I was waiting in my car yesterday afternoon at the gas station in Saar. I didn’t know why the service was especially slow at the precise moment I was there and I started to look for omens (just like any rational, bored 20 something year old would do in any gas station). I was looking across the street and realized that all the palm trees, as far as I could see, were gray. Everything else was covered in a film of dust that either came in from inside or outside the borders (still can’t decide). The final omen came to me when I noticed that the gas nozzle clicked and stopped working half way into filling up my car. I was staring at the attendant, trying to make sense of why the pump wasn’t working correctly, when I suddenly imagined a scenario in which there is no gas in the station.
When a gas station, in a supposedly gas-producing country, runs out of gas, what is a person supposed to feel? I imagine that most of those caught in such a situation would panic and would either go to other gas stations in search of gas or do something else with their time. I also imagine another group of people who would be happy, because this is another close step (without falling off the edge) to their own destruction. I would like to refer to the last group of people as those suffering from vertigo, in the sense introduced by Milan Kundera. I probably fall into this vertigo group.
Vertigo is not only the sense of dizziness one gets when standing in front of a deep abyss, but also a small sense of excitement. An excitement in which one imagines himself or herself falling into an abyss while knowing that he or she is secure from destruction.
As I looked at the gray palm trees, I breathed in the suffocating clouds of dust and looked at the attendant who was busy trying to figure out how to get around the problem at the pump, and I smiled.
lovely