There is a woman down at the dojo where I work out who stopped coming in because she became a real-estate agent and I miss her. She was forty-three, I believe, and in perfect shape. Her body fat does not, or did not, exceed five percent, I would have guessed. There are certain exercises in a dojo in which you have occasion to touch a partner and it was a pleasure to touch this woman. I do not mean this in a precisely sexual way or in a precisely nonsexual way. If there is a neutral interface between sexual and nonsexual, I mean that. When you touch this woman you feel either pure muscle or muscle with bone close under it or just bone itself and you want to squeeze her a bit as if to say, Good for you, girl. And if you did slip up and actually say that, and I think I might have here and there, she would not take offense but would know the remark to be a high compliment, and she would know she worked hard for someone to feel only that muscle and bone and that you knew how hard she worked and that it, muscle and bone and nothing else, was such a good and rare thing that a man could be forgiven for misspeaking or for letting his grip linger longer than absolutely required in the exercise. If the exercise called for striking one’s opponent, she could be struck as hard as you’d strike a man. If it called for an excruciating number of abdominal contractions in, say, a tandem sit-up exercise called a cockpit, you would have to work very hard to keep up with her and not be embarrassed by your not keeping up with her. Now she is selling houses and there is no one at the dojo to feel thrilled by touching.
I wonder if there is a correlation in real estate between the body fat of the agent and the commission the agent pulls down. If the two are directly proportional Peggy will have to put on weight. If the relationship is, by some freak chance in a land that worships sugar, inversely proportional, then Peggy is already retired. Were she already retired, I would see her back at the dojo. I presume. I hope.
I hope for something. It is not a strong hope. The strength of the hope does not exceed—I am now seeing lightning out the window—let me restart this sentence. The weak hope I have is congruent to the weak vision I have of whatever it is I hope for. I hope weakly and vaguely. The weakness matches perfectly the vagueness. I would think that this proportionality is the best arrangement. If one hoped very hard for something one could define very well, it would be okay except for the chance of high disappointment. If one hoped very hard for something one could not define, the chance of disappointment it seems to me would be exceedingly high, if not guaranteed. If one hoped very weakly for something one could define, I would ask what is the point of hoping weakly for that which you see strongly. I hope weakly for that which I see weakly. I’ll be okay no matter what.
Gluing Wood
Today we want to glue some wood to some wood. We will get all the surfaces clean with sanding and then by wiping the wood with our coarse brown paper toweling, which itself is limp wood. We will apply the good wood glue, which is the color of banana pudding, to both surfaces, liberally, and align the pieces and press them together. Before the final fit it is important to slide the pieces back and forth just a bit, or twist them a bit, depending on the configuration of the pieces; this lateral friction, as it were, is to displace small pockets of air that may be trapped in the glue if the pieces of wood merely come together head-on. Once we have a good airless fit with plenty of squeezeout we should wipe the excess glue with more paper and clamp the pieces firmly together or effect a clamping by means of weight upon the pieces. Clamping can also be effected by tying the pieces together, often with bungees. The pressure should be that of a very firm handshake. Wood being married to wood likes a good handshake. If there is more squeezeout it may be addressed after this clamping or the dried excess glue may be sanded off later. You can use your anytime minutes on small squeezeout. If one of you would go get me a Musketeers the morning would be better. Some of you know how I put a Musketeers in a Dr. Pepper and how the acid in the Dr. Pepper will make the Musketeers into something like a very tasty sea slug. Which if it goes too long though it can be difficult to lift it out in one piece. I call that the Drooping Musketeer and I don’t really like it, I don’t. At a certain point you have to just stir the Musketeer into the Dr. Pepper. A Baby Ruth looks like a turd. A Butterfinger is wont to explode. Never recap your Dr. Pepper if you are using Butterfinger. I must tell you that because the Surgeon General won’t. The cleaning industry tells you not to combine its stuff but the candy industry does not. If there is no caution statement on a candy bar telling you that it is bad for your health in several ways, chief among them obesity and Type 2 diabetes, it is not finally surprising that they not tell you that under certain conditions the candy unit will explode and perhaps blow your pop bottle apart and blind you, or worse. The good wood glue we use here is pretty set up in an hour. Tomorrow we will start in on the router. The router is essential but many a one thinks it is just some kind of dangerous cosmetic tool. It is not. Get your wood and get to gluing and stop wasting time.
The Retarded Hermit
The hermit knew he was illiterate but had not thought, in the beginning, that illiterate necessarily also imputed retarded. As he got deeper into the hermitage, and more dim-witted when he infrequently ran into people, he began to sense that retardation was actually part of the deal with him. He realized that he had always been stupid but that his energy as a youth had been sufficient that he had been able to mask stupidity with avidity. As his avidity waned he saw clearly the stupidity that had been underneath it all along, like the mud flat that is under a receding tide. The happy frisky bright blue waters drew slowly off, leaving a dull flat plain of mud. This was his brain.
His next realization on this score was that he was so retarded, in fact, that the discovery of a mud flat in his head did not overly bother him, except for the embarrassment of having thought himself not stupid most of his life. He had had little tolerance for people who overrated themselves in this regard, and now he had to admit that he had been among the worst of the presumers. But with an admission of stupidity can come an admission of amnesia when it is convenient, so he conveniently forgot that he had once presumed himself smart, and he became more and more comfortable in the fact that he was dumber than a post-horse on radio day. That was the kind of locution that might strike him in the new fulgent retardation, and he would happily use such a locution notwithstanding that it meant nothing. It did mean something: it meant he was in fact stupid if he used it, as stupid as a post-horse on radio day. As stupid as a lean killing machine on Tuesday. As stupid as a cloud. Dumber than God on the day he made incense.
How had he become a hermit? It was difficult to recall. If he tried to recall, he might come up with something like this: I met a girl who told me she had made a fortune making other women believe that the gizmo she sold them would effortlessly fry the fat off their ass. He would say also: That’s the way she put it, which for some reason really made me laugh: “Fry the fat off their ass!” I would see one ass, one quantity of fat, millions of women buying this gizmo.
In fact the hermit had met no such woman. If he tried to recall how he had become a hermit he might deliver himself of other fictions as well. A dog told him to become a hermit. As a hermit he would be able to position himself eventually to repudiate plumbing and be a natural man. As a hermit he would never have the means to deliberately go to an air show, and it was probable that one would never accidentally come to him. The problem of not having enough bricks of the right color was never going to trouble him, if he became a hermit. And so forth.
So he became more comfortable with however he had become what he’d become, and more comfortable with the realization that what he had most become was stupid. People not speaking to him, which had once worried him when it developed, now served as a kind of validation. He liked them over there not speaking, as opposed to over here causing trouble with their attentions in which he was not that interested and which he could not comprehend anyway in his fast-draining neap-tide stupidity. My head so out of water, he said one day, I can see fiddlers running in and
out of they tiny holes. He wanted to talk like a Mississippi blues man but knew that that too was a pose of intellection that he could not sustain. Those guys were smart enough to all sound the same way, to talk in a code of agreed-upon stylization to fool the doofus acolytes. He did not really have any such theories about Mississippi blues men duping their congregation or want to talk like one. It was just another kind of lie that drifted through his head, across the mudflat of his brain, as agreeable as any other lie. He had no idea what a post-horse was, if there even was such a thing. There was some logic to faulting God for making incense, but he had no idea what might be meant by a radio day. This was the essence of the new condition: nonsense now made sense as he realized the sense he had insisted upon had never actually made sense. His life had become a fabric of tiny lies instead of a construction of some truths and verities around which some lies might buzz. His life was all a buzzing lie, and it always had been. In one way, once this stopped alarming you, it made you very happy. It took the pressure off. It was like skydiving without leaving the house, or even one’s chair.
It was time, in this new condition, to get a good tank of fish and send off to Russia for a mail-order bride. He would like a school of lipstick-red platys and a Ukrainian girl named Elena. She was thirty-six and had a boy eight years old. She skied and reported that she tried to keep fit. She did not describe herself bizarrely as the younger women tended to. (“It is difficult to judge myself but I can describe myself as trustful, emotional, calm, serious, tidy, purposeful, friendly, sincere, thrifty, sexy, patient, persistent, sacrificial, responsible, accurate, and honest. I have a lot of friends who say that I am communicative, modest, sensitive, sentimental, calm, democratic, reasonable, romantic, sympathetic, womanly, and economical woman.”) All Elena said was “I’m warm-hearted, communicative, tender, kind, and loving. I like traveling, picnics with my friends in the open air. I adore skiing. I try to keep fit.” Would he no longer be a hermit if he secured these fish and this bride? He would be a hermit with some fish who did not talk and with a Russian bride who did not talk much, apparently, so in a way, he thought, taking the perspective from outside, he would be even more of a hermit than he now was. The hermit has taken a bowl of fish and a silent Russian wife, they would say down in the village or wherever it was that people discussed hermits. It was a fine plan. But it was not a fine plan.
It would require energy to acquire a bowl of fish and a bride, even one by mail-order. He could perhaps, if she was to deliver herself to the door—he did not know how it worked, but something this easy was going to be necessary—ask her to pick up the fish on the way. This idea was appealing but it caused the first fear associated with the plan. These Russian women had spunk and did not want to marry a layabout or a retarded person, that much was clear from their ambitions and desires in the catalog profiles. They seemed like good soldiers in this regard: rugged, ready to work, to party, and expecting their comrades in the trench to be good heads beside theirs. It did not bode well in his imagination, even as low-tide as it was, to tell such a woman to get fish along the ten-thousand-mile journey unto him and to then unwrap herself and present herself to him without his getting up off the bed, which is how he saw this all happening in the mudflat of his brain. This fish-and-bride plan was a non-starter.
Language of that sort had once irritated him. That’s a non-starter and I’m a self-starter so it’s not copacetic with moi. But now to say something was a non-starter was a delight. He himself was a non-ender. He was not in the middle of anything either. Oh, Elena, he said to no one, not even really to himself, and arguably not even to her phantom self ten thousand miles away keeping fit in Ukraine: Oh, Elena, I’d make you a good man if I were a different man, but as it is you’d get here on radio day and little Sergei—is he eight?—would want to play soccer and I’d have to take him down to Little League, if I could even find it, and he’d wind up on the crummy team for boys who can’t play, as I wound up, and then he’d be headed for a life not unlike his mad stepfather’s and he would come to long even more than he does now for his real Ukrainian father, and you, well your own disappointments would accrue just as certainly and vigorously, and, besides, I am older than the age range you say you want your partner to fall within and would have to petition for an extension of about ten years, and I would ask you to get some tropical fish on the way, just like step out of line after customs and pick some up, and it would be hard with your “with-dictionary” English level for me to explain what a lipstick-red platy is, and how disappointing it is that all they have now are these swordfish-orange platys, so you really have to look hard, maybe go to twenty tropical-fish shops in brand-new huge and confusing America en route to the hermit’s lair and still probably not find lipstick-red fish, so, really, and also, I am retarded now, so really I think it better that you stay in Ukraine with Sergei and wait for a better offer from a better man. I hope you agree.
The New World
In the New World we went our Separate Ways. There’s a rat in separate. In the New World large colorful fruit hung from trees, and pink piglets trotted about cleaning up the downfall. There was consequently no smell of rot, or fruit flies, and these piglets did not seem to mature and be seen as gross adults wallowing in mud or otherwise stinking up the place. Just cute pink pigs scarfing up the red and green and yellow fruit on the ground and running off before any of it came out of them the other way. When I first apprehended this system of fruit disposal by permanently cute pigs who do not defecate in your presence it occurred to me that I must be in a Utopia with a good mind at the helm—nay, a superior mind. I gave my wife all the credit cards, putting them into a pistol holster I had had lying around, and she went over the dale happily, armed. I thought for a moment she resembled a horse going over the horizon, agreeably clopping her Separate Way with a bouncy if clumsy gait. There was nothing to be bought in the New World with the credit cards, or with anything else other than your luck or your charm. She knew this, or I thought she knew this, but having all the credit cards nonetheless made her happy, and I was happy to have made her happy, for once. After all, Separate Ways would not have been obtaining unless there had been failure in this dimension, The Making Happy of the Other. It is of course the final dimension, and accordingly the most difficult to negotiate successfully. You enter this dimension usually without having mastered the other, preceding impossible dimensions, such as Tumescence at the Right Time. Here’s a good saying: He (or she, or it) is not worth the powder it would take to blow him.
I became a trotting-horse racer in the New World. I was walking by the track and a fellow I was afraid was going to try to panhandle me or sell me drugs or a girl said, “Much you weigh, mon?” to which I said, “Say what?”
“If you not over one fitty, come scrate wit me now at dis time immediately.”
I was put on a scale and then put in a cart and a bell rang and a horse pulled me around a track and I was handed fifty, or fitty, dollars. I do this twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. My style has developed as an imitation of what I did, apparently successfully, that first time: I just hold the reins lightly on the horse’s back. No urging or cajoling. The horse wants to run or he doesn’t. I concentrate only on staying in the cart and keeping my little helmeted head level. I admire the other drivers’ more active styles, but that’s not for me, in the New World. I am called El Placido. My colors are pink and black and green. I watch my weight. The cart and the harness tack is well made and I admire it. It smells good and feels good and heavy. At speed in a race there is a good breeze in your face and there is a good quantity of mud and dirt aflyin’. It’s all good. I do not smile inauthentically in the New World. Here’s a good saying: So-and-so has enough money to burn a dead mule.
Friendlies, or family-friendly things, or something like that. I dreamed a fellow saying or writing something like this. It was of course to have meant something, and perhaps it would, or would have, were I to recall exactly what the fellow wrote or said, but
I do not. I do not because my mind is shot. In the New World, as in the Old, it pays to secure a position that a shot mind does not impeach or imperil but in fact enhances and aggrandizes. Thus I keep my head very level in the horse trotting. Here’s a good saying: No human sorrow ever stopped the world.
From a fellow with one hand at a market I purchased a box of parrots. They looked up like puppies when you peeked in. I got them home and opened the four box-top flaps completely and let the birds fly out. I opened all the doors and windows. All but two birds more or less straightaway left the building. One clung to a cornice and said something very close to “Polly want a cracker.” I will be making a supreme effort to hear this more clearly if it is repeated and to find crackers here in the New World. The other bird that stayed in the house perched on my shoulder, which delighted me. He bit my earlobe very hard, I thought certainly removing it, and I flinched and somewhat swatted at him, and he fluttered and puffed out his feathers and gave a loud caw, and then rather primly and ceremoniously readjusted his feet on my shoulder and looked me in the eye, evenly, as if to say “My bad,” and he has not tried to eat my earlobe again, if that is in fact what he tried to do, or was thinking of doing. My experience with parrots is early but I see that it may prove hard to ascribe motive with them. Was it a bite of some kind of vengeance? Was he off his rocker from being boxed like a puppy? Is he in love with me and unaware of his strength? I believe him to be aware of his strength because I have seen him bite through a tin can since the earlobe adventure. Here’s a good saying: The New World may be in fact a very, very, very, very Old World.
Cries for Help, Various Page 10