I had forgotten how much of an empath I’m prone to become when I’m cast alone into a strange milieu. Unanchored, I begin to drift and soon find myself in a fog of unknowingness. Built structures that I encounter of whatever sort become an immediate baseline of deadliness—a straight-line of my own imminent mortal transience. If I fail in such unfamiliar environs to connect in a meaningfully empathic manner with ambient life force(s), these structures begin to cacoon/entomb me with a genuine guarantee of proximate mortal demise. For you see, a true empath connects with the lifeless and inorganic as readily as with the lifeful and organic. And in a dire of an imbalanced environ, the empath, too, is threatened by the internalization of all embracing precocities.
Pittsburgh is one hard city. Set forth to discover, open the gates of sensation, and turn to stone. Or is it iron? Not smiling is inescapably fatal, as the facial features of so many sidewalk zombies unconcealingly attest. Sequentially encountered, they seem mysteriously and mystically one with the cast steel of the many bridges that cascade over this and that unlazy river. As if, they too, once were gripped by the imminent intimacy of unfiltered empathy but were slammed mercilessly into the stolidness of ironicity (Iron City?). Peer into too many such visages and feel your own face begin to strain with rigor mortis. And the harder and more petrified your mug becomes, the quicker your eyes dart around looking for an out. The eyes, the eyes are the very last to become empathically hardened. The very last.
But it’s okay, it’s okay. A street junky that you pass begging for change is really working undercover for Humanity, Inc. And though you stone-cold initially ignore every aspect of his supplicating presence, his glancing observation (“Hey big guy—this is one hard city. Best to smile.”), to your slight, reverberates as a delayed, echo-chambered, last-vestige-of-compassion realization:
Wha? …??.... Finally: a meaningful connection with an ambient life force: rigor vivis! Hell yes! Damn yes! And you turn around, reach for two quarters, and wind your way back to the street junky and say: “Brother, I’m about to give you these two quarters because that’s the best damn advice I’ve heard all day.” And he looks at you and laughs joyously, then looks up and stares at heaven quite piercingly.
Truly amazing the salvation that two bits of metal can buy.
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