Rock Kant Like a Hurricane (or, “You Should Probably Mop Poopy Floors Twice”)

I remember sitting at a bar at a country club when I was eleven years old, watching MTV. It was one o’ clock on a heady summer morning. Mom was downstairs vacuuming something. She was the night janitor, and I was her pathetic little bodyguard, I guess, despite the fact that I preferred the barroom TV to actual bodyguarding. Also I was a year short of puberty and would’ve lost a fight with a light breeze. Mom’s normally punctilious judgment was clearly askew on this one.

I am not the only member of the Abu Halen family who has problems with the bottle. (Santa Cruz La Laguna, Guatemala; May 2022)

Our little hometown outside the open windows was asleep with the covers off. The middle of the night in the middle of the summer is insect song, warm whispers, full moons. The chairs were upside down on the tables, upside down on the bar. The Scorpions were on MTV. The wind of change blows straight, they said. The future’s in the air. Somewhere democracy was punching its victorious fist through the face of an evil empire. It was tomorrow in Russia. You could feel the wind of change coming up from behind, nudging tonight toward tomorrow in a beautiful, inexorable straight line.

That’s what the Scorpions say, those under-appreciated German philosophers who would rock Kant like a hurricane in a German philosopher throwdown. But the biblical book of Ecclesiastes says something different. Ecclesiastes usually diverges from Scorpionian thought, I find.

Ecclesiastes says the wind of change doesn’t blow straight. It swirls in long spiraling revolutions over decades and centuries. To and fro. Cyclical motion. Tyranny to freedom, then back again. Progress, backsliding, progress. Circles beginning and ending in the same place, over and over. The thing that hath been is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done. We’re going nowhere. There’s nothing new under the sun.

All we are is dust in the wind. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. You can all just kiss off into the air. And other examples of Wisdom Literature. (Saudi Arabia; November 2013)

A decade or so after my summer as Mom’s bodyguard, I became a night janitor myself, like my mom. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say. Or, in our case, the poop doesn’t fall far from the toilet, but if it does you will probably need to mop twice. I lived in a big city by then. My shift ended at a quarter to five in the morning, right about the time when every summer day is born in sunrise and dewy dirt. Blood and water and dust.

I had my own car. It was as old as me. I remember driving home on an empty freeway one morning. Coldplay in the CD player I’d wedged into the spot where a tape deck was supposed to be. Rattles riddled the dashboard, cracks crisscrossed the windshield. We were barely holding it together.

Ye olde car wherein I subjected myself to Coldplay. (Dundee, Oregon; May 2001)

It was tonight in a new Russia with worthless currency, a paroxysmal blood feud in Chechnya, and a ruthless, amoral czar in embryo beginning to pound an authoritarian drum. Iraq crouched like a wide-eyed refugee caught between the pincers of a totalitarian madman and a global superpower with bad intelligence. There was a hole in a city where twin towers had scraped the sky somewhere across purple mountains, majesties, and amber grain. Smoking husks of hope, the heavy bass of war drums. Circles. Going nowhere. There is nothing new under the sun.

I rolled the windows down. The wind of change swirled through the cab, across my face, through my hair. I could still smell yesterday, but it tasted like tomorrow. Tomorrow. Some days that’s all you’ve got.

Then sunlight crested the desperately green hills ahead. It burned instantly through the dewy dawn, slammed into all my windshield cracks, supernova-ed into a billion nuclear sparkles. The night was over. The beginning of another circle. A new circle under the sun. The speakers said, We live in a beautiful world. They were telling the truth.