SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I was sitting in a little cafe/restaurant thing that was about as wide and long as the main hallway in the house where I grew up — and it really wasn’t a big house. The tables alternated which of the two long walls they were up against, making the waiter sashay in a zig-zag to get through them when he was in a hurry. I remember wondering if they had a clause in their zoning or whatever that allowed them to specify femmes (male or female) that had the right sashay-rhythm and were stick-thin enough to fit between the tables.

I remember I had a cup of cream of cucumber soup and a toasted bacon and avocado sandwich, but I don’t remember a thing about why. Not a damned thing.

I don’t remember why I was there at all, but I remember rushing to keep from being late. I don’t remember who I was supposed to be meeting, and once I was sitting down, I never gave it a second thought. I don’t remember why I ate anything, because I had just finished off some Thai leftovers before cleaning up and putting on my makeup. I don’t remember why I brought the largest purse I own that barely matches my overcoat. And I don’t remember at all why I thought it would be a good idea to bring that huge pig-sticker my uncle gave me before I took off for the big city.

Though now that I think about it, the big bag is the only one that the knife fits into with any amount of subtlety.

I do remember not giving a second thought about which dry white wine would go best with the soup and sandwich. And I remember thinking it all tasted lovely, and that I would miss the place when it dried up and blew away, like all the good restaurants did that had the poor foresight to rent that little coin-slot between the storefront evangelical church and the stairway up to the mysterious windowless nightclub that had never been open during the times I had been in this area of town.

I do remember lingering over a plate with a small pyramid of thumbnail-sized chocolate-covered raspberry tortes, wondering if I had been there long enough yet.

It occurs to me now — just now — that whole point of the exercise might have been to be away from someplace rather than to be specifically there, but I don’t remember who or what I would have been avoiding either.

But I do know that this is the thing I think about whenever I want to yell at people for not thinking about why they do the things they do. I mean, seriously. I’m bright. Whipsmart. And if I can have an Alzheimeresque episode like this and not find it at all strange until more than two weeks after it happens, then who the hell knows why any of us do the things we do?

[*]

This one time a flaming yellow snarling thing came down out of the sky and quenched itself in the e. colerific river I can see from the fire escape. When it hit, there wasn’t the big buckets of steam I was expecting — just the “splunk” of dropping a huge rock into a bucket of water and the return to what counts as darkness in this city.

The snarling kept going for a while but I don’t remember when it stopped, or why. In fact it just seemed associated, really. I don’t know anymore. A hundred years of Hollywood has taught us that all spectacles need sound effects.

I stared for a while at the hole in the water where there should have been a hole in the water, if you take my meaning. And then I put out my cigarette and climbed back inside.

What the hell. Was it a meteorite? Something that fell off a plane? Some space junk? And what do you do about it? Call 911? Call a couple of friends and see if the usual suspects of drunks and stoners know anything about it? In the cheesy science fiction movies, some housewife in curlers calls the university or the mysterious research lab on the edge of town that was probably to blame to begin with.

The only university I’ve ever had a connection with made it plain they never wanted to hear from me again, and the mysterious labs on the edge of town are all preoccupied with meth and whatever the latest new thing is. I don’t call those numbers anymore and I break the fingers of people at those numbers who call me. The cops and I have a strict “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

I opened a bottle of beer and poured it down the sink, which is what I do these days instead of drinking it. I don’t do that very often, but what else can you do when the moment calls for a drink and you don’t drink anymore?

I rinsed out the bottle, turned out the light in the kitchen, sat down on the sofa, and decided that if it was important, it would eventually be in the news. And then I forgot all about it.

We see a zillion things a day that are more important, maybe less of a spectacle, and don’t do anything with it because we just don’t have the tools in our heads to process, to do anything with what we saw, to make a connection.

What can you do?

[*]

What’s my problem, you ask? I’ll tell you. When I kicked the demon out it left a demon-shaped hole in my head like a cartoon character leaving a room in a hurry, and through that hole I can see the unending beauty of the Outside World.

If you knew me, as you read that you would hear the sound in my voice that’s the Running Chainsaw of Irony.

I can’t help that.

But this is what it’s like:

Imagine sitting on the john doing what you gotta when the floor, the walls, and the ceiling all fall away, leaving you hanging out bare-ass naked in the middle of the air. You look around and you see the same thing has happened to everyone else as well. You see everybody in your apartment building, bare-ass naked too, puttering around above you and below you and off to either side, picking noses and scratching and doing everything that primates do when they think nobody’s looking, jerking off and humping one another’s mates and stealing from their own children and shitting in the well and generally being bastards and, all the while, genuinely believing that they’re good people.

And, #^@& me, they’re probably right. Or right enough, as much as it really matters. Because people are dirty, selfish, short-sighted primates, and, by God, they’re all the best examples of that animal that we call people that they can possibly be. Did I mention it hardly matters?

It hardly matters, because way up above is a foot. A foot the size of the moon, the size of the earth itself, and that foot is coming down with all due speed.

I can see all this through the demon-shaped hole in my head, and, on a good day, I can do nothing but laugh and laugh and laugh, laughing the laugh that is the most horrible, mind-rending gleeful laugh you ever hoped to never hear.

But. But — let me tell you about a bad day.

to be continued…

[*]

Sidewalk in suburbia. An actual neighborhood — fifty, sixty years old — instead of a housing development/subdivision. Nine out of ten streetlights shedding a sulphurous mist just post sunset. New sidewalk. New cracks. Brick bungalows maybe ten yards back from the roadway. Mailboxes a lesson in suburban diversity.

A crow followed me from lightpost to lightpost. I didn’t notice until just after the third one — when he swooped by at arm’s length and waited for me at the next one.

I slowed to a halt and stuck out a raincoated arm. He fluffed up on the post, considering, then dropped down in a less-than dramatic swoop, ending up on my forearm.

Even though I’d been acting like I expected it, I was caught off guard. I couldn’t tell you whether he weighed more like a grapefruit or a bowling ball. Adrenaline surged while I thought of what to do next.

I thought about the neighborhood I was in. I hazarded, “What up, my nigga?”

He cocked an eye at me the way birds do, where everything you say or do requires them to look at you in a funny way. “Hello,” it said.

Of course. “So this is where I get the lecture about political correctness in my greetings?”

“Hello,” it said. I sighed.

“Hello,” I replied.

He bounced up and down, the way a bird will when it’s testing a branch to see if it’s springy enough to help with take-off.

“Gum?” it asked. “Hello.”

I was, in fact, chewing gum. I rolled it to the tip of my tongue and presented it.

The crow bounced gently up to my shoulder and pecked the gum expertly off the tip of my tongue.

“Hello,” it said, unmuffled by its beakful, and flew off into the trees behind a nearby house.

“Aloha,” I replied. “Don’t let it drag the ground unless the streets are clean,” I called out after it.

I have no idea what I meant. My own special version of Tourette’s Syndrome. It sounded like good advice regardless.

The footsteps that had been shadowing me for the past quarter mile kept their distance. Hell, I would have, too.