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birthday) – and I admired the sheer diversity of skill and all
the things he could do. But envy him I did not: the settled
life for some, the gypsy life for others. The Hat’s progress
through life was steady, no hairpin bends. He could
probably have understood if El had abandoned sport to
devote himself to his family, or his business, or another
sport, to science, to something “serious”, but El went off
into space (which they say has a blackness we don’t have
here on earth) and thereby sinned against balanced
priorities The Hat saw as sacrosanct.
“At your age I was into everything, swimming, track and
field... I even played the trumpet – and took my son to the
nursery! You guys, though, don’t seem interested in
anything.” The Hat saw things clearly, but he was looking
up from ground level, his only perspective, so how was he
going to understand that rhinoceros on El’s chest? The guy
was into everything, but everything interested him only to
the extent that he could make it, or press it, or complete it,
otherwise he saw nothing and just passed by. That’s the
way it always is, but we wanted more, to go from rags to
riches on a jet engine. We wanted the big time. Achilles
rushes into the river and finishes off the Trojans right there
in the water – till there are so many corpses, they dam the
river and it pleads, “I cannot flow! Kill them in the fields,”
but Achilles shrugs, as if he holds the world in his fist. We
understood that, but we were just sad guys who couldn’t
make it into orbit. So screw everything! We would watch
the leprous society around us go to hell in a handcart.