That much is true. I do. Need to relax.
We all do.
All us bullet heads need to chill.
Right on. We could hurt ourselves if we don’t.
Bullets don’t just go off by themselves.
No, they don’t.
Exhale.
Okay.
They’ve started letting us take the yoga classes if we wrap our heads in towels.
That is good news.
Yes it is.
&
That is a man with fifty functional rain hats.
What do he paw fink?
What?
A man with fifty hats makes me think of a joke about a bear. A country boy is told that a bear hibernates all winter. What do he do? the boy asks. He sucks his paw, the teacher says. What do he paw fink? the boy asks. You needed to have been there.
Where?
I will estimate that I heard my aunt tell this about 1962 in a rented cabin on the Crooked River in Georgia. Boozists and card players.
Big hit, was it?
Medium hit. They lost a large quantity of beer leaving it in a chest freezer too long, looked like ropes of intestines and brown glass in there. Good snake count outside. Rough river with some salt water in it. Nice place. These places are all gone now. At least I fink they are.
I fink so too. My paw is dead.
Mine too. This is one reason why I do not discredit totally a man with fifty rain hats.
I am not following you, but I dig where you comin’ from.
My paw could wear one of those hats were he here. I did not really know him. That is a shame. Had I to do it over again, and if he himself had fifty rain hats, I would not laugh at him for that, is all I am—
— Yes yes, perfectly clear.
You going to pay me, or whut?
How much you worth?
Four grand.
Four grand.
Yes.
Okay.
You don’t think I am worth four grand?
I said I’d pay.
You said, Okay. You have doubts.
Okay, I doubt that you are worth four grand.
Okay. Pay me.
That is what I said I would do. No one who argues to effect the initial status quo is worth four grand.
I made an error. I have mental problems.
I would say that you do. It may take your four grand to begin to address them.
That would be a waste of money. My first purchase will be a deep-fried hamburger, followed by a nice leather bag for some new toiletries. I lost all my toiletries in the misplaced-car incident, or series of misadventures related to losing the car, I should say.
Your toiletries.
My toothbrush and chiefly my Eveready badger-bristle shaving brush, which I had had over twenty-five years. It’s like losing a child, or a parent. When I get a good new ditty bag and a shaving brush in it I can begin to reassimilate into normal living. Hat, boots, beer come next. Redhead on my arm. Hot-air-balloon vacation, that kind of thing, snap me back into my BVDs just fine.
Four grand will get you there?
I should think so. Yes.
You’ll stop this trebly warbling and trembly walking around and all the goddamn moping and incoherent expressions of your pain as if only you have any, and the incessant holding of your large face in your tiny hands?
Yes, I shall stop all that.
Four grand is cheap if it will stop the lugubrious flood of you.
Well, pay up, and I’m a new me, that’s all I can tell you.
&
Is it better to have continuity of no content or discontinuous content?
What is “content”?
I use it as an irritatingly vague substitute for seriousness of purpose or meaningfulness in living, or something similarly perhaps as irritating as “content”—
I get the drift. I would say it is better to have content without the continuity if the alternative is smooth unbroken vapidness such as the sort we practice in these dialogues every day.
I’ll mark you down in the intellectual column. I am not surprised. I’m penciling you in right beside Bertrand Russell.
I’ll take it. One might be penciled in beside, say, Jerry Lewis.
Listen, I’d rather not talk today. I want to go watch old tennis players be displaced by young tennis players and the crowd weep as they retire and then start cheering for the new cocky-bastard upstarts who have sent them to pasture. This I want to do today, and nothing else. I want a cool soda water in my hand and a hat on my head and to not be overweight myself watching the elderly depart. I can from this position think gently of my own death.
You almost got some content going on.
I got it going on.
You’ll look like a tennis groupie but you’ll have secret ponderment.
No one will know.
You’ll be a subversive in the stands, a thought arsonist. You’ll be like a Frenchman.
&
I’d like to see some flying dogs.
Are there flying dogs?
Not that I know of. Seeing some would improve my mood tremendously, though.
I suspect it would. Mine too.
Cheer us right up, flying dogs.
Raining cats and dogs.
Like to see cats bouncing off cars.
Why’d they call combat air battles “dogfights”?
They wanted to see flying dogs too.
&
And today, today what shall we do? What we shall do today is…
Is carry placards on the street.
For whom? For what cause?
I do not know that. May we not just carry a generic placard for A GOOD CAUSE? Let people fill in the specifics, according to their own designs and divinations of what cause needs supporting?
They might arguably be much more likely to actually support the cause if we let them supply it.
Indeed they might.
So how does our sign read? Here, I have the fat Sharpie, the white board, these handy furring strips.
What are furring strips exactly?
These sticks.
I know it’s those sticks, but why are they called furring strips? What is furring?
Can’t you just make a sign and put it on a stick and go out on the street with it and start a movement and change the world without pestering the shit out of people about a word?
You can say “furring strip” without a clue what you are saying and be unbothered?
Write STAMP OUT FURRING — THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIME on your placard. On mine I am going to merely put SUPPORT THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIME. This covers the spread. Let’s go.
Let’s take some of that lemonade. It’ll be hot.
You got it. Stamp out sugar, the moral imperative of our time.
You is a Communist. You put that on your sign and we are both dead men.
&
The red Ban Lon shirt and the dark walnut clubs made the strange deformed Negro boy wielding them look remarkable.
That is the most idiotic utterance I have ever heard come out of you.
Why?
Why?
Yes, why?
Because if the combination of Ban Lon and walnut and deformity moves you only to remark, as the word remarkable suggests, then you suffer a catastrophic failure of the imagination.
I do. I do suffer that. So do you. Are you mental?
I thought you said arf you mental.
You neglect to note Negro when you list Ban Lon and walnut and deformity.
It is a spectacle beyond the mere remarkable if a boy, white or black, is in Ban Lon with walnut clubs and deformed, to my mind.