Differential Settlement, plus one.
I believe I have worked with your cousin before; Steve. Perhaps you can confirm or deny my working theory about him: That his parents used an old microwave turned on its side as his bassinet and kept it on low power all the time to keep him warm.
We were very much at cross-purposes, which was very hard for me to figure out, on account of his lying, his refusal to answer my questions, and his refusal to state his reasons for refusing to answer my questions. Smarter women simply left the facilities, but I was desperate, with nowhere else to go, and odder and odder gossip coming out; stirring up relationships that had been in a benign stasis for years. Can’t be friends with everyone. Women whose snubs I had come to accept as a matter of fact suddenly licked their lips and asked me provocative, presumptuous, and impertinent questions. Was I to leap at the chance to unburden myself to someone who had been occluding fifteen degrees of my field of vision for months, without the slightest nod of acknowledgement?
I was creeped out. I did not want to know what it was about; I just wanted it to go away. The idea of setting this all to right, a particularly hard case, since these women appeared so entirely misinformed, exhausted me. I wanted them to just go back to being who they had been.
The whole place was built on a filled in pond. On my own maps, there was still a pond there. Sometimes the ground belched up sulfurous odors that the management tried to cover up with splashes from a 55-gallon drum of mint. Massive potholes showed up, inside the building and out, from time to time, on account of the differential settlement of the pond sludge, washed out in pockets, seasonally.
A creek remained and looped around the complex, pouring in and out of culverts under the busy road. One time Steve and I watched a ragged cat, going frantic and mewling in the parking lot.
“It doesn’t know what to do. It’s trapped by the creek and afraid to cross the road.” I said.
“Barbara’s like that.”
Barbara had been the worst offender. The first few times I had given her a hello or a nod, she wheeled around on her heels, and went the other way. I let it alone. So be it. But now she was openly insulting me, and encouraging people to join her in “golf applause” as I entered the building. I was asking Steve’s help in figuring out how to put down her attacks. I really didn’t want to know what her problem was, but now it had perhaps become my business.
“Okay, then: Tell me what the deal is with Barbara.”
Steve looked at me hard and walked away.
More than once he boasted that he knew smart people. He teased me that he knew someone who could be both very profound and very dirty at the same time. I told him I would very much appreciate an introduction to such a person. He sniffed, and made a quarter-turn away while thumbing his phone.
I am recalling he mentioned you once. I said given my own history, I was not aware of you, but I was willing to believe that you were as real as he said, and please, tell me more. He refused.
So, how to believe, how to believe how to believe my own bullshit? If truth belonged to the past, then my compulsive truth-telling bound me to keep living it. If things were to be different, I would have to be able to see things as other than they were, to put aside the truth as I knew it.
Take the hydrogen car … by now one can watch video demonstrations of one on Youtube. Oh, yeah, a car that runs on water; what an amazing extension of the potato clock! But no, it didn’t come from the potato clock … it came from people who wanted a car that runs on water. And it still didn’t meet the standards to be licensed to run on an American street. Maybe it would only work for a few days until its works got gummed up with the patina of oxidation or bubbling corrosion. – a car that needed its cylinders re-bored with every fill-up! Oh, there I go again.
For a time, I tried asking people who believed in me why it was they did. Their answers quickly disintegrated into tenuous and sad personal comparisons: Really, I was alone.
One time Steve’s family had given him a book on fixing vision through muscle control. “Oh, really, a book on squinting?” I said. He got angry again.
I can only recall one spell I’ve made in my life, and it was for Steve, who incessantly complained about his life, and specifically about being a coward. His pain, about things that he could and couldn’t control, to my mind specifically related to his cowardice; became my preoccupation, as I tried to find a way to end his high-pitched bleating short of stuffing a towel down his throat. This spell was the “Inverse Pinocchio.” [I’m having trouble finding it for you in my journals at the moment. It used to be in the SENT TEXTS of a cell phone I no longer have.]
I couldn’t tell if the spell had helped him out. He would never let on if I was right, and besides his cowardice, he had a tendency to impulsive idiocy that threw everything off at the last moment.
We were very much at cross-purposes, which was very hard for me to figure out, on account of his lying, his refusal to answer my questions, and his refusal to state his reasons for refusing to answer my questions. Smarter women simply left the facilities, but I was desperate, with nowhere else to go, and odder and odder gossip coming out; stirring up relationships that had been in a benign stasis for years. Can’t be friends with everyone. Women whose snubs I had come to accept as a matter of fact suddenly licked their lips and asked me provocative, presumptuous, and impertinent questions. Was I to leap at the chance to unburden myself to someone who had been occluding fifteen degrees of my field of vision for months, without the slightest nod of acknowledgement?
I was creeped out. I did not want to know what it was about; I just wanted it to go away. The idea of setting this all to right, a particularly hard case, since these women appeared so entirely misinformed, exhausted me. I wanted them to just go back to being who they had been.
The whole place was built on a filled in pond. On my own maps, there was still a pond there. Sometimes the ground belched up sulfurous odors that the management tried to cover up with splashes from a 55-gallon drum of mint. Massive potholes showed up, inside the building and out, from time to time, on account of the differential settlement of the pond sludge, washed out in pockets, seasonally.
A creek remained and looped around the complex, pouring in and out of culverts under the busy road. One time Steve and I watched a ragged cat, going frantic and mewling in the parking lot.
“It doesn’t know what to do. It’s trapped by the creek and afraid to cross the road.” I said.
“Barbara’s like that.”
Barbara had been the worst offender. The first few times I had given her a hello or a nod, she wheeled around on her heels, and went the other way. I let it alone. So be it. But now she was openly insulting me, and encouraging people to join her in “golf applause” as I entered the building. I was asking Steve’s help in figuring out how to put down her attacks. I really didn’t want to know what her problem was, but now it had perhaps become my business.
“Okay, then: Tell me what the deal is with Barbara.”
Steve looked at me hard and walked away.
More than once he boasted that he knew smart people. He teased me that he knew someone who could be both very profound and very dirty at the same time. I told him I would very much appreciate an introduction to such a person. He sniffed, and made a quarter-turn away while thumbing his phone.
I am recalling he mentioned you once. I said given my own history, I was not aware of you, but I was willing to believe that you were as real as he said, and please, tell me more. He refused.
So, how to believe, how to believe how to believe my own bullshit? If truth belonged to the past, then my compulsive truth-telling bound me to keep living it. If things were to be different, I would have to be able to see things as other than they were, to put aside the truth as I knew it.
Take the hydrogen car … by now one can watch video demonstrations of one on Youtube. Oh, yeah, a car that runs on water; what an amazing extension of the potato clock! But no, it didn’t come from the potato clock … it came from people who wanted a car that runs on water. And it still didn’t meet the standards to be licensed to run on an American street. Maybe it would only work for a few days until its works got gummed up with the patina of oxidation or bubbling corrosion. – a car that needed its cylinders re-bored with every fill-up! Oh, there I go again.
For a time, I tried asking people who believed in me why it was they did. Their answers quickly disintegrated into tenuous and sad personal comparisons: Really, I was alone.
One time Steve’s family had given him a book on fixing vision through muscle control. “Oh, really, a book on squinting?” I said. He got angry again.
I can only recall one spell I’ve made in my life, and it was for Steve, who incessantly complained about his life, and specifically about being a coward. His pain, about things that he could and couldn’t control, to my mind specifically related to his cowardice; became my preoccupation, as I tried to find a way to end his high-pitched bleating short of stuffing a towel down his throat. This spell was the “Inverse Pinocchio.” [I’m having trouble finding it for you in my journals at the moment. It used to be in the SENT TEXTS of a cell phone I no longer have.]
I couldn’t tell if the spell had helped him out. He would never let on if I was right, and besides his cowardice, he had a tendency to impulsive idiocy that threw everything off at the last moment.
posted by Constance X at 6:20 AM
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