I hate it when writers mix their metaphors:

Something odd happened to me over the past four days.

Have you ever read the short story “The Hunger Artist” by Kafka? It’s about a circus performer whose shtick is starvation. He gets so used to not eating, he draws crowds by not eating for ten days, twenty, a hundred. He soon fails to impress the crowds so he allows himself to waste to near invisibility. Eventually, not being seen, he fades from the memory of circus and public alike. A panther is placed in his cage, which is presumed to be empty. I seem to recall that the panther eats whatever is left of him, or at least that’s implied.

On the surface it’s a metaphor for the self-denial of the artist. The story critiques the viewer of culture as susceptible to the cult of the new, failing to appreciate suffering artist. But it also undermines the artist’s tragic pose and feeds the poseur to the dynamic panther. I’m sort of like the hunger artist in that I’ve gotten used to not eating. I’m sort of like the panther in that I’m getting hungry.

It was Friday night in the ville and Bob and I attended a Beta Omega Beta cocktail mixer. This was pre party for an ATO event. The ATO’s in the ville are the alternative fraternity. When I was a student there they would dress up like Shriners and bike in circle eights in any and all parades that would have them. When Brad, John, and I lived together we often hosted pre, post, and in competition with, ATO parties. It was all the same people. You get the idea, the smart and slightly odd kids.

This past Friday night I ended up being invited to bartend, to play charades, to smoke, to teach a little bit, to be tolerated a lot, and to relive being the person that I was ten years ago.

Afterward Bob and I went home, not going on to the ATO party. When I turned off my headlights to go in the house I must have hit the switch that turns the hazard lights on. The two switches are next to each other. They flashed away all night and in the morning when we tried to head out for lunch the battery was flat. We asked a neighbor for a jump and it turns out that they had seen the lights flashing, but the car was locked and they didn’t know which dark house it belonged to.

Bob suggested that we take a drive down to Macon for lunch so that the battery would charge. We ate at a little old hotel that claimed to have opened in the eighteen eighties. Right by the front door there was a small, framed picture of Buddy Holly on a bus. Someone had punched the photo and shattered the glass. No one seemed to care to take the broken picture of a broken man off the wall.

Macon is one of those towns that have lost. The factories are all but gone. There is no College there to bring in jobs or money. A dive bar had replaced the antique mall we were going to check out. That town is fading and the panther is primed. You fade when you get caught up in the old, don’t reach out for the new.

When we got back to the ville we had more trouble with the battery, not because there was no charge, but because in the jump the positive connection had gotten loose. You leave those fearful hazard lights on too long and you drain the battery. You get a jolt that starts you, but it’s no good if your connections are loose. If you’re stuck in the past, you’re a broken picture of a broken man on a dive bar wall in an empty hotel. That house on Friday was filled with alt kids who were mentally electric, in motion. From them and from my other friends in the ville I got some kind of a jumpstart. The hazards are off and now I just need to keep connected to the positive.