruptions—crush against stones and move gurgling masses of wood and pipe and metallic skeletons through open lots. The cars stream by, squealing and sputtering and cackling over the uneven pavement. There are cracks in the walls, marks and smears on counter tops, splatters of paint on window frames; markers and pens and pencils break or lock and refuse to perform their functions.  

 

Everything wobbles. Your body is full of all kinds of strange and creative organic wobbles—constantly shuffling around its parts. Your joints and bones crack, grind, and slide against one another. Globules of gas and awkward convulsions circulate in your bloodstream. Perhaps cancer—merely a defect, merely a wobble—is even beginning to populate some organ, some imperfect quadrant of your being.

 

Existence, the cumulative makeup of both your own body and the world around you, is caught up in wobbles. Your friendships and romances are even more precarious than that table of yours. They splinter and fail with only the subtlest notice, and they are far, far harder to put upright again.

 

This disarray is the only true uniformity in your life. Entropy is the foundation of your affairs, and you build monuments and concepts of meaning that struggle and pant on top of one another in a sad attempt to hide it. The vast inelegance of the whole affair—so material, so broken—eventually reveals itself to be nothing more than a huge amalgamation of continually broken parts. The table is merely a statement, a call for recognition of the kind of life you are living. The table is demanding that you recognize the absurd hilarity of your broken world, which is ultimately nothing more than a continual, fumbling stream of imperfections.

 

Think about it. What is safe, secure? What doesn’t truly, honestly wobble? Isn’t the physical world itself just an accumulated series of vibrating, wobbling particles? Look at that table. Feel the way it jerks under your fingertips. The table is everything. The table is the cruel realization that nothing is static. Nothing is true. Everything is broken. The table is wobbling, the table is the truth!

 

 Or maybe it’s just a table. A table that wobbles, and spills your coffee, and forces you to clean up after yourself. Maybe you shouldn’t have picked that table. Maybe you should just find another table.

  1. subduedintellectual posted this