This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 2:11 am and is filed under guidebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
22.12.2008
There are certain days when every word gets bitten off before it can chew. When, at best, the things you try to say turn on you and spit up half-masticated lumps of your tongue. Syllables resemble oily bags full of the odds and ends no one wants, the plastic pull-tabs and dusty cat toys; is it any wonder, with their mouths so full, that no one can guess what they’re trying to say? And besides, it’s probably giving them too much credit to think that they’re trying to communicate at all. They might simply enjoy the noises they make, the patient labor involved in gutting a vowel.
There are tricks for managing this condition. There are certain phrases that your own voice has forgotten how to hear, things that will escape detection long enough for you to say them. So they say is one, that’s the way my mother did it, and, can I help you? Stop, but don’t start. What matters is not that these phrases are irrelevant to the problems at hand, but that they are possible.
Besides, whose skin is it that has suddenly engulfed your right hand and ruined all your fingerprints? Why the impulse to pull up the venetian blinds, and see what might be sticking to the window? There must be a path between all the snowflakes, if only you could make it out. A scant half-animal threads ahead of you, picking up the broken furniture people have thrown from their windows, and even at this distance you can clearly see that there’s no white in her fur.