David Bulley

Say if you are three hundred feet over shallow water replacing bridge bolts that failed the X-ray test. Maybe the wind is trying to push you off, taunting you with a sexy smile and playful voice, like a lover not your wife might taunt with the same dangerous falling at the end of it. Pretend your lunch pail was placed just two feet beyond where you can reach, safety tether hooked. Well, you have to get the lunch by unhooking but then there you are, untethered.

Not deciding is a thing that a man does. Some might say that not deciding is not doing, but really, they just haven't spent any time pondering the matter. Probably they decided not to.

Decide: Hook it back up, or leave it unhooked.

Now the suicide guy might decide to leave it unhooked, like he feels. He might be preparing to do the fly-try. That's what the crew here calls the jumpers. They seen a lot of jumpers over the years, mostly non-bridge people, but last year a welder, on the very bridge we are pretending about, stood straight, shoulders back, military attention and then sort of leaned over until he fell. When he realized that he really was falling and there was no way back up and he was going to die, he flapped his arms like crazy. He did a fly-try. They all do.

The safety-fearful guy might decide to hook it up right away, no question, just clip and done. Probably that guy never even gave it a thought, the decision being entirely internal.

Then there is the guy who does a thing called not deciding. He makes the un-move of deciding to not make a decision either way. Maybe he wants life to carry him a little. Maybe he is a coward in some matters and lets the wife decide most things, never even realizing that he is giving something valuable away.

Counselors teach about the no-decide guys. Marriage counselors teach all about how men, even laid back, easy-to-get along-with men, even men who gave all the decision they ever had in them away: these men are still at fault for everything. Maybe the affair was just exactly like that. It wasn't a thing done so much as a thing unstopped, like going downhill and trying to figure out, should you put on the brakes or not, but before you can decide there you are at the bottom with an idiot-stupid grin trying to tell how it isn't your fault because you never decided.

So maybe on the bridge with that lovely warm wind tugging and you see that the tuna soaked through the white bread and you don't even like white bread or tuna. The sun is hidden and yesterday on the unpaid day off you had to take, maybe your wife tells you--with the egging-on idiot counselor--that she was never happy, not for one single day in fifteen years of marriage. Not one day, not one goddamned stupid fucking idiot asshole fucking day; not a birthday or the vacation in France or the kiddies, none of it, that she has been miserable the entire time…

Well, maybe you'd look at that tether and decide not to decide for a while.

NOT DECIDING

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