October 11, 2002
This weather, endless rain, both troubles and comforts me. My gene pool is pooling around me. While walking my jeans start to suck up water like that early physics experiment on water surface and meniscus. Crossing the street I do that directionless dance with another pedestrian. It can be a precious moment, an opportunity to pause, realize the absurdity of our ceaseless velocity, and to smile into another’s eyes. But my dancing partner today was not of this mind. “To the right, to the right,” she yelled at me. I wanted to yell back at her that we don’t all automatically go to the right. Who the hell teaches you these things anyway? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. Besides, are we supposed to go to the left in countries where that is the side on which we drive? It left me mildly irritable, another fact of life, of navigating the world, that had passed me by. It reminded me of going to school that first day and the teacher discovering that I couldn’t read the time; my mother had never thought to teach me. She was too busy reading me great stories about killer witches grinding up their victim’s remains with a mortar and pestle. The witch in question also used her mortar and pestle as a mode of transport, seated in the bowl while utilizing the pestle for propelling herself through the air and steering. Was she always yelling to other mortar and pestle conveyed witches, “to the right, to the right!”?
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This weather, endless rain, both troubles and comforts me. My gene pool is pooling around me. While walking my jeans start to suck up water like that early physics experiment on water surface and meniscus. Crossing the street I do that directionless dance with another pedestrian. It can be a precious moment, an opportunity to pause, realize the absurdity of our ceaseless velocity, and to smile into another’s eyes. But my dancing partner today was not of this mind. “To the right, to the right,” she yelled at me. I wanted to yell back at her that we don’t all automatically go to the right. Who the hell teaches you these things anyway? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. Besides, are we supposed to go to the left in countries where that is the side on which we drive? It left me mildly irritable, another fact of life, of navigating the world, that had passed me by. It reminded me of going to school that first day and the teacher discovering that I couldn’t read the time; my mother had never thought to teach me. She was too busy reading me great stories about killer witches grinding up their victim’s remains with a mortar and pestle. The witch in question also used her mortar and pestle as a mode of transport, seated in the bowl while utilizing the pestle for propelling herself through the air and steering. Was she always yelling to other mortar and pestle conveyed witches, “to the right, to the right!”?
- rachael 10-12-2002 12:56 am