LOL. For some reason that reminded me of a time I was down at my mechanic's place. God this is funny when I think about it. Never seen anything like it.
It's a shop building on a small street mixed into houses in an older part of town.
The floor in the shop building is wooden and completely saturated with 60 years of oil and car guts and fluids, and it's warped and rolling six directions and there's nowhere to sit down except the vinyl breakfast chair at the mechanic's desk with the pohone and I don't have to tell you what blue jumpsuits that crawl under cars on wooden floors with a droplight do to vinyl breakfast chairs.
So, I stand outside, with my hands in my pockets, and look at the trees, in the neighborhood, which are significant.
That's my usual routine, when I have to wait, after I've run out of catching up talk with my amigo Blue Boy.
Crap! One of my stocks keeps going Down, and Down, and Down. I hate when they do that. When you say, one more day of this and I'm selling? But that day arrives the next day and you think, well, yesterday wasn't the bottom, Awful Yesterday; so this must be the bottom?
Sheesh! I need to MAKE money, not LOSE it. Yoo- -hoo!!
Uhm - so I walk out there through the roll up door toward the street, no cars on the road out there, noticing how bright the green is on the chestnut across the street, and a guy behind me, diagonally, says Hi.
I figure he must be in the front yard of the house next door, behind me now, and might even be someone I know, and so I gotta turn around and say hi. Be nice ya know.
He's got a little one and a half story boxey house with a steep roof, and he's standing on the little concrete porch in his socks, rocking back and forth on his feet, in a too-small fat-belly tee shirt, with a pipe in his mouth. It's stuck in his mouth, but his hands are in his pocket; and so he looks like he's been standing there for hours. Years maybe. He either likes to come out and smoke it, or his wife makes him, but whatever reason, he's used to standing out there on that box of concrette with two steps and the little square of roof and looking at the trees across the street and the weather and he can't walk very far without shoes in just socks and he rocks back and forth and he's a little bored sometimes because he's bored anyway and that's why he smokes a pipe, and so when somebody comes out of Blue Boy's Garage, he says hi to them.
I'm telling you all this because that's just what I saw when I turned around.
This whole little scene; instantly recognizable, digestable, pattern-compliantable. Tells the whole "superficial" story in what seems like sixty seconds, but is probably the two or three it takes to see where he's at.
A snippet of grass that needs mowed, a mushroom-patch of blue and yellow iris, a laurel, and a guy with his green wooden house and tiny porch.
It's a sunny late morning, like a Saturday in the woods, and it's warm and Spring and that's why the trees are so green and people are coming out of their houses and literally just doin nothing on the porches. And this is a behavior you notice as a constant throughout The Drowning State. You better get Out THERE and on the porch when it's not a howling gale, because you just better because you just better, because you've been inside so long you know you better, check out and see what it's like out there, see if you recognize it; but you'bve been inside so long you don't even know what to DO out there, what do you do out there, so you just stand on your porch for the first week or so. Then maybe later, you go out there to mow the lawn or straighten the mailbox or some Purpose. But not in the beginning. You just wander out there like deer cubs.
Kind of confused like.
People also have a tendency not to get off their porches. Because the ground, the concrete and the grass, is still soaking wet. For the first two months, or maybe the entire goddam year, fucking horseshit. So you stand on the porch, because you don't have your shoes on, because those are wet and muddy beside the door and this is a nice day. Again, later, people will put their shoes ON or remain barefoot MY GOD WHAT A CONCEPT, and go out in the yard onto the grass. This usually happens, I kid you not, the first week after the Fourth of July.
But it may not.
Goddam S T A T E.
So this guy is Out. He's been out for a week. He's got no shoes, and he's not leaving the porch.
But that's okay; it's a very nice day and heck he's in a old-fashioned tee shirt, rocking on the edge of the concrete riser in his white socks, with his pipe. Nothin to do. Nothin to do. Kind of likes it.
But this guy does have a problem.
I know. It seems like he doesn't.
And it wouldn't be fair; really, really wouldn't be fair, to do anything like startle him. Like honking at a fawn. Or squirting a cat asleep on the deck, accidentally, with the hose.
It's pretty still and quiet out here today, there's a lot of bird noise ansd someone running a mower across the creek, and the leaves are shaking on the cottonwoods just a little, but the sun is stilling everything down. So the first thing I notic is the crackling noise. The guy's house is on fire. As a matter of fact, the upper floor is pretty much an inferno.
You know how kids draw the classic house? A box with a triangle roof? Well, if you put this little dry-sock porch on the side there, you can see this guy's house, and the second, half-story, where the foor is steep, is a sheet of flames. Because the sun is out, and a little glary, and I had to put my hand over my eyes to make out the guy's face, I didn't notice it.
But boy, he sure is casual about it. "Just burning down the house."
Normally, I'm a springer-into-actioner.
You know?
Fire has a timeline.
Like a constant. It goes forward, until you get to a certain point, not really a climax, more of a dissolution, and then it sort of slows down, and everyone leaves. But in the beginning part, usually everyone is running around and shouting and saying things, remarkably, like call the fire department.
But at this moment, the info is coming in through separate IRC channels, and I can't get it to compute.
I've got, gotten, the guy standing there, smiling and saying hi thrugh his pipe teeth, not even reaching his hands out of his pocket to get it, and then as I look up, upward, under my shading palm, I see this clear and orange sheet slding upward over his roof, practically flat, like dry ice over cold concrete. Half of the roof is inside this pie, with the chimney for a cherry stem, and it's so hot and clean and quiet, there is not smoke. No turbulence. It's just quietly, very politely, actually, engulfing the entire house.
Like I said, I get that channel up there, this most magical fire, and then I remember it's a house, and I mini-panic and look down, and there's this guy smiling real big waiting for me to say something, or for my eyes to adjust, or for the standard waiting period where I see he's got iris and comment on I can't get em to grow at my mother's place.
So that shuts it off again.
I'm not even able to get to the place where the cognitive argument takes place, in the brain.
Where some kind of logic comes in, and says, he's not burning down his house. People don't burn down their houses. Not normal people. Okay? Not normal people. Okay, I don't KNOW if this guy is normal. I think it's his house. Maybe it's not his house, and he's an arsonist. A casual arsonist, who likes to smoke a pipe after a good start, and let his handiwork creep up on him.
A guy who was just heading out the door with his matches and kerosene, in his stocking feet, when he saw my back and FROZE and decided to play it cool, lest he be discovered streaking across the yard and later arrested with muddy socks. No, better wait here on the porch and see if I can lose this guy.
But like I said, my brain isn't getting to logic.
It's just divided into fire, and awesome socks.
And what to say, to be polite. You know, like, ahem, "Nice weather."
"For a fire."
"Yah."
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I gotta go, else I would finish this story.
This frankly bizarre story. |
