Dear diary,
According to the dictionary that I keep in my shirt pocket, eaves are “the part of a roof that meets or overhangs the walls of a structure.” I researched this word in order to inform you that a wasp is building an addition onto one of the eaves of my apartment.
Since I hate using poison on unwanted creatures, I prayed unto my sweetheart, saying: “Please send me a garden-variety spray bottle.” And lo, my prayer was answered: for my sweetheart returned from the market with a sky blue squirt gun. This weapon is colored translucently so that its operator can tell how much ammunition remains.
I don’t know if my plan will work, but I hope to shoot some water at the house of the wasp. It’s a small house: it’s only got six rooms so far; thus I hope that the wasp will not be too devastated to find it ruined. (Why do I follow the Golden Rule with insects?) I assume that the water will cause its house to become soggy and either drop from the eave or be declared unfit for habitation.
I assume the reason that wasps build under the eaves (rather than, say, on top of the roof) is that they want to avoid getting rained on. Imagine what a nuisance raindrops would be if you were the size of a wasp. Like pudding-filled beach balls hurtling down from heaven.
But, speaking of my sweetheart, over the past fortnights, she and I have been regularly screening episodes of the Up documentaries. An assembly of kids were interviewed at the age of seven, and then follow-up interviews have been filmed every seven years since. As of now, the subjects have reached the age of 56. (The director has said that he intends to continue the series as long as possible.)
I can’t imagine any viewer watching the Up films without comparing its subjects’ lives to her own. Since I’m 38 at the time I write this, I would already have been interviewed for five episodes of the series. Here is what I think they would reveal about me:
SEVEN UP
I am half shy, half bratty, plus arrogant and disgruntled about everything. I identify myself as a conservative republican who worships Ronald Reagan. (Please blame my parents.)
7 PLUS SEVEN
I attend public school and also work at a fast-food franchise. I hate my job. I hate school. My sole interest is music.
21 UP
I work at a factory and share a studio apartment. After graduating from public high school, I cannot stand the thought of continuing on to college. I have begun to record my own rap demo tapes.
28 UP
I now work as the safety officer for my father’s trucking company. I abandoned rap and joined the Christian church. After God, my only interest is imaginative literature. (I have not yet learned that God is imaginative literature.)
35 UP
I’ve been married happily since the last interview. Now thoroughly antichristian, I spend all of my free time writing. I just published the first of what I hope will be many strange books.
42 UP (a prediction)
My corpse is discovered in a ravine. I could not prevail against God: therefore God took me.
3 comments:
Strangest thing: YOU discover your corpse in a ravine, call the authorities, and because you're nervous and panicky, the cops begin to suspect you had something to do with it, and after they learn that you have discovered one of the most taboo of all taboo secrets, that God IS imaginative literature, you spend the rest of your life falsely jailed for your own murder, forced to go back to work in fast food in the prison cafeteria in the mornings and making license plates in the prison factory in the afternoons, but fortunately you and the other inmates will be allowed to sit around the cell campfire at night and create rap hymns of the Old West in order to get out early on good behavior, that is, as long as you live out the rest of your life under the eaves..
hahahaha!!—Full circle: I think that you just inadvertently re-converted me to Christianity, by showing how I have become my own pest in order to spray myself down from above!
Ha! NOOOOOoooooooo!!!!
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