I ran across a frog this evening in the park. As I pound out my thoughts, I came upon his still, scared body, middle of a not un-trafficked road through the park —the kind you’re a little more sure of walking down; a place where humans reign over the beats they’ve created, even if only as a token of glory days gone by— vulnerable to blinding light and fear itself, and with ample reason to freeze too; he looked up at me in hope and horror.
I stopped, and, high from running and from THC, and perhaps thereby vulnerable to nature and ideas in unique combination, I had a very one-way conversation with him.
I felt his fear and approached slowly, as to represent the smallest possible threat a Goliath can to the docilized descended amphibian (this was no wooping frog or bull). I had good intentions for him, though I knew in the back of my mind, if I must touch his slimy skin to move him -if it came down to that, somehow- I couldn’t do it–not unless a car were coming, perhaps. But I forward and steeled myself out of both kindness and anticipatory braggadocio (for this very moment, in fact) and spoke while I kneeled, lean, and give the leg of the guy a soft longways stroke of ‘hello good sir,’ taking my invisible hat off to him. A top hat as running hat would be just the thing for exactly this occasion–elsewise, I’d need a southern draw for my part in this story, a cowboy hat to match, and to audible the aforementioned greeting to something of an ‘eve’nin’ there.’ Southerners seem a little less cordial to these critters, perhaps because kindness towards a meal–ruins it. Not to exclude other obvious and equally viable archetypes of ‘runner meets frog’ tropic infamy from such a drama as this, but so as to fictitiously compliment the traditional frog-kinly attire as befitting one who would have such a conversation as ours, we’ll stick with the vaguely British gentleman’s version of my greeting and all subsequent dialogue for the remainder of this writing, caps included. Consequently and for clarification sake, I am not British, nor have I ever been, but if one can aspire to just the accent and the top hat, I am certainly guilty of these imposterous inclinations.
He stay still as ever–as all the moments I’d known him, at least. I saw him at once in –speaking of archetypes– as the change agent his kind has long represented. Here I recall Hyde’s point, that the ecytype, as an individual of a class comprised of enough individuals sharing multiple immutable or unique enough characteristics to a majority of them as to merit making a group of them for their own and others’ various conveniences, need not embody any particular characteristic of the group -and surely not one projected upon him by a midnight-mad running monster- in order to represent to the expectant eye of such a monster, its significance as embodied representative of the class, regardless of the observed individual’s damned opinion. This to say; when a little girl points to a cat and says ‘Dog!’ she is correct, through stubbornness and, at bottom, murder. And the cat’s opinion is unlikely ever to be sought in the matter.
Addressing him with my forefinger bent in defense: “What are you doing out here, man? You’re frozen in fear, but you’re going to get squashed. Do you want to hop along?” I said with an unnerved -and I’m sure likewise unnerving- nudge of my finger at his pale green thigh.
I turned to go and saw the reason for his fear and trembling. His brother had been partially squashed; brain still alive, leg permanently…fucked. The rest of him was in perfect shape. He was just done for on account of some asshole in a Mitsubishi Talon—a turbo edition, I am sure. I said a word to him, and triple-checked his injury; naively for hope, and reassuringly for justification of my impending actions.
I saw the relationship between them. The life and death and mourning and adrenaline. I saw, I thought, perhaps a glimpse of what Nietzsche saw in his horse—and I do not pretend that I’m immune to such a fate as his despite having a nothingth of his talent.
Now, I had a moral choice: end the suffering of his no-doubt family member -we’ll say his brother- and reinforce the frog’s own archetypal expectation of me as his golem; in stomping his brother’s brains out; or leave them both to their demise, but perhaps with precious time to settle old qualms and say their alms, but in the case of the latter, also prolonging suffering. Only now do I stop to consider whether frogs suffer—best, or most generous, to my mind, I think it, to presume so.
I made peace with them both, bowed with hands in prayerful position, and wishfully asked that the surviving one’s understanding of my actions be those of sorrow, friendship, and mercy: to be viewed as the exceptional ecytype rather than the rule of the archetype—brief violence rather than soft-soled cruelty.
Just then, I realized how warped a morality is man’s: ending another creature’s life, and concerned primarily with how he’s seen in so doing—and by the victim and his kin themselves no less! So much ado about guilt.
I thought upon myself a curse of the bitterly thankful frog’s: “Change—and not for the better, for you.” Perhaps warts from my greeting him; “warts upon your life,” he would say.
Despite barely having engaged him, I found a patch of wet grass and gave my fingers a good wiping. Then my shorts got the brunt of the dew-slime concoction I imagined then residing on my skin.
Whereas, I was on the walking portion of my run, I began running again. Running from the curse of interpretation.