What can I say, it called to me. Maybe something about smuggling watermelons since my wife is super pregnant.
I also riffed off a challenge from several weeks back: SomethingPunk, for which I wrote the story “Borrowed Time“. This one’s more fun, less depressing: FruitPunk.
Hope you like it.
Seeds of Insurgence
Larry takes a healthy slurp from his biodegradable cup filled with the newest lime-flavored Nutro-Slam beverage, wipes the froth from his mouth with the back of his meaty hand, and then sucks the froth off his knuckle. It tastes almost, but not entirely, completely unlike lime. Travelers file past him in a somber parade, waiting for winged tin cans like the ones dinner comes in to whisk them off to some other part of the world. To stave off the boredom, he begins concocting backstories for them, one by one. This one, with the patched overcoat and the limp, saved all his creds for one last trip to see his grandchildren before he dies. That one, in the flowery dress and boyish haircut, back from college to see her parents and come out of the closet. He wonders if that makes him a bigot.
A shout shatters his reverie: “GRAPES!”Read More »
The Half-Measure is that thing that you do when you know you need to do a thing, but part of you still wants to not have to do the thing, so you do what you have to but you leave the door open for still not doing the thing. It’s a nonsensical in-between space between making a commitment and wimping out.
The problem with half measures, of course, is that they intrinsically mean you didn’t do the thing that you said you were going to do. You left a kill switch on it. You didn’t really pull the trigger. You didn’t commit. You said you did, maybe you acted like you did, but you didn’t.
I’m guilty of a lot of half-measures in my life, but there comes a point when you are no longer a child and you have to leave childish things behind.
I’m not going to go into detail here about specifics. This one’s a little bit personal. Why, then, post about it at all? Because I want it on the record, I want some accountability, I need to purge it. And yeah, I know, it’s a little bit narcissistic and infuriating for a reader of the blog to stumble on this and not be treated to the juicy details. And yeah, I’ve been known to scorn that sort of thing in the past, and I probably will in the future. But I’m not taking this to Twitter or facebook, I’m not seeking comments and ego-stroking, I’m not looking for vindication or sympathy. Lately, at the very least, Writing makes it real, and I need this to be crystal clear to myself. This blarg is where I purge the thoughts that are clogging the old melon, and this particular clog is one that needs to go.
No more half-measures.
Apologies for the detour. Regularly scheduled programming will resume.
You don’t go to an auto mechanic and then ask them to repair your back porch. You don’t hire an interior decorator and then ask them to write your dissertation. You don’t hire an exterminator and ask him to bake you a pie. So why do people think that every place they go is in the childcare business?
There was a great episode of House, MD wherein Greg House was opining that people’s treatment of an individual lies flatly on a sliding scale related to the empathy they feel for that person. More specifically, that because he walks with a cane, he can get away with being an enormous asgard-hole and never catch crap for it. He then goes on to (deliberately) crush a woman’s toe with his cane and beams a smile at his friend, Wilson, as she apologizes to him for being in his way. Great moment, great show, at least in the early seasons (ah, television shows, why do you ever make your late seasons? Stop early before it turns to sharknado). In fact, I could go on and on about the reasons that show was tops on my list while it was on the air, and that’s even without pointing out that the entire show is inspired by Sherlock Holmes, one of the greatest fictional characters in existence.
But anyway. As usual, House was right. And not just about Lupus. (It’s never Lupus.) If people feel sorry for you, they’re much less likely to dump on you. Now, me being a heteronormative white male living on privileged white male island, what could I know about people feeling sorry for me?
It’s more correct for me to say that my wife had the theory. All fairness, she thought it first, all I did was flesh it out. But it’s brilliant, and it fits, and it has changed the way I think about my life in the past twelve hours.
The theory is this: Our house — more specifically perhaps, our household — is a closed system of stupidity. There is a constant amount of stupidity contained within the space inhabited by my wife and I and our son and our animals, and that amount of stupidity cannot be altered by the comings or goings of any of us in or out of the house.
Let’s review the relevant data.
Jasper was our dumbest dog. Our dumbest critter, really, but “dumb dog” has a lovely alliteration to it that I can’t stay away from, so there you have it. He’d run into the glass door. He’d go into a yip-dog frenzy when the mailman or other interlopers approached the house, or in fact drove past the house. He’d follow at our feet, pardon the expression, like a lost puppy, any time we had any sort of food, in the hopes that we’d take pity and give him a bit, knowing full well that we wouldn’t. He would jump up and down like he was spring-loaded on any new visitor to the house despite our multiple attempts to divest him of this behavior. He’d follow the sprout around and take food from his hand even though we would fly into a murderous rage when he did so.
A sweet dog, make no mistake – but dumb as bricks. Well, Jasper couldn’t stay with us. Without getting into too much detail, he and the sprout were not a good match, so my family generously adopted him. So he left us. (We still see him on the weekends and he’s doing awesome.)
Now, it’s not a thought that we had consciously at the time, but in retrospect we kind of took it for granted that with Jasper leaving, the incidences of, ah, stupid behavior would lessen. But the Stupidity Constant began quickly to stabilize the closed system without us even knowing.
Little by little, our other animals began acting dumber. Penny, our other dog, for example, has begun pushing her food bowl all over the place and spilling food everywhere. She’s always been a little skittish during storms. Lately, though, she goes into fits during storms, trying to squeeze into tiny cubbies and knocking over furniture, chewing on shoes and baby toys, shaking like she’s stuck in that paint mixing machine at the Home Depot. Now, she’s never liked storms, but since Jasper is gone, she descends into idiocy and terror whenever it begins to rain. She barks and howls when strangers come to the house. She runs under our feet tirelessly; my wife and I have tripped over her more times than we can count.
Okay, so maybe she’s upset over the absence of her “brother”, which I’d buy, if it had not been six months. But she’s getting worse, not better.
Then, there are the cats. The Alpha (yes, cats have Alphas, I know, I thought it was insane when I heard it, but trust me, this cat is an Alpha), Marty, has always been a bit, hmm, special. But lately he, too, has been dumber, for lack of a more eloquent term. His most egregious ridiculous behavior is one I can find no explanation for. He’ll splash in the water bowl, trying to tip it over, leaving sad little stupid pools of water all over our brand new $2000 floors. Why does he do this? TO INFURIATE US. He’s also more guilty than ever of running under our feet, especially on the stairs.
Thing is, the stupidity rotates. When Penny is low-key, the cats are all keyed up. When the cats are chilled, Penny starts chewing on the baseboards. No, really, she’s chewed up baseboards.
Not the markings of an intelligent creature.
Anyway, we were talking about it this morning while cleaning up the latest slurry of puppy chow (spilled by the dog) and water (spilled by the cat) and I tripped over a different cat while coming back through the living room and my dear wife said, “god, I swear, the other animals are getting dumber.”
And it clicked.
“Like the house is a closed system of stupidity?” I said. She nodded. “Meaning that there is a fixed amount of stupidity that has to exist in the house at any given time?”
“Exactly,” she said.
“In other words,” I said, feeling brilliant and self-important, “as Jeff Goldblum so eloquently put it in Jurassic Park, the stupid will find a way?”
Both our eyes got wide as the truth broke over us like my brother breaking wind: sudden, inescapable, undeniable. Oh, and simultaneously impressive and terrible. Our household is a time-space anomaly, a Grand Central Station of idiotic animal behavior.
I have suspicions that a similar anomalous field exists in a bubble of about a hundred feet around my person, but one theory at a time.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 