Energy

This morning, a washed-out high-altitude blue summer sky. I'm sitting outside the coffeeshop beneath an arbor, birch and cottonwoods offering shade, little bits of cotton floating in the air around me, tumbling back and forth on the flagstone pavings, rising and falling in a thousand tiny directionless drafts, moving like slow fireflies, bits of ash from a bonfire, rising and falling very slowly, describing circles and spirals, back and forth. Listening to the Field cover of “Everybody's got to Learn Sometime.” It makes me feel as if whatever had been bothering me is already safely ensconced in the past; as if I've “learned” something critical about being in the world. But of course I haven't learned anything, and nothing really has changed; epiphanies are still simply disconnected emotional artifacts, entertaining, pleasurable, but, worthless. When good things happen, there's no real way to make those good things mean anything, there's no way to get the good to continue; I have no method for the creation and sustenance of actual good feelings. I'm talking with my sister:

—I appreciate religious people, I say. —They have something I lack, a little less clarity, a little more magic. I appreciate that, you know, their ongoing expectation of mysterious transformations, magical occurrences, using words that don't mean anything but which somehow contain a whole host of things, possibilities, you know?

—Sure.

—The question is, as I see it, should I start taking anti-depressants?

—Well, Brian did say that you have 'bad energy' and that you're a negative person, possibly the most negative person he's ever met.

—He said that? Hmm.

—Yeah.

—I've been too hard on him.

Durango is a small town framed on all sides with the tops of mountains. Crowds of badly-dressed hippies, bicyclists and off-road customized Jeeps, Ralph Nader bumperstickers on Subaru wagons, recycling bins, solar panels, backyard greenhouses, compost gardens. Here, lights are turned off in empty rooms, people are self-conscious consumers of organic, free-range foods; “sustainability” is on everyone's lips, alongside an omnipresent discussion of “energy”—good energy, bad energy, coal, solar, the sustained existence of energy, this last a contemporary neo-religious causal catchall, a vaguely scientific religion, the physics principle of the Conservation of Energy having been somehow transmuted into a justification for the continuation of our lives as we know them, something to cling to, death-defying. I inevitably reply:

—Who cares if the energy in the universe remains constant? If I die, my identity will be utterly dispersed, which is the only thing that matters, because I won't be around at that point to take comfort in the conservation of energy in the universe.

Somehow, no one accepts this point. The universe takes on the qualities of your typical deity: dispensing mysterious justice in the form of karma; maneuvering people toward some putatively purposeful end, because everything happens for a reason, of course. Then these proponents of the universe begin in with hysterical anti-Christian rhetoric. It's embarrassing for everyone involved. I feel deep embarrassment.