11.0
Victims on the tele is so uh understandable y’know? I know, right? Sometimes I’m totally like crying. Who will prevail — it’s like, I can’t even see a pram without like weeping. It moves me in my soul, which I have for sure. I like talk to god sometimes. Not in a weird way. Shut up! It really centers me. I try not to ask for things for me when there’s like bombs falling on Palestine and all that stuff. But sometimes I do. I did it more when I was younger. I’d ask for toys and sports equipment. My dad totally loved sports. He watched them every weekend when it wasn’t softball season. I’d sit there on these hot aluminium bleachers for hours while he played. I was such a tomboy as a kid. I’d get so sweaty and agitated that his team would let me take turns with the boys being the ballgirl. My dad used chew and me he gave chiclets. The only time he took it out was for a cold one from the styrofoam cooler yellowing. A few a game loosened him up and made him play with oomph, he said. God, look at me. I’m like terrible. But in the meantime in the work week he’d like reset into despair. He piled up a lot of frustration at work and then he’d let them have it on the ballfield. The winters came, the season ended, and beer and softball lapsed into just beer. Maybe the winters would not have been so tough on him if the planet would heat faster and the season went year-round.
Work or probably me, he took it out on the officials at my games. They had some doing to get us kids restarting after his tirade. But somebody warned him he was going to be barred from attending. Then he did calm down, til basketball began. We had a pudding party at the end of the season and after I grew up, like mom told, he used to pay for those himself, as a way of saying sorry to the coaches for riding their sorry butts all season long. No, it was cause you kids deserved it, is all he said to me. I mean, yeah, he set impossible standards. It have me like a complex to this day. If nothing’s ever good enough, then y’know maybe the guy I’m dating isn’t either, or the next guy, or the next. Or going back to the first guy while having what-have-you with a foreign temp, and like distracting myself from the mess of feelings with the first guy by having happy hour with the pushy insulting well-off a-hole at work. I y’know after one day when his wife came for lunch and I saw the look in her eyes when she looked around at us — I knew I was not the first, and I put a stop to it, and then I didn’t get the bump up to team lead after all. I know, yes now I know, but I just wanted to try it once and see if it worked and it didn’t. Dad told me when you get passed over, the only choice is to start a new job search and work even harder at the next place, but not to think that anyone was your friend because they weren’t. But I was still pissed at him in general, so I didn’t listen.
11.1
Our hero was then moving faster. He wanted a finality. For him the whole thing, chasing his love out to Nebraska, was not something he wanted to go through again with someone in the future. It hadn’t been much fun this time. To him, our heroine wanted what he gave her at the start. She was in no hurry to reach Dutourd’s horrors of love. It had all been jam until a couple weeks ago. She took the common feeling they had made and left it out there vaguely, wherever it was. Let it guide the old explorers, let it set men’s hearts aflame, let it inspire lady swimmers and solo rowers on the sea, let it be the fuzz between that which sustains us and what would rather see us dead. Let it ever be a guidepost tween what we had been born for and the limitations that we can surpass. Let it be a pivot in our thoughts. Let us carry it into our dreams and disregard its kinship to our own mortality. “It’s out there, but for now I’m here. It’ll not grow large and cover me. Perhaps someday far away it will, but for now I need not venture near those grateful needs. They are too sharp to have them near.”
Now ready to confront, he wanted to speak to her without contradiction. Like a guru, which meant he expected to be listened to, but only because of the value in his words, their well considered truthfulness, came by careful rigor, which brings utilitarian weal unto the masses, writ large by the will, his in particular (hers tertiary, behind the mix of theirs together). Which did not stop him from speaking the objective, but did slant its perception. More than that she herself was right, she was happiest when the things she held most dear were right and valuèd. It took some determination on the part of her partners to accurately portray the savant she subconsciously desired. There was the incessant clamoring for change that this became background noise in her daily strife. There were clearer mirrors in public restrooms.
She was more concerned at knowing there was a guide available to her should she deign to need one. Back into her dozen conscious years, since children are but aren’t, and only the onset of puberty woke her up to how the human world will splay its people. She’d been through times when she was gratified, the passenger, and someone else was driving and was the one in charge of making sure that she was happy. To be the service provider was now maturity. Crests are built but sometimes fall / Be careful lest you build them all. It became breezier and bathed in sun upon her porch. She could see real far. It was made more special by its exclusivity. Little candy squares were covering the crest. She’d unwrap one to find a golden belly chain, another was expensive cosmetics, another was a limitless e-reader with a thousand hours of exactly what she wanted.
They didn’t get it, but like everyone else our one-time couple had got to where they were by product of their flawed neuroses, not in spite of them. He looked ahead, staring at her parent’s house from down the street. He wondered if she’d see the signs he’d stuck yard-salely in the neutral ground, now that it was dark out and she still wasn’t home. He’d stay on her sofa, though he’d prefer the bed, while she had no inkling of these intentions, nor how near he was to their attempting. Her thoughts were on her present. She saw a future that was not set against him, but did not have to include him either. Nowhere was his presence deemed a must. To know this would have emboldened him, for all he’d take away was that the door was not completely shut and it was still soon enough a big surprise and gesture could wriggle his way in. A man will never take his life who has hope with a woman. Our hero would prefer their reunion to go off outside embarrassment, but in a grand display of magnanimity he’d go through that or worse to have her beside him on the drive back to their life in Californ-i-a. She’d have had plenty of time to dwell on the same quality they’d shared that had so enrapt him. It was quest worthy but more than that, she’d see that she was quest worthy. No one else would show her that, he thought.
She was in a funnel, stuck in the debris around the entrance to the spout. But she’d learned the mobility of men was nonetheless wrapped up with their base drives, and which of those was likely to win out, while he knew that he wasn’t like most men, that it was plain he could control his body’s want, that he lived up to an ideal, and conducted himself in everything with valor. While his love was in a spout, he saw it.
There were times for her when she wanted instant gratification. Then it was tempting to flirt a bit. To grease the wheels became instinctual. A relationship would tamp it down, but with her girlfriends they’d take turns being actresses in meaning. Others were prepared to act on their pursuit, their deafness made this tack dangerous, so she’d only do it solitairely if it were in some kind of shopping, where she knew there’d be security, or okay, if there was some relief from boredom by turning on desire in some hapless youth, sans mercy. She was coming to the point whether she’d decide to be the hookup for a famous guy or not. Her girlfriend had done it, an actor known for his paranormal TV show. The experience “had been fun” was what she’d say, but her friends demanded details, and so she admitted there had been something weird where her abdominals met the top of her hips. They all said eww but probably one’s tastes got real specific after thousands of encounters, pulling out, going to the bathroom sink, running water through the condom so it was not fished out of the trash for fertilizing later, showering with someone’s girly soaps, then saying what would get him out the door, so tedious. The girlfriend said the actor made her come, but among the clique she was a known embellisher. Then they had the friend who was competitive, and so she began attending fan conventions and card shows, but she stood out to the fans more than she did to the desirables, and she was too busy fending them off to get her body autographed, so she switched to charity events and this was the better strategy, because not only were the guests of honor more approachable, but there was money around too, any buck of which could give her the life she’d always dreamed of, to the extent that they were able.
The back of the day was perhaps falling even as he worked to keep this love alive in his own private ICU. What they were facing was not all there was. Down the line there were muito challenge-os awaiting. Future friends would tell him how they toiled. He’d believe them without conceiving any of their suffering. It was so foreign to his own. They had not loved like he had, no. The blind never really understand color. What is blue? they’d ask him in his work. He’d tell them it’s a character of the sky, so it’s what we see outdoors most of the time. This blue pervades our outlook on the world. Other colors the sky can be are black at night or grey when cloudy or with rain. The varying shades of storm clouds need not be brought up here. He’d tell them clouds and rain took away the blue from the sky, so we missed the blue. It leaves the sky and wafts inside us, making us feel blue. They’d be a little puzzled even as they were eager to make him feel good for trying to explain. He’d tell them, starting again, that they were well versed in music, so imagine every color’s like a different kind of song, from gamelan to hula. Every object has color, so every object is playing a song that only working eyes can “hear.” The sky sounds like a medieval ballad in the day, and at night it sounds like Eno, but sometimes it sounds like Paganini when it storms — to our eyes. He’d say what he’s saying is, everything throughout his waking day is singing, is constantly in song.
Much can be done beyond the realm of cheap experience.
People interpret the harmonies with brush and paint. People born playing one song enslave people born playing another. There are big problems with there even being different songs — some people want to lift the needle from the record of all copies of a particular song. It happens enough to practically be a cycle of history. In other words the repetitive nature of this music does nothing to make it commonplace. We’ll still let it drag us into multi-generational wars. It’s ordinary enough that we can break it into eight main categories for the children. We expect certain song to go with certain buildings enough that we won’t use the song to describe it — it’s already implied. The blind from birth are confused now; nevertheless he was asserting he enjoys a richer world. This turned them off from him. The blind and sighted altogether work their partners in the necessary groove.
11.2
As to the road itself, it wouldn’t mind. It was up for anything apart from extreme temperatures. It was too young to crack up already. Cracks are wrinkles and tar snakes are grey hair. The road goes on til it runs into another, or til people stop their adding to it. It goes through, over, and around. It can be buried, split, and crashed upon. People do it in it. In some ways it is the fusion of all irrational being.
Even the most schizoid obey gravity. Some instinct, some measure of cause and effect, remains on or off it. There are joyless blunders and then there are lives spent off the road away from understanding. This is where the road marks off the ignorant-by-choice. They have that patch of unpaved land in common. Their misunderstanding is enough in this world to sustain them without excluding (except in the most fanatical of cases) the physical pleasures that are the daily goals of most of the rest of us, from bad food to mediocre sex. Plus they get extraordinary promises of extra life when their time runs out! Since any afterlife that ended would be sad, the real-hard-wishers believe it simply will go on, but will fill and indeed stretch way past the limits of the monkey mind, which they for sure do not have. How nice if our quantum discovery would phenotypically mutate our lobes in gestation so that all people will be born capable of understanding just how they evolved. Just don’t take away their cars, their guns, and their right to come.
There were times our heroine didn’t want to take anything from anyone, apart from aggression from some males. She wanted just the opportunities afforded to her, which ought to be the same for everyone, she thought. But she had to navigate the world with precautions the way it is, as does everyone, not the world as she wished it to be. Part of that burden was the above average influence she had on remapping the exterior to suit her. Whether it was well considered or a whim, the potential was the same. Often she did this subconsciously for her comfort. There were needs that needed an immediate redressing. Then there was unlocalized longing that had no easy fix. It was here she was most like the rest of us. It was here that we could reach and hold her hand. She might deign to need us here. It was one among the many hopes we held regarding her, and the most likely to come (true). Her perspective was 3D color while ours was 2D black and white. It’s plain she would be drawn there, to the step up in dimensions. She was the greener grass though we were right beside her. Somehow the patch of ground she stood upon looked drabber in her absence.
Besides good-looking or advantageous men her age, everyone would be attracted to such a character as hers. That’s what people thought of when they saw her, her perspicacious intellect and well considered charm. Such a creature has incisors. Its attributes are going to be used. It will be put to use or molded into something that it wasn’t as a child. There are no bounds to tinkering. Bounds make ways around. Someone figures how to tunnel under.
11.3
Victory comes easy in the uncharted — no one knows there’s something to be won. The calliopes are playing though the rides are rusted shut. The through-put’s interminable.
Fully adult later she wanted to do something to promote women. She’d have loved to find a mentor, one who was exceptional in her field. Reaching success meant surrounding herself with successful women. There was this push in this direction. But she still stood out too much to be a part of just any group. It became hard for her among those she did not resemble. Her symmetry was too off-putting among the insecure for groups not to unleash the metaphorical hell on her that they so championed among themselves. Groups secure themselves among the many groups by keeping others out. Anything requiring special effort is the first to be discarded. They are the ground-nesters of the birdpocalypse. Still she kept it pono where anyone would have her — if it were close enough to where she wanted to be. She foresaw herself as being a mentor when she was older, to give young women the answers to the questions she had when she was their age / now. A country club would be the way to get back into the art set, the ones who went to auctions and met at benefits, and giving rotating donations among each other’s foundations. She didn’t need a membership, she just needed a friend inside, which she had — someone who’d been the solar center of her own clique, a woman of some means who’d married well, whose family had had a membership for years. There was desperation and jockeying among the middle aged to parry, but there was smart conversation to be found there too — supporters of the symphony, scions of endowments. Apart from men, and far from what she used to paint before a couple men had stopped her, at this age she would count herself among them.
They have intolerance to mystery. Everything must have its explanation.
“I wonder if” means something new’s about to suffer.