![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thinking Like a Mammal -- part deux
Nov. 2nd, 2004 08:18 amSo the momentous decision grows nigh… I refer, of course, to the dilemma as to whether I should renew my New Yorker subscription. I never read the damn thing. My office is unfortunately situated in a room that was once a solarium, right by the front door to the house, and people trip over big dusty piles of unread magazines on their way into the living room. Small business ownership has turned me into a concretistic thinker – I don’t even get most of the cartoons anymore. I’m a moron. Still, The New Yorker is my last link to a happier time when I actually had an intellectual life. The nostalgia factor is strong.
Dead crab day at the beach this morning. Xena (small white dog) was in heaven. Great ropy kelp forests had washed up on shore. Lots of dead jellyfish and two flat, peculiar, prehistoric-looking fish which a fellow dogwalker – an amiable, white-haired gentleman in a Bush-Cheney button – identified as halibut.
“I’ll be happy when this election nonsense is over,” he told me.
I hope you won’t, I thought but merely smiled.
In the distance a flotilla of dolphins cartwheeled. They didn’t care about which lucky politician wins the big prize – unlike my husband whose obsession has become difficult to live with. He actually woke me up at four-fucking-ayem to rant and rave about some Ohio judge’s decision to check voter identification at the polls – “Not one black person is gonna be able to vote in Ohio! Not one!”
“Will you just calm down,” I said.
“I can’t,” he muttered from between clenched teeth.
“Sure you can,” I cooed. I flicked on the remote. Infomercials! There’s a company called SMC which can teach you how to make vast sums of money from the very first day by selling adorable ceramic leaping dolphin lamps made in China. Wow. Three hundred and fifty percent mark-up over wholesale. Price point is so important in retail…
By this time Ben had fallen comfortably back to sleep but I, of course, was wide awake.
Tripped over a stack of New Yorkers on my way into my office. Spilled coffee all over a stack of inventories. Sat down at my desk. Contemplated the piles. The Hot Sauce pile. The Max College Application pile. The Bills pile. And there, way in the corner, almost as dog-earred and dusty as the New Yorkers, my Stegner Fellowship application pile. I have written neither of the short stories I wanted to submit and the due date on the application is December 1.
I know the results of this election will influence events for at least the next hundred years. In a hundred years, of course, I’ll be dead but some mutant strain of my DNA may still be stalking the earth – that’s the breeders’ dilemma: I’ve got to care, I have a biological investment and it’s hard to stop thinking like a mammal.
But the other part of me is thinking Shakespeare:
Substitute “John Kerry” for “Hecuba” and there you have it.
I was born at the very end of the Korean War. The Korean War – really, a kind of epilogue to WWII – was a momentous event by any historical standard, but really, who gives a fuck? Who thinks about it now? And it’s only been fifty years. History casts a really long shadow.
What the hell. I'll send in the renewal check this morning.
Dead crab day at the beach this morning. Xena (small white dog) was in heaven. Great ropy kelp forests had washed up on shore. Lots of dead jellyfish and two flat, peculiar, prehistoric-looking fish which a fellow dogwalker – an amiable, white-haired gentleman in a Bush-Cheney button – identified as halibut.
“I’ll be happy when this election nonsense is over,” he told me.
I hope you won’t, I thought but merely smiled.
In the distance a flotilla of dolphins cartwheeled. They didn’t care about which lucky politician wins the big prize – unlike my husband whose obsession has become difficult to live with. He actually woke me up at four-fucking-ayem to rant and rave about some Ohio judge’s decision to check voter identification at the polls – “Not one black person is gonna be able to vote in Ohio! Not one!”
“Will you just calm down,” I said.
“I can’t,” he muttered from between clenched teeth.
“Sure you can,” I cooed. I flicked on the remote. Infomercials! There’s a company called SMC which can teach you how to make vast sums of money from the very first day by selling adorable ceramic leaping dolphin lamps made in China. Wow. Three hundred and fifty percent mark-up over wholesale. Price point is so important in retail…
By this time Ben had fallen comfortably back to sleep but I, of course, was wide awake.
Tripped over a stack of New Yorkers on my way into my office. Spilled coffee all over a stack of inventories. Sat down at my desk. Contemplated the piles. The Hot Sauce pile. The Max College Application pile. The Bills pile. And there, way in the corner, almost as dog-earred and dusty as the New Yorkers, my Stegner Fellowship application pile. I have written neither of the short stories I wanted to submit and the due date on the application is December 1.
I know the results of this election will influence events for at least the next hundred years. In a hundred years, of course, I’ll be dead but some mutant strain of my DNA may still be stalking the earth – that’s the breeders’ dilemma: I’ve got to care, I have a biological investment and it’s hard to stop thinking like a mammal.
But the other part of me is thinking Shakespeare:
"What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?”
Substitute “John Kerry” for “Hecuba” and there you have it.
I was born at the very end of the Korean War. The Korean War – really, a kind of epilogue to WWII – was a momentous event by any historical standard, but really, who gives a fuck? Who thinks about it now? And it’s only been fifty years. History casts a really long shadow.
What the hell. I'll send in the renewal check this morning.
