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Friday, 5/30/97 Falling up CHANGE: Hard to look beyond routine life, yet hope for the future perseveres

"From the bottom, it (life) looks like a steep incline From the top, another downhill slope of mine But I know, the equilibrium's there." - Faith No More When I was a seventh grader, I remember one particular occasion walking up a hill to the bus stop on a chilly morning. I can remember the taste of the dew hovering about me, covering the empty street with a gaudy grey. I heard the red beast before I saw it. It was due for an appointment with the scrap yard, and its gears made no qualms about verbalizing its pain. The automobile turned onto the street I occupied, and it parted the grey with a paint job from hell. Above the sound of the car's din I heard something else. In the cavity of the front right wheel I saw the body of a red and white cat, who had the misfortune of getting his head wedged in the beast's maw. The thing was still alive too. His body was pounded to the ground with each rotation of the wheel, and his limbs flashed about in all directions as it tried to dislodge itself. To no avail. He was screeching like a kamikaze banshee, as if he were embroiled in a back alley cat fight. And the car was accelerating. Soon they were out of sight, over the hill; then the sounds of their dueling pain faded away as well. It was not until later in my life that the surreal image coalesced into reality, and I realized that the cat was an acquaintance of mine, falling. Warren Craig and I seemed to accidentally run into each other on a quarterly basis. He revealed his true "identity" to me in a conversation we had some time early 1996. I was coming out of lab and he was coming from an office hour in the Molecular Biology Institute. We walked out onto one of the top floor balconies overlooking the court of sciences where we could see the backpacks atop busybodies scurrying about the court. Warren lit up. Typically, I opened the conversation with our common passion, music. But my raving was greeted with a despondent nod. "I can't play guitar anymore," he said solemnly. I asked him what was up, and our conversation shifted to a minor key. I asked him if he was still with Megan, remembering from the quarter before, the last time we spoke, that he had felt the relationship was in jeopardy. At the time, my first response was to tell him, straight up, to either break up, or, at the very least, back off from the relationship a little. I always thought Warren had a knack for sticking his head into imagination's crevices to feed his creative mind, he would dive into sadness or hopelessness for extended periods of time to experience the rapture of overcoming them. But who was I to judge him or tell him how to live his life, my instincts were hardly trustworthy. They were still together, he told me. He told me what had happened with that angel-girl and how ever since then he couldn't bear to hear himself play music anymore. He was sick of being stuck in what he called a "routine." "Lectures, exams, lab work ... what is all this shit for?" he asked angrily, "after we graduate, what then? More exams, more work to do in grad school, med school, law school, at a job or whatever, more weeks, more months, more years gone by that are not our own. "When I graduate in a few months, what then? I'll just be another in a crowd of people, handed a piece of paper rewarding me for carrying a book-crammed bag for four years, shown the door, rolled out on the conveyor belt from this mass-production institution that is UCLA. I'll be like those people down there when seen from afar, a nondescript face," surveying the scurrying backpacks. "What then? A life that is not my own." He paused momentarily, his brow furling as he took a drag from the cigarette. Then his facial expression relaxed somewhat as he continued to look over the court and began speaking again. "They say when you die in your dreams, you've died in your sleep. The other night I dreamt I was sitting at a stoplight behind the wheel of some red pickup. My elbow was hanging out the open window. A car pulls up beside me, on my left, and inside are two men. I turn to look at them. The passenger recognizes me, pulls out a gun, and shoots me in the head. A warm numbing sensation diffuses through my body and the blood seeps over my eyes and I go blind." He took another drag on his cigarette and had no intention of saying more. His facial expression was disturbingly calm. Silence. His long black hair was thrown about by the wind, obstructing the sun from my view. The cig hung from his mouth as he leaned over the ledge. A sudden fear gripped me, an image on board the random-thought express passing through, as he leaned further over the edge. I saw him at the foot of some 30-story building with his concrete-lover blood making pretty brush-like dash marks where the bodies intersected. I felt mortal and powerless, and my mind was sent racing to find a reason for his and my being. Given the melancholic tone that I've infused my previous columns with, one might think me to be the least likely of advocates of the "life is grand" party, but there I was, rambling incoherently to him about the other night ... The other night, last Wednesday, when I was walking up Strathmore to campus, the full moon was rising, elegant, unwavering, lyrical. Elegant as Hope with her silly, beautiful smile, silly because it somehow makes everything all right. Unwavering, like friendships of my formative years. My companions are still with me, if not in the same room, in the same spirit. And if we are headed in different directions, so be it. Lyrical, like the music that once emanated from the guitar amplifier, that is silent now but will return, without question. Yes, sometimes we may get our heads stuck in the gears, stuck in the wheel of a time machine that does not discriminate, mercilessly destroying the places we once knew, picking off the people we once were in random drive-bys. Though we may adamantly insist that life is cruel, in the spaces between seconds, in between rounds of back alley street fights, over the hill where the sounds of dueling pain faded, something wonderful may just slip through the cracks, and it is our station to honor them and commit them to memory. On cue, the wind snapped and died down. The sky began to darken, scurrying backpacks no longer saturating the court below. The world fell still to observe the sun as it lowered itself gently beneath the clouds, under its blanket horizon. Warren righted himself, turning to watch also. Colors - gold, orange, red - streaked out across the sky, reflecting off the dirty Boelter Hall windows. Darker and darker the colors grew until the sky became a cigar violet. Warren was the first to move, after we had stood immobile up on that balcony for several minutes. He turned, and an uncharacteristically warm half-smile cracked across his face. He murmured, "I think things will be all right." We left the precipice to meet again on another day. Dave Yu Yu is a fourth-year microbiology student.

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