You know how once you have “Honda Pilot” in your mind, you start seeing “Honda Pilots” everywhere, and then you’re like “Why are there so many Honda Pilots” but there’s really not any more of them than there were the day before (most likely); you just notice what you notice? It’s been like that for me lately with the idea (strategy? tactic?) of continually asking oneself, about something one is writing or has just written (or thought or said I suppose), “Is this true?”
I keep seeing this little incantation popping up on blog posts and the like, offered as advice for how to get better at writing, thinking, and speaking. I like it! It seems useful and wholesome. However, I’m finding it incomplete.
I would like to ask not just “Is this true” (it generally is but truth is easy) and not even “Is there a part missing” (there is; incompleteness is the life force of language), but “What is the missing part” (and ask this recursively).
By way of illustration, here are some true quotations:
“to” – Hamlet
“c” – Einstein
“therefore” – Aristotle
“a” – Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
These seem preternaturally suggestive, to me at least, because of their literary familiarity. Obviously they would expand, respectively, to To be or not to be; E=mc2; Excellence something something about who we are or whatever; and It was a dark and stormy night.
And those in turn would expand further from there, and so on until we get to the entire textual content of the universe.
But for ones that aren’t so obvious, when does a sliver of text become a “quote”? (And how big can it get before it’s too big to be merely a “quote” anymore?) I started a “Photographs of Milwaukee” project one time, featuring actual photos of Milwaukee — things like a close-up of a cigarette butt nestled in the space between a curb and the street; a piece of pea gravel; a single locust leaf; a rectangle of anonymous brick that’s the wall of a McDonald’s but you wouldn’t know it.
What makes a thing a thing? What makes a text a text? What makes a pigeon a pigeon is the missing part. No one can see it — duh — because it’s missing — but we can all feel it, all the time, and it keeps us lean and hungry.
The more missing parts you identify and incorporate, the more will be revealed — like that one character from, idk, Bazooka Joe or something that was like, Oh no! I have a hole in my pants! — That’s OK, I’ll just cut it out!
Bruh. I don’t know. I’m stalling because today’s pigeon is pissing me off, and I haven’t yet been able to figure out why. It seems harmless enough.
pigeon
the loudness button
I mentioned the loudness button a few days ago. Funny how the randomness wants me to zoom in on it now.
OK so fuck it, let’s zoom in on the loudness button.
It’s face is circular, in diameter smaller than the bottom of a Bic. The word LOUD appears directly above it, in a small, black, bold, rather flattened font.
It has a dull chrome appearance, very satisfying to the touch. The action is “in/out;” it’s a spring-loaded toggle physically and visibly either in the “in” position (ON) or the “out” position (OFF).
Its immediate backdrop is the faceplate of a Pioneer AM/FM/cassette car stereo head unit, a model from the early 80s that looked something (perhaps exactly) like this. To the button’s right, there’s a small series of RoundRects you can mash — nothing “digital” here — to whip the tuner to one of its preset positions.
Surrounding this modest single-DIN interface is the dash panel of my stepbrother’s slightly bitchin’ Camaro. It has a junior Millenium Falcon vibe. Well worn, second hand, possibly some nascent rust in some spots. But still cool. I wanna say it is a dull brownish-orange color. A tad darker than scallion, shall we say?
Sitting in the driver’s seat is BD, my stepbrother. Sitting in the passenger seat is pre-driver’s-license me. Stuffed into the Pioneer’s cassette hole is Robert Plant’s The Principle of Moments.
Zooming further out, a layer at a time — outside the car is Kingshighway in Cape Girardeau. It’s sunny, car windows are open, there’s a melange of traffic and bird and people noises and the smell of exhaust, hot pavement, hot oak leaves.
We creak to a halt about four or five cars back from the stoplight by Arena Park. In the lane to our left, there is a more ordinary car, also windows open, containing a group of young women, who I guess must have been, at least to BD, at least in some surficial way, attractive.
We’re getting close to the part that’s been pissing me off, and I still don’t know why.
BD gets this dumb chin-jutting macho-mug look on his face, and, of course, cranks up the Pioneer. Robert Plant croons out, “I’m in the mood for a melody, I’m in the mood for a melody, I’m in the mooooood....” Two plaintive guitar strums punctuate that state of being, and then he sings it again.
This is not good enough, not strong enough, not convex enough. Head bobbing smugly, glancing meaningfully over to the young ladies’ car, BD pushes the loudness button.
I already know what it is for, because I asked him a while ago:
“What’s that for?”
“It makes it louder.”
What response is BD’s chimpery eliciting from its target audience? I honestly don’t remember.
Maybe they flirt, maybe they ignore, maybe they act annoyed. They are real, actual human beings with infinitely detailed, sacred and tedious stories of their own, that I will never know anything about.
Meanwhile, sitting in the passenger seat like a passenger, I try not to look like someone who is trying not to giggle.
Welp, that’s it! Except for the infinitely nested neverending succession of missing parts, that’s all I got for this one. I don’t know why I remember it and I don’t know why remembering it has been making me feel agitated.
Maybe it’s because I’d like to think of myself as superior to all the dumb shit that BD did, but I’m not. Maybe it’s because it took me so long to learn what “loudness” actually means. Maybe it’s because I’m a sucker for a button you can push to smooth out the contours, round out the curve, sculpt the response, bolster what’s missing.
That all sounds if not plausible then at least true — and too easy.
The light turns green. The cars in line take turns lurching to a start. The camaro and the car next to it travel along apace for a moment, then drift apart, then diverge entirely. The tape spools. The song ends. The mood shifts. The next song starts. We talk about something else, or nothing at all. I’m not that version of me anymore. I grow up, mostly. BD kind of doesn’t. The missing part is still missing.
A sweetgum nestled in a sidewalk crack. A piece of packing foam and an empty bleach jug by the side of a busy intersection. A smattering of condensation beading the concave surface of a cup holder. Fine fair hairs on the neck behind a dangly earring worn by the stranger in the next car.
It’s here. Somewhere. It’s in here (or out there) somewhere.