So I’m having morning coffee with my mom, which, if you were to ask me, is the one solid and measurable thing I’m actually doing here, no matter how weird the day before was there is always the morning coffee, and my mom says “who’s that coming up the driveway?” The house is cavelike and between the grapevine and bushes it’s really hard for her to see much out the windows and there’s this thermal plastic stuff over them on the inside too.
So I go out the back door, unarmed, like without a kitchen knife or baseball bat because this is a small town, ready to tell some drunk freshman that he’s got the wrong house, man. And there’s this thin older gent, looks like a cross between Pete Seeger and the actor who played Max Headroom, he’s got a convenience store paper coffee cup with, I assume, convenience store coffee in it (oh, that’s not planting a seed, I just mean I don’t think he reused the cup to put homemade coffee in it. Although I didn’t taste it it looked like coffee, and later I put coffee in it for him).
He was the father of the husband of the young(ish) family next door, visiting from the Bronx. We talked in the driveway for a while. I discovered something a little odd about my own state of mind; I pointed out the Oregon plates on my rig and when he said “Ory-gone” I not only didn’t correct him but I didn’t have to try hard to not correct him. I know, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Try saying Ory-gone when you get off the plane in PDX, there’s a guy who got off an earlier flight and is waiting for his lost luggage and he’s already been there long enough to feel compelled to correct you, maybe even pronounce the A in Michigan or the T in Minnesota. You’ll have to trust me; it’s a big deal. If you’re in a pronunciation emergency you’re better off with Organ (as in “she chased me around the church and caught me by the Organ”) than you are pronouncing the E as though it were an I and modifying the O with a silent e. If you live in Ohio you’ve never been faced with this. Hard to fuck Ohio up. I imagine the Celts have a similar problem with tourists from Sussex.
Oh, as a side thing, I forgot about the Samuel Clemons quote when there was a dispute over how many exclamation points not to add. “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” Hmmm, I don’t remember the dispute well enough to know if the team I was routing for used that or not, I’m sure the team captain knows it. I could just look it up, but, you know, it’s still like cheating.
I found myself in an extended conversation about God and colloidal silver, both of which Max Headroom seemed in favor of. I have a real soft spot in my heart for 60’s era Berkeley Jesus freaks, and it grows softer when they are from one of the five boroughs, preferably not Manhattan. It was a discussion, not an argument. We never did get around to talking about what the fuck he was doing walking down our driveway, later, when my mom asked, I did point out that every neighbor who ever lived in the house next door used the side door and not the front door, and that a lot of people do that; I made up an excuse for him. It seems reasonable.
He took me over next door to show me his hand made colloidal silver machine; a simple and primitive design that I’m sure works real well. I was a bit embarrassed. I haven’t talked to the wife or kid in almost nine months. I wasn’t about to explain why, though I’m pretty sure she knows. It’s a city thing. This isn’t a city but with the exception of my folks everyone in both households are used to cities. Um, between both households I’m the only one born here. In fact in this town I’m probably in the gross minority; people who were born here. You don’t go and visit another man’s wife without letting that man size you up. This is a “Can I borrow a cup of sugar?” sort of town. And so I’ve been a bit standoffish, though the little girl makes me smile every time I see her. She called me a clown today. I called her a clown. We were both ok with that, being clowns and all. She showed me a picture of tigers at a zoo with apples. We decided those tigers were clowns too.
Max Headroom’s wife had that sort of long suffering look of a woman who has had to tell her husband “No more strays!” every day of her life. We talked about God and science in practical and useful terms, without dogma and without anyone asking me to accept Jesus Christ into my heart. He accepted that I knew what colloidal silver was (I might be spelling that wrong, I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen it written down. There are words I’ve seen written and never heard pronounced, or hadn’t up until I heard them pronounced, and words I’ve heard and never seen. I was twenty before I understood that the written word hyperbole and the spoken word hyperbole were one and the same. It’s not an intuitive spelling; phonetics is not your friend.). I don’t think I’ve ever expected anyone to know what colloidal silver means, but, you know, I don’t have a need for a practical application or I haven’t been moved to perceive a need for it. I mean it’s sort of an esoteric thing to talk about to a guy in what amounts to pajamas in his driveway on a muggy Midwestern morning.
Talking about clown tigers seemed damn near organic and natural by comparison. Tigers are sort of the clown of the big predator set though, that’s why they get to play Vegas and chew on magicians. You never see a panther play Vegas. Panthers just aren’t funny. Neither are clowns. I assume we weren’t talking about literal clowns but rather the broader sense of one that pulls another’s leg. It was a more subtle conversation.
Yeah, ok, that’s about it. Oh, I engaged in a God discussion because dude was cool with my epiphany story. That’s my test of whether I’ll talk theology with anyone. It’s a true story, I tell it right, and self-righteous bible bangers have to dispute it because that’s not how spirituality works. I also do the opposite of saying it’s proof of god, my conclusion is it’s a real good reason to be an agnostic; my conclusion is I don’t have a conclusion, an excuse, am not apologetic. I became a falcon, and yeah, maybe I just thought and think I became a falcon, but, you know, you’d think that’d open the door to becoming, say, a tiger the next day, a bear the next and … no, once I became a falcon for a very short and very extended moment. Not the sort of thing Jesus or his dad does to a fellow, so, to accept that story as divine one has to be loose on the rules. I don’t really care if someone thinks it’s bullshit, I have absolutely no investment in anyone believing me except when I’m lying and then it’s very important I am believed unless of course I’m lying to cover up a different lie and then it’s just important that someone believes I want them to believe the lie on the table. I quit lying when my memory became spotty. You have to maintain a lie once it’s told. I really don’t expect anyone to believe I don’t lie I mean there’s only two kinds of people who say that and at least one of them are liars.
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