Are you quoting Trouser Snake?
Indeed I did.
Don’t. Anymore.
Okay.
Quote Studio Becalmed or quote no one.
Studio, bless his short mortal soul, did not say enough for us to ferret out quotes. He was, after all, Studio Becalmed, not Studio Blather. I don’t think Studio could have ever been troubled by a “vision of something dark” that he couldn’t put his finger on.
No. In our mythology of Studio, he went fishing or walked around in the woods and then saw Jayne one day and romped thereafter in the Alps of Heaven, dead or alive. He was not given to analysis of figments of his imagination.
More importantly, he was not confused. I am confused. And getting confuseder.
I am getting wonderier about our mental welfare.
Well, you should be if I cannot get up from the bed and recover the wanton emotions of the night. It’s very cold outside. I saw this mechanic wearing a pair of overalls into which he had inserted a heating pad and he had plugged himself into a power strip and was working comfortably. We could make rigs such as that.
If we got a generator and put it in a red wagon we could make it to the liquor bunker warmer and making more noise than all the brothers’ Buicks combined.
We would never be fucked with hooked up to a generator.
Are you making some roundabout insult?
I am just having a vision of us wired to a loud Honda generator, smiling in our superwarm jumpsuits, and carrying large unbreakable bottles of vodka unmolested through the ghetto. That is all I will confess to.
It is not a bad vision.
It is a happy vision. It is not a vision of a dark place I cannot rescue from abstraction. I am done with all that. This Red Flyer walk in heated suits is a Studio-Becalmed vision, and I am going totally with it.
I want orange electrical cords and orange suits, like jail suits.
That will be our very best protection, if we look to have escaped and are not in a panic to conceal our prison garb.
We will be bad. Unspeakably bad and loud and bold. One of us stays with the generator while the other goes in the store.
Right on.
I can see Studio camped in a pup tent beside Lake Rosa. He gets up at four in the morning under a moon and casts a Dillinger on the lake and catches bass the size of fire hydrants. His uncle remains asleep. There is coffee later, black coffee boiled in a black pot over a fire. An easy morning.
What is a Dillinger?
Torpedo bait, propellers fore and aft, striped like a zebra.
Is this a joke about primitive bass fishing?
Well, it was a funny bait and the fishing was primitive — the bass back then hit anything in the water, as near as I can tell. Water snakes — there were enough of them that they rained from trees into the wooden rowboats.
You are on a full-on nostalgia roll now.
I am. I am about to envision drinking the tangy water from the orange metal tumbler and petting the rogue water moccasin.
Do we have any heating pads?
No.
Jumpsuits?
No.
Metal tumblers?
No.
Dillingers?
No.
&
Did we party last night?
Not, to my knowledge, beyond the usual, the genteel talktail party we always hold. Why?
Because I notice that all the knobs to the stove are off the stove.
They are gone?
No, on the kitchen floor.
Neatly or scattered?
I would say they are in a configuration that is between neat and scattered. As if they fell from the stove behaving like apples falling from the tree are wont to behave: not far.
That is an interesting idea, stove knobs as fruit of the stove.
Well, the fruit is on the ground.
I am without answer.
A stove-knob burglar came in and was frightened off the booty by something?
One of us sleepwalks and likes to pull appliances apart? Were you punished for playing with the stove as a wee?
Did another appliance molest the stove — did the toaster oven pull her knobs off?
Did a bull come into our china shop? I would like to know who coined that conceit, the bull in the china shop, it is not bad at all.
I wonder if a bull has ever actually got into a china shop.
I would think, in the long reach of time, it not unlikely, at least once. A bull running, say, down a street in Spain could easily detour into a fine shop. Remember your laws of thermodynamics. I’ll say it was Dickens, Sterne, one of those guys.
I am a little depressed.
I am too.
Nothing novel.
No.
We should reknob the stove.
I’m going to. I left them on the floor only for evidentiary purposes. The crime will not be solved, we might as well sweep up the evidence.
That could be our motto for Life. Life will not be explained; sweep away the evidence.
&
The hindmost hand.
What?
I have had another vision, of “the hindmost hand.” As a phrase, not as a thing.
What does it mean?
No idea. But I like it. It comforts me.
It would be possible to take succor from the hindmost hand.
Far superior to that from the foremost hand.
Inarguably.
We have fallen on the right side of the fence on that one, yes.
And how discomforting is the hindmost foot, or the foremost foot, compared to the balm proffered by the hindmost hand?
That foot is not a halcyon idea any way you put it.
No. We favor the hindmost hand.
The hindmost hand helps us, leads us last through the door.
The hindmost hand on the small of the back.
It hands you peace of mind.
It sits you in the shade, the hindmost hand.
It shows you the valley, the light without trouble, the happy shadow.
It calms the water before you.
It hands you the halter to the gentle horse of Life.
It gives you a piece of candy when you thought you were left out.
It spanks you when you need spanking.
It waves a hearty farewell when you are leaving.
The hindmost hand greets you forever.
The hindmost hand helps you over the last hill.
The hindmost hand hauls you into the Final Alps of Heaven.
Studio Becalmed shakes your hand with his hindmost hand.
With your own hindmost hand you say, Hidey, finally, to Studio, and you rest.
Your long sojourn is done.
You may discard your electrified orange jumpsuit.
Let’s not go there again.
&
I have lost my mind, I am comfortable with having lost my mind, and I plan on having my mind stay lost.
That is Caesarian, almost. What precipitates this observation?
Por esample: I have spent the better part of the morning cutting up my bvds for rags, making nice usable little patches of soft polishing cloths by cutting along the seams. This surgery is done as carefully as if it were construction, not dismantling.
This is not irrational behavior. We can be compelled to many enterprises like this. The brain wants order. The soul likes clean lines, man. The isolated “cotton panel” speaks to it.
Yes. But I am saving the elastic waistbands, because they are generally unexhausted elastic, which I cannot throw away.