The Uncertaint E. Principle

“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wile E. Coyote. I am far more superior, faster, larger, and more cunning than you are. And I am going to eat you.”
-the Kaiyoat


wile e. coyote is , hands down, my most influential character. every kid needs role model, and i found mine in a cartoon. his perseverance was pitiful yet inspiring, his plans charmingly absurd, and actions malevolent, but harmless. ha! okay, so it’s clear that my take on this cartoon’s significance has matured some. be that as it may, suffice it to say that good ol’ wile e. was kind of an unwitting mentor (unwitting, indeed!). he always had the coolest rube goldberg machines, the idea of a being ‘supergenius’ is alluring at any age, and, aside from the ‘round-the-clock workers at acme’s shipping department, he relied on no one but himself. no matter how reliable his schemes were to fail, it only ever made sense to start over and try again. and again. and again. so enamored do we become in the starting over and over, that we lose sight of why he’s chasing the roadrunner in the first place.

of course, my admiration couldn’t stop there. being a child supergenius myself, i began to notice things in the coyote’s world. particularly how it wasn’t until wile e. had realized he had walked off a cliff that he began to fall. not until he was aware of his circumstances was he affected by them. i remember wondering if that would work for me, too. was this to be my cure? my few year-old brain became convinced that denial was to be my path to normalcy. after all, what i don’t know can’t hurt me, right?

unfortunately, my parents didn’t share in my enthusiasm. as far as they were concerned, i still had cf whether i “knew” it or not. i was going to have to take pills and do my nebs just like before. or was i? i mean, they can’t make me inhale, they can’t force me take those pills; especially if they didn’t know i wasn’t taking them. and so, like the coyote and roadrunner, i entered into a kind of cat and mouse game. after all, it was my life at stake. it was me who was going to have to live with the consequences, and my child supergenius self knew this. what it also knew was that all i had to do was remain unaware of my situation; and taking pills and doing nebs did not suit my denial well. unlike the coyote, who never seemed to be able to set a decent trap or, for universe’s sake, not look down, i was pretty good at dodging my parent’s watchful eye, even with my blinders on.

what i didn’t know at the time, was that every thwarted treatment, every vomited pill, every discarded bottle was the acknowledgment that locked the reality in place. my very rejection of cf was the observation that set the free-fall in motion. and i hadn’t even noticed i’d been falling! by the time i finally hit bottom a good twenty years later, i had bounced off of enough outcroppings and protrusions that all i could do was look backwards towards the top and laugh...and cry...and smoke a joint...and masturbate...and lament about how my life should never have been left in the hands of such a disassociated maladroit child. i mean, a child supergenius is still a child, after all.