The pause that—
“Hey, Kip,” said Kevin. “You want a Coke?”
“What?” I said.
You had to have been there to see what was mildly fucked about his question: he’s on the ground, scratching his dog’s head, and I’m some fifteen feet up in the air on a neighbor’s ladder, caulking the top of a window frame and an ineptly drilled hole where someone fed the television cable into an upstairs room. I’ve been meaning to fix it for a while now, but a) had no ladder and b) it’s been raining a lot, so. But here I am, wrestling with a caulking gun, a tube of caulk that’s recalcitrant at best, and rising gusts of wind, and Kevin’s asking me if I want a Coke. Sure. What the fuck.
So I get the caulking done, and he brings me a Coke, and I climb down off the ladder and carry it back around the house and set it down on its side and step back and take a deep breath. I don’t think I like heights much, or ladders. But really, it’s best to figure that out after you’ve gotten down, than otherwise.
Chore done, I take the Coke inside and sit down to take back up the task of writing that bloody introduction, and every now and then I sip some Coke. I don’t drink soda or cola (or, as we call it generically in the South, “Coke,” as in: “What kind of Coke you want with your burger?” “Root beer”) all that much anymore. I like beer and wine and seltzer water and a little sugar in my coffee which I drink by the pot, but me and pop parted ways some time ago. Still. Every now and then. You know?
But what I’m noticing is, it’s been an hour or so, and I’m halfway through the 20 oz. (250 mL, apparently), and I’ve still got this racing tension in my chest, you know? Little jitters running down my arms and into my fingers, like my nerves are nervous, firing at shadows. And I’m thinking it’s maybe an after-effect of the ladder and the height and the stupid bloody caulk, but no, it’s been too long for that.
No—I think it’s actually the Coke. Geeze.
Plus my teeth have that weird dry filmy feeling, now.
(What? I have to get back to writing the other thing? Aw, c’mon. I can stretch this out for another joke or three. Honest. I could. —Geeze. You never let me have any fun. Bastard.)
Ghosts.
I keep my hair cut short, these days. It used to be quite long. But it’s too thin to look good like that, now, and it’s ebbed back from my face like a low spring tide. So I keep it short, quite short, buzzed short for long, hot days.
Of late, though, I’ve been at home, at work on the web and ’net; I talk on the phone to most of those I work with, and I have a dearth of cash. I’ve not gone to get my hair cut for some time. It’s now as long as it has been for months.
At the end of this past week, as I walked through Old Town, the wind blew up in strong gusts, and my hair was now so long that it tossed on top of my head, a brief wild dance held fast by the roots, and I felt the ends of my hair prick my ears, and the skin of the back of my neck. It was a thing I’d not felt—I don’t want to say “for years,” but it had been a long time, a long, long time. I stopped there on the curb and felt my skin crawl down my back, down where my ribs curl in to meet my spine, pricked by the ghosts of my hair, my long hair, tossed in a long-gone wind—
(And now I stop and fret: “ghosts.” Is that one sound, or two? At first blush, one would think one, but say the word out loud, and hear it, where the “t” breaks the flow of ess to ess, and turns the breath of the word from one gust to two, or one and a half, but more, I think, than just one. And what of words that have been joined by a dash? Does “long-gone” count as two words, two sounds, or is it one word, one thought, but two sounds, joined by that small line?
(This game is hard; more work than it might seem, at first. But fun.)
The thing about “Kip.”
It’s that there are so few of us, you know? I mean, there’s Kip Niven, and Kip Adotta, and Tom Hanks played a Kip once, and there was this football player named Kip something, and even if you start to add in all the “Kipps” out there, there’s just not that many. (There was a woman in one of Gene Wolfe’s novels named Kip, but I think that was short for Stanford.) —Anyway. When you’re watching a movie, and Katharine Hepburn keeps saying, “Kip, stop it,” and “Kip, behave yourself,” and “Kip, don’t do that,” and your name is Kip, well, you get a little twitchy, is all I’m saying.
Epiphanic mathomry.
So I think it goes that Shmendrick showed up a couple of days after everybody else, and the innkeeper was sweeping out the stable. Schmendrick asks him if there’s been a man and a woman, pregnant, stopping by. With a donkey. Maybe some shepherds. And these three other guys, dressed kind of like me, camels, Balthasar, Casper, Melchior, ring any bells? There was this star? And the innkeeper says oh, hey, you just missed them, nice guys. Good tippers. And Schmendrick’s like, oh, gee, really? Did they maybe leave some kind of forwarding address? I’ve got this stuff for them, see, the guy and his wife, the pregnant woman, I mean, except I don’t think she’s pregnant anymore, that what the star was about, you know? And the innkeeper shrugs and leans on his broom and says, you know, they said something about Egypt. And Schmendrick, he says, Egypt? Geeze. I mean, I can’t keep going all the way to frickin’ Egypt. Well, damn. And he kicks the dust and then he says, hey. You wouldn’t want some cinnamon and pepper, would you? Spices, you know, from the East? They’re good for if you’ve got some meat that’s gone a little gamey, you sprinkle it with a little of this, takes the edge off, very tasty. And I don’t really remember how it all ends, but anyway, that’s why we don’t celebrate Epiphany on Jan. 6.
As to why we celebrate Epiphany at all—
The first one was in Boston, and even though most of us had dropped out of college for one reason or another at that point (most of us would eventually go back, don’t worry), we were still on enough of a college schedule—and enough of us were still making Yuletide trips back home—that we couldn’t get everyone in the same room for a gift exchange until early January. So what the heck. Epiphany. And we’ve been doing it ever since, though now I think it has more to do with taking advantage of post-holiday clearance sales.
So: some pear brandy, and Ken MacLeod; a silk shirt in some lovely nameless harvest color; some plates with Warhol’s Monroe on them, a perfect fit our Hindipop kitchen; a fountain for the library (as soon as the library gets new paint and a new ceiling and new shelves, we’ll have a place to put it); some Poe, who is worth Becca’s hype (her squeals of delight at receiving Tomb Raider on DVD aside: remember, she can be cheerfully pragmatic about her entertainment), and whose brother all unknown to me is the guy who wrote that book, or assembled it, more like; a lovely Kahimi Karie EP from Spain, the jetset cosmopolitanry of which pleases me inordinately, and anyway, there’s a killer version of “Giapponese a Roma” on there; and ganged up and dropped in my lap, Taschen’s gorgeous reproduction of the Nuremberg Chronicles, and if I’m a little quiet here in my corner, well. —And if I miss the days when Barry used to wrap his presents in glass bottles and duct tape, I don’t so much miss the days he wrapped them in dirty socks, which was, all told, pretty much the same day. (It was a conceptual piece.) Still: books; music; software (pirated and otherwise); cheerfully useless toys, trinkets and oddments; a 20-gallon aquarium; services rendered or coerced; a copy of Plotto and a cast-iron lamp shaped like a giant housefly. You know: mathomry. But lovingly so. Epiphanic, even.
So it’s been slow.
I did some laundry. I downloaded some Cowboy Bebop and Tegan and Sara and that Nico song Wes Anderson used in The Royal Tenenbaums. I’ve been avoiding the news. (I haven’t been doing such a good job at avoiding the news, but my intentions are pure.) I walked all over downtown to a bunch of third-string temp agencies and dropped resumes off with people who all said, well, right now, you know, but hey, we’ll call you. I’ve written so many cover letters I’m getting writer’s block staring at my own letterhead. How many ways can you say “Give me the fucking job already”without, you know, seeming desperate?
But this wasn’t supposed to be about that. Any of that. —I could tell you about Wil Wheaton. You know how he looked in Stand by Me? Especially that moment in the swamp or whatever, they’ve just done something exciting, and he leans back against the tree and closes his eyes. I looked just like that when I was that age, or maybe a little younger. Even had that striped shirt, except it was the ’70s and not the ’80s pretending to be the ’50s. None of which really means much of anything except I’m curiously touched he’s still, you know, keeping it real, or whatever you call it. Not doing anything that’s likely to land him on E! anytime soon. And if he isn’t as funny as I sometimes think he thinks he is, who is? He’s managed to retain some small scraps of dignity,which is an impressive feat in this day and age. —So you’ve probably read his blog before and everything, and the line about the 50,000 monkeys is pretty good, but you maybe didn’t know he swept his categories in the 2002Bloggies (hey, I didn’t know till five minutes ago),and you probably haven’t read this amusing article about his blog. And yes, the bit about who would win, Anakin or Wesley, is pretty much exactly as funny as I think he thinks it is.
Hey! The only other thing I could think of was this joke from a humor magazine somebody I knew or maybe it was the brother or cousin of somebody I knew, or ex-girlfriend or something, the linkage is unclear to me now, but anyway, they went to Emory, and maybe they sent it to my roommate (who looked like a young, scruffy Billy Joel, so), and anyway, I thought it was so funny I scribbled it on my dorm room door froshling year. It’s a poster for a late ’80s superconcert:
Squeeze
The Firm
Hooters
INXS
—with—
XTC
See? Like I said. Slow.
Elephant dung, not cow dung.
What? We went with John and Becca and Chris and saw Brotherhood of the Wolf which is (impressively) the closest thing to a Hong Kong historical action flick I’ve ever seen take place in 18th century France, and then cooked dinner for Steve and Sara (asparagus with egg and cheese, right out of The Moosewood Cooks at Home, and kukkakaalialaatikko, and bread-machine bread), and then it snowed, I mean it actually frickin’ snowed for the first time in like two years, and the cats hated it, and anyway, whatever; none of that is really worth talking about, because people enjoying themselves and laughing and cracking off-color jokes over chopped cauliflower and laughing (and yelling, but laughing) at the antics of people who can’t remember how exactly it is you drive in this snow stuff, none of that makes for gripping literature, precisely. Schadenfreude, that’s what puts butts in seats.
So: without further ado: some highlights from the New York Times’ corrections over the past 30 years or so.
(PS: Don’t tell Jenn I told you, but she’s working on some character art and I’m writing some copy for her for Dicebox that should be going up soon. Prepping to spread some word of mouth at APE—or at least, to have some lucky friends who are actually going spread it for us. But mum’s the word, for now.)
Why, yes. It is brand new. How nice you noticed.
Some random entries below, typed up more to play with style and form than anything else, but hey, they’re still, y’know, cool. I supoose. Still working out the kinks. Archives? Um. I’ll stick ’em somewhere, when I figure it out. Did I mention I can’t code for shit and I’m doing this all by hand? Well. With Dreamweaver, and Dean Allen’s invaluable Apple Scripts. But otherwise: hand-made. Whee.
