“Are you in school?”
“Eleventh grade.”
Figure out a way to compliment her intelligence, which may not be vast but which looks vast insofar as the girl is still with this mother and therefore has the patience of Job and you think that her intelligence must somehow be as large as or nearly as large as her suffering.
“You’re in the IB program?”
“The whole school is sort of an IB program, it’s a magnet school.”
Ah. And so how to rescue her? Lock the door on the mother in the yard? No: just stand there, thinking of Woody Allen and Roman P. Keep your eye on this girl for the next two days and see if you can do anything for her. You are an ass and this girl has had enough of assness but maybe you can slide something her way that will not be more assness. You will have your hands full with the mother, but still. Even tonight you will be up until midnight hearing about the spiritual healers in Sarasota Florida the mother is referring you to, while the daughter sleeps in the cold room. Listen to the ecologically ferocious mother’s twenty-minute shower from the safety of your own bed. You have told her about your own adventure with Jesus a few years ago and you may need Him again. You have withheld from her how He wears a dirty Pink Panther costume and gives bj to French husbands on family holiday. It will be interesting to see yourself try to tell her this; it will require your knowing that Jesus himself is witnessing your telling her this and chuckling at you as you do it. You must tip your hat to Jesus: when they say He is The Man, they are not kidding.
It’s a new day: act like it. Put the behind behind. Appreciate the lunacy of that, of all advice. Just have a look at appreciate itself. If you inspect the weirdness of all advice, of the imploration that it be followed, you might have a look at the advisability, the integrity, the tenability of the imperative mood itself. Now that we have, just bag it.
Cross the stream. Build a small perfectly shaped teepee-style Boy Scout campfire and watch it burn and put it out when you are done according to standard overkill practices so that if the woods burn down tomorrow you will be blameless, even in your own head. Recall how you have felt the times you have inadvertently burnt the woods down and appreciate that this feeling clear of guilt for having redundantly shoveled a fire apart even after you have drowned it twice will be a stronger good feeling, the freedom from the guilt, than the strong dumb feeling you have had doing all that nonsense to the fire. While having the strong dumb feeling knocking apart and drowning the tiny gratuitous fire that was not even that much fun to have sat beside and watched, look around the woods for the absent wildlife. Strain your ears; hear the flutter of a sparrow or a finch, and know that you can’t, but some people can, identify that bird by that flutter alone. Marvel at how some people became smart and some who once fancied themselves smart, that would be you, never were smart and never became smart, coasting along all that time without need to become smart because of the presumption that they (you) already were. You may even want to confess that you identified presumers of this sort with your best scorn until you joined the club. The appropriate expression for this surmise is “Shit.” You may go ahead now and say it, by the little late fire in the wee noise of the lone fluttering bird, aloud in the woods.
The Indicative Mood
I have read that half the bees are missing. There is a woman on French TV with glossy pink cream on her lips. Oh, surely that is not called cream. Right you are, it is called gloss. So say it again. No. You have slipped into the imperative mood. All right. You have seen a woman with not cream but gloss on her lips. Yes, I have seen a woman on French TV who has glossy pink gloss on her lips. How stupid I sound. The gloss is stupid — relax. You have slipped again. Stay in the indicative. You too. I will.
What about the bees? I will not respond to that. Okay: Tell me about the bees. I will not respond to that. Okay: that half the bees are missing is interesting and possibly alarming but perhaps some details could help us along. The bees have just not come home. Your bee farmers are opening up hives and they are empty. Give me some wine. No. I would like some wine. Okay.
An early car such as a Model-T Ford or a Model-A Ford was a simple thing and it had enough room around the engine that you could stand inside the hood and fix it. And the engine was simple enough that you could fix it. Now the bees are gone. We have come a long way in the wrong direction, or in a wrong direction, I think it fair to say. There is not space inside a car hood now for a bee to work, and half the bees are MIA. I love the category MIA. It means dead but we are too pusillanimous to say so. Goddamn that is a cute girl out there on the street.
There is butter in parts of the world that has crystals of salt suspended in it. There is butter in parts of the world that has no salt in it.
This deal wherein the women have to be covered up — I am not down with it. I have patience for perversity but for a person to have to walk around under a blanket just does not position itself well in my I-can-see-that scope. My I-can-see-that scope in fact does not have in its field of view people covered up unless it is dark at night and cold in the room and they want the covers on them. I am sorry. I have refocused my scope and I just can’t get that to come into view.
I love a well engineered car even if a bee cannot get under the hood. You have got to admit they run better than they did in 1930. I concede you that ground but I maintain still that we have won the battle and lost the war. I will not contest you on that. The wine is good. We want more of it. We do. We are wine wanters. We are wanters. We want shit. We do. This is good. A boy is always praised for a good appetite. No one is praised for a poor appetite. A good appetite gets one in trouble later in life, and a poor appetite would have one be lean and healthy, trim as a garter snake on a log over a creek 200 yards from a family picnic. I went once to a social put on by a club called something like the Toasters. Someone’s backyard was devoted to passing out ice cream to the entire neighborhood. There were vats of ice cream of all stripe in commercial coolers in the yard. It was a riot of bloating and running and headfreeze and a weird happy panic among us who thought surely we were crashing this thing, before we knew that term, but surely we were uninvited and were going to be stopped from eating this ice cream, which we ate all the more indiscriminately for this fear of impending probation. I like the way you ended that with probation. Yes, it is not the precise word I wanted but I was in a rush insofar as that sentence looked capable of going on forever to end it, and possibly probation serves well precisely because it is not the right word but evokes a fuzzy neighborhood of possibility for the right word into which the audience can insert the right word. The audience are good people. I love good people. Me too.
If I knew anything about weaving, and had me a setup, I would weave me a good rug today. I just feel like having a good rug under construction, and later like walking on something solidly built and durable and good under the feet and good to look at as you cross it and good to look at still after you have crossed it and sat down in a good leather chair with maybe your whiskey under a pleasant yellow cone of lamplight and a not smelly dog right nearby. I can even see crossing back over this rug and signaling the dog to come on and putting on boots and getting your shotgun and going out into the field and walking with the shotgun breached over your arm and flushing two quail and glancing at the dog, who looks from the quail to you, with a small raise of his brow at your not having fired at the quail, and you say to him, or her, Those birds flew away, didn’t they? and the dog just resumes the walk. I can see all this. I wish I had a loom. The other stuff — the whiskey, the lamp, the estate with quail on it — would all fall into place. Yes it would. Like dominoes. Like world-class high-living self-important-but-not-so-important-that-we-do-not-know-how-to-be-a-modest-gentleman dominoes.