"It's going to rain tomorrow."
L-I P: Didn't you begin a previous piece like that?
Yes, Father Grindgrad was the speaker. This time Frank Weathers is speaking.
L-I P: What's the difference? Talk about "parodies of oneself."
It makes a great difference, although the Sardine certainly felt that few people would remember an article appearing a couple years ago. Seems as if twenty years have passed since it was written.
"Can I get on with what I have to say?" Frank asked rhetorically and annoyed. "Isn't anyone going to ask why the Sardine put those words in my mouth? He must have a reason."
"You must have something big going on," sneered Wal- terr. "Your daughter's getting married?"
"No."
"It must be an outdoor event," said McNulty, after washing his mouth with a swig of Grand Mariner.
"And what activity do I do more than any other outdoors?"
"Golf," offered the timorous voice of Honey.
For the next five minutes McNulty lectured his wife as to the foolishness of her response. It was November, nearly December, and few golf courses were open.
"It is golf," said Frank, "the club championship. I have been involved in a round robin this last week. Temperatures have been in the low forties, upper fifties. No wind. The greens have remained true. Now the weather's going to turn bad on the day of the championship. Can you believe it?"
"It's only going to rain one day," said Wal-terr.
"A front's passing through. It's supposed to go down into the thirties."
"Would they cancel it?" asked McNulty, seemingly unfazed by his earlier miscalculation.
"I doubt it, but I always play horribly in cold weather."
"It always rains when we want to do something," said Honey.
"No it doesn't," said McNulty.
"It rained on our wedding day."
"That was fifty years ago." He turned to the Sardine. "Do you know that she remembers our entire life together through the prism of our wedding day?"
The brief lifetime of the bad engulfs the eternal pleasant. Not that bad weather is necessarily bad.
L-I P: Would you want a tornado smashing through your wedding reception?
The Sardine doesn't want to get the flu either. In fact....
L-I P: Look out, people. Get last call and let's get the heck out of here. We smell something rotten in the den of the Sardine's imagination.
Bad weather, bad breaks, bad health are the prime movers of life. We can't really eliminate them, but we try. It's a fundamental inclination to want things unspoiled and perfect.
L-I P: You're against making things better. Better not run for political office.
Making life "better" has always been a perilous adventure. I'd have to check more closely, but I believe that history contains a mess of things being made better.
"What about...?" Frank asked.
Let the Sardine finish. History has been an attempt to make things better for one or two groups of people at the expense of the rest. Frank would upset the seasonal weather cycle to win the Club Golf Championship. Most vacationers would want a drought so that their vacations won't be inconvenienced or ruined.
"Just one day," said Frank.
I don't hear the people of Bangladesh complaining after a monsoon floods their country. Not that they like it, but it's the price of living there. The suffering is absorbed into the life cycle. They understand life.
"I don't see you moving to Calcutta," said Wal-terr.
Let's look at something we can't control under any regime. Something that's been happening for the last billion years. Continental drift.
"Yeah, the continents fit like a jigsaw," Frank said.
About 175 million years ago they fit. One of the strangest accidents of the geological past.
"Too bad they didn't stay together," said Honey, "that would be the perfect way to have the continents. It wouldn't cost much to get anywhere."
"How did they get like that?" asked Wal-terr.
The continents move on subterranean plates. The plates themselves rest on a liquid called magma and this material sometimes seeps through to form volcanoes. What's interesting is that the plates fit imperfectly.
"That's a shame," said Honey.
It has to be that way. The imperfect fit causes the continents to move. They are called "tectonic" plates, a Greek word for "imperfect."
"Don't those plates cause earthquakes?" asked Wal-terr.
An earthquake is the result of the earth settling after the plates have moved several feet in opposite directions. The earthquake actually brings back a balance.
L-I P: Figures you would side with an earthquake.
Continental drift strikes me as the perfect metaphor for life itself. We are borne through life on the surface of powerful psychological, social, and historical magma. Our fit with other individuals – be these called cultures, tribes, persons, countries – is uncertain, incomplete, "bad," if you will. We try to understand these forces and "do something about them." Without imperfection we'd be stuck in a narrow phase of life as are the rest of the vertebrates and invertebrates.
L-I P: So you propose we do nothing, sit back, and be bad because we're imperfect.
Before anyone considers improving mankind, it might be better to understand the nature of our imperfections. Or, better, understand how little better humans can really be.
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.