WHY FIGHT GRAVITY IF YOU CAN'T ANSWER THE QUESTION?

 It's time for true confessions.  Two summers ago, I dropped a nickel on the landing outside my apartment front door, and for two years, the nickel has remained untouched.  

The first time I noticed the tarnished five-cent piece staring up at me like a moon from the dingy concrete at my feet, I sloughed it off.  I'd pick it up later, I mused.  The next time I noticed it, I thought, naw, I'll get it later.  Yet soon, the silly thought of seeing how long the nickel would remain by the doormat.  Not exactly a wager; more like a slide into simple wonderment, something a child might think of trying.  No matter.  Weeks passed.  Then months.  Then one, and then two, entire years.  

The nickel remained heads-up.  A private pleasure.  Something to laugh about, laugh quietly, laugh when I was unlocking the door to my home.  Beyond that immediacy, I barely even thought of the nickel. 

Then, last night, the proposition of a dumb nickel sitting on the landing for two years hit me as something actually noteworthy in a small way: I could place a nickel's recent "accomplishment" in The Guinness Book of World Records.  I could get a camera crew from the famed almanac out here in this rickety neighborhood and get a photo opportunity for the minuscule amount of money the world had actually left alone.  Far beneath this reverie, I could call up the local newspaper.  Surely, some ding-dong at The Dallas Morning News is looking for this sort of eccentricity, something I've laughed about that rag for years:  The man in the wife-beater wrestling an alligator, the kid who has been walking a lizard on at string around the block "all summer long", the couple that decided to exchange vows inside a Walmart.  Endless weirdness.  Feature stories always attract a nod and a wink among people with nothing better to do than read some squib about. . . 

. . . a man in far North Dallas who managed to keep a valued nickel untouched on the second floor landing of an apartment complex.  Wow.  Me.  Famous.  The eccentricities of simple humans are fodder for the news: the guy who has been keeping a record of his toenail growth for 10 years really shouldn't have come to mind, but it did.  It's not that I'd really want to place anything I've ever done in the Guinness Book of World Records.  But there really are people who relish the mere dream of it.  After all, that's where The Man With One Long Arm And One Really Short Arm and The Wolf Baby Family of Upper Volta are featured. 

Perhaps this essay is about money and fame.  Preoccupations of many in the 21st Century US.  We live suspended in a world where our own quiet realities never seem to be enough for us.  Or so it seems.  We listen to the crime reports on the local news and worry that crime is literally everywhere.  We see the TV commercials with lovely women, handsome men, and all sorts of glorious things none of us can afford.  And the people all look so hip: They're "with it".  But with what, exactly?  

Where does the glamorousness, the souped-up glory, the hipsters, the movie stars, the music idols, the wealthy, the mansions, all that obsess mass media actually mesh with each anonymous existence?  Right here on my block, I'm certain, truly exceptional individuals don't bother to lurk or loom; most of them simply live their lives, sometimes thinking thoughts that far outmatch whichever big pundit or expert on the TV set claims to possess.  Or do these twin Weltanschauung pass mutually askew?  

Big time, small time.  Where is the actual "spirit of the age"?  What happens to human beings who are crossed between the two?  Yes, we sometimes hear of famous people who bridle under the pressures of fame or wealth.  We hear of them having breakdowns, or enduring messy divorces with other famous people for no other reason than (perhaps) inflated egos bashing into one another in a world of endless dissatisfaction.  And what about the dissatisfaction?  Isn't dissatisfaction one of the engines of the commercial empire, the secret empire that hides beneath the cardboard claims of a fading republic?  

And what about those who never achieved fame, fortune, wealth or much of anything?  What does the onslaught of pressing urges to dissatisfaction do to people who simply want to be left alone?  This problem isn't news, really.  We're seeing these effects almost everywhere.  We think of rural denizens who have lost so much to faraway capitalists or to political moves that never once took them into consideration--and they rebel, they bristle, they resent, and often, at least many times I suspect, they don't quite understand it when pundits, posturers, posers, politicians and propagandists call them "dumb", "stupid", "naive", and sometimes much worse.  Too much of this has to do with what could be called "new restrictions" on the meaning of success.  In the US, 2023 version, success is immediately translated into financial success.  And because financial success is so self-aggrandizing, many who are all about self-aggrandizement and the aggrandizement of those who are financially successful like to take credit for, well, luck.  And those unfortunate?  Look at the meaning of "unfortunate".  It's as if someone who has not been granted the sunshine of financial success has encountered tragedy.  

No surprise there.  The American mass media is best modified in our understanding as the commercial mass media.  A medium of gatekeepers who are funded by wealthy commercial individuals and organizations which, unsurprisingly, demand some kind of "traction" for the dollars they spend on the media.  While I find the suggestion that commercial interests are going to claim more power, undeserved if one considers that mass media is essential to a politically informed public and that commercial organizations should or ought to take the public interest into considerations other than mere monetary "consideration", I can do little to nothing about this corrupting influence on mass media.  If the hand that feeds demands you dance, the seeming logic has it, you've got to do the little dance for the hand that feeds.  

The nickel on my doorstep.  How much does it have to say to a self-examining mind?  

Who wants one's smallish accomplishment placed side-by-side with an "actual photo" of human babies with hairy faces?  Some guy with a five-foot-long arm stands beside a next-to-invisible accomplishment, and taps its small-beans hero on the shoulder with his other arm--which happens to be maybe a foot in length.  Proximity alters everything via background, context, history and placement.   

I don't know about anyone else right now, but I've been thinking a little about eternity today.  Those of us who think about eternity now and then also know that putting something into print it binding it so to speak to eternity.  At least that's the hope.  And that brings me to the nickel I dropped on the landing of my apartment two years ago.  

It's still there.  I'm not sure what the hell I was doing that day, fiddling in my pocket for the door key most likely, and out popped a nickel which then clanged onto the concrete floor only two feet from the entrance to, like, my entire life.  

Your entire life.  Think about that.  You begin at a single point in an unknown line of likely infinitesimal numbers of moments, and then you begin the inevitable slide into entropy, chaos, complexities, maturity; more concepts and phenomena than anyone can name. It's a long way down indeed.  The nickel drops, and perhaps the nickel waits for someone to retrieve it.  

Isn't that what salvation is supposed to involve?  Retrieval?  Look.  A nickel has fallen to the concrete and must be saved from what's essentially solid, cold, dusty, and dead.   

I remember how, when I was young and in college, one popular line we dropped on one another was: Me? I'm stayin' loose.  Entropy, then, is erosion--is it not?  We erode, we stiffen, we solidify, and we lose the often-mentioned flow.  Sometimes we get lost in thoughts, and our thoughts are loud or perplexing or racing enough to distract us from simply being present in the instant, our alacrity. We fall to the concrete. . . 

. . . but, as with many words, concrete may mean something quite different from the proverbial stone.  It could mean--how did I put it when I was 20?  I'm just keepin' it real.  

There you go.  Keeping it real: a solid.  On the ground.  Groundedness.  

It's odd how a word like concrete can pull at you from both life and death.  The nickel fell onto the concrete.  In a metaphysical sense, what could this mean?  There are so many ways to spin the nickel's fall from the grace of the trouser pocket.  

Is pocket change "keepin' it real"?  How about money in general?  Some culture philosophers claim money, once it's expanded into the commercial, is antagonistic to what is really real.  I tend to agree with that assessment.  Money can create an inauthentic, hyper-real existence that is a homogenized ghost of the real reality.  But that's beside the point.  

Nobody has touched the nickel on my landing for two years.  

This reminds me of a sort of trust test I had to pass once when I moved into a woman's house as a renter.  She left a $100 bill lying around--just to see if I'd take it.  I caught onto that quickly and left it where it was.  Hence, I passed.  Had I failed, I'd have been $100 richer, but also without a new place to live.  

Playfully, and alone, sometimes I'd reverie that my landing nickel was a sort of trust test.  So far, everyone has passed it.  The nickel remains in the same spot it fell two years ago. The place was pretty cozy, I suppose.  The woman was a real Mrs. Havisham as in Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations".  Somewhat eccentric, a real tippler, the woman had a yen for antiques, especially Art Deco treasures, and her old Victorian Prairie Home on Junius here in Dallas was crammed with dusty expressions of the modern as envisioned and wrought in the 1920s and 1930s.  

Nickel lands.  On the landing.  Nice.  

This weekend, however, when a friend from Indianapolis came to visit, my world record contending nickel on the landing met its first palpable threat.  My buddy saw the tiny coin and shouted, "Look!  A nickel!"

He stooped to pick it up, but I shouted, "NOOOO!"  

Puzzled, he asked me, "What the heck?"

So I told him.  About the nickel I dropped.  Dropped two years ago.  How it hasn't been touched.  How it's amazing no one has just taken it.  

Yes, I do realize this is pretty nerdy.  A little weird.  But it's fun.  Reminds me of how an entire Kurt Vonnegut novel spans a millennia-long machination by an alien race, the Transfamidorians, to create a spare part of a spaceship of theirs that had been marooned on Titan, Saturn's largest moon.  

Yes.  It's in the spirit of Vonnegut I keep the nickel in its place on my landing.  Now.  What was the question?