pigeon

dad yelling at me for making ice cubes with hot water

I don’t want to write about this one, because it doesn’t seem fun at all. The only reason I drew a pigeon tonight in the first place is that my Ultimate Personality Test Report said I should consider giving without expecting a reward. They probably meant giving (time, energy, care) to PEOPLE but I think it applies to writing too. That’s the main reason I STOP writing, is because I’m afraid I’m not going to get the reward I expect. That’s a created pain that I then avoid. So then I castigate myself: DON’T AVOID THE PAIN WHAT ARE YOU SOME KIND OF PUSSY? But the funny thing is, I wouldn’t have to self-flagellate if I just didn’t CREATE that pain in the first damn place. There’s enough natural pain to go around as it is — which, curiously, is a lot less impossible to handle than the synthetic kind.

In any case, I guess for some reason I’ll write this pigeon down but I don’t remember much about it at all, except this: Dad’s house, one of the “every other weekends” during the years when that was how often I stayed over there. I had read something about hot water making better ice? I think it was posed as the counterpoint to cold water being better for boiling — or maybe I didn’t read it. Maybe I just made the inference myself, given my perennial love for inverted symmetry. “Well, if you’re supposed to use cold water to make hot water, surely you should use boiling water to make extremely cold water!”

Funny thing is, as I’m picturing myself reading about it, which I almost certainly didn’t, I’m picturing myself hunched over a phone screen in my dad’s old green linoleum kitchen, scrolling through dumb loosely related facts. But — OBVIOUSLY that’s not how it would have been! No phones! Early 80s! I didn’t even know what a Internet was yet! Bless me, I was just a scrawny, bangs-faced animal, primitively rummaging around in a world of flesh, paper, and slow-motion news. We heard about things when we heard about them, and not a moment before. And things, when we first heard about them, were new to us, because we’d never heard about them already. Can you even imagine?

Oh! I think I just figured out another reason I stop writing: because it becomes very unpleasant to keep trying to come up with not merely the right words, but the best, most incisive, insightful, smart sounding words. That’s why an exercise like “10 literal observations about the world” can be such a bracing tonic. But why does it matter? Why do I eventually feel a need to claw my way back into the mental reality within which I am free to sit here and make letters and words appear in a certain order?

There’s a lot of reasons, but I think I can narrow it down to two main ones:

1. The clack of the keyboard, the shapes of the letters and the spaces between and around them. The orderly line of them, shoulder to shoulder like little cat soldiers, jostling each other, some thinking hard, some trying not to laugh, all of them likely to get distracted and start licking each other’s fur or wander off in search of kibble. Sitting here in this warm room with those cats.
2. Not knowing what I am about to think next. I said that in a live session of my creative writing class the other day, and as I said it I realized it sounded true: Not knowing what you’re going to think next is a form of being alive. When you write or type it, you get to see it for the first time, and it quietly astonishes.

What does this have to do with hapless, gangly little old me, wobbling a steaming ice cube tray towards the open freezer door, as my dad walks in from wherever he’s been, sees this ridiculous tableau, and “yells” at me? (Folks, I guarantee he didn’t really “yell,” but, you know, kids who have gentle parents think anything loud enough to convey disapproval at a visceral level is yelling.) What does this have to do with my trivial and fleeting but oddly intense shame, my disappointment and frustration as I watched my potentially superior transcendent future ice cubes slink back down the drain?

His reaction was so incredulous, essentially “Why the hell would you think that would be a good idea?” I remember a feeling of injustice (in just ice). Like HOW DO YOU KNOW? MAYBE IT IS A GOOD IDEA! MAYBE THE WAY WE’VE ALWAYS DONE IT ISN’T ALWAYS — whatever. I didn’t say any of that of course. I didn’t really care if it was or wasn’t a good idea. I just wanted to have some fun with life, is that so WROOONNNNGGG??? Now I know why my Ultimate Personality Test Report said I was an INFP (lol). I don’t know what my dad’s would be.

I guess writing about this pigeon was kind of fun after all. So now what? Biskit goes to the vet tomorrow. I’m gonna brush my teeth and go to bed. That’s all — literal observations of my actual world. The period at the end of this sentence. And whatever comes after that, whenever it may come. And so on and so on, until there’s no more, and I can’t anymore, and then that’ll be the end.