I bought some summer clothes, you know, shorts, T-shirts, and a lilo with a beer holder for the pool. I packed everything in a suitcase along with sunscreen and set off to the beach for the weekend, taking advantage of the high temperatures my country has been enjoying the last few days. As soon as I set foot on the sand, the thermometer plummeted. The sky has also turned a donkey-belly kind of gray. And a wind that in all likelihood comes from the land of ice caps in Al Gore documentaries has started blowing. Now I’m writing behind a misted-up window, watching the rain pour down furiously outside, surrounded by a rising flood, and so cold that I may well be a corpse and just not know it yet. This might be a posthumous column. The last thing that went through my mind in life was freezing to death in the middle of April. Besides, that’s just insulting. It’s how fish die.
My last week has been a disaster. I won’t go into details out of respect toward my private life, assuming we writers have such a thing as a private life. There are times when everything goes wrong, that’s most of the time, and then the rest of times everything goes incredibly wrong. I should have spent the whole week crying or something, but since I’m a satirical columnist, I have an obligation to be chirpy and make my readers laugh, even though I feel more inclined to having a testicle removed without anesthesia; not that I’m too keen on having the same operation with anesthesia, either.
One of the mysteries of when something you care about starts to go wrong is why, suddenly, every object in the universe conspires to add to the disaster. Typical stuff. Your girlfriend leaves you, then your car breaks down, then there’s a flood in your house, then your cat dies (that’s what you get for having a cat), then you get a traffic fine, then your favorite suit rips, and then a freaking two-centimeter wide meteorite falls to earth and chooses from the vastness of the planet to burst through your bedroom causing a fire that I’m sure you refuse to take care of.
When the wave of misfortunes begins, the storm is infinite. If you don’t cut off the bad streak, you will see that the major things — health, money — and the minor things — the clogged drain in the kitchen, the glass that falls out of your hands — gang up to provoke your wrath every minute. And they succeed, of course.
I’m on that streak. Coming to spend a few days at the beach to enjoy the sun and being surprised by the great snowstorm is just a drop in an ocean of misfortune, so I take it with resignation. They say that God makes us better through setbacks. Sometimes I look up to heaven and say with filial love, “Father, maybe I don’t need to get that much better right now.”
On the other hand, there are ironies of fate that I never quite get used to. When some great sadness afflicts you, and you need to be alone, and you go off to some secluded part of town to try to lay low, he always shows up. He, that is, the annoying one. Faces and names are interchangeable , but the likelihood that you’ll meet the most annoying acquaintance in the whole neighborhood in a remote place you’d gone to cry in solitude is directly proportional to the severity of the drama you’re trying to cope with.
As a satirist, I trade in humor, so it shouldn’t seem wrong to me, but there are obviously times when life laughs in your face with big guffaws. But don’t be alarmed, the sun always comes out in the end. Specifically, it will come out on Sunday, when one has already returned from the beach to the big city.
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