Turning your reality needs into realty

My dear,

There were a thousand wasps outside our front door yesterday; so we telephoned Angel Slayer Insect Service & scheduled a house call. Then their representative paid us a visit.

That’s all that happened: that’s it for the quotidian – I got no more news but my private imaginings. There’s nothing else empirically verifiable about the past twenty-four hours of my life; so, at present, I can’t make much of a contribution to the sciences. I’m just an old woman giving my last two cents.

One interesting aspect about our evening with BOB (that’s the pest-control representative’s name, according to the tag on his uniform: “BOB”, printed thusly in all caps, like the villain from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series – tho also now I realize, too late, that Jeffrey Beaumont, the protagonist of Lynch’s earlier movie Blue Velvet, poses as a bug sprayer so as to infiltrate the apartment of a mysterious woman; yet, I ask the reader to disregard that last coincidence: I don’t want this entry to get too complicated), I say, the only interesting item to report about our encounter with BOB is that he acted surprised, almost to the point of incredulity, when I answered “I’m a writer,” after he asked me what’s my racket.

Now I don’t want to relay all the boring details about BOB’s attempt to upsell us from the wasp annihilation that we requested (he tried to convince us that we NEED, additionally, at least six mouse traps in our basement, and hummingbird poison all round the roof, as well as carpenter ant treatment monthly, and a spider-petting zoo); I only want to reiterate how much BOB lit up at my answer to his question “What do you do?” Actually he said, “So what do you two do?” because my sweetheart was with me.

My initial answer was: “I’m a writer and she’s a music teacher.” This made the guy flip his lid – he blinked and did a triple take and said, “What! You’re a WRITER?” And his eyes got big. Now I’m thinkin to myself: Why does a bug guy care so much about writing?

Then he said, “What kind of stuff do you write?” (I get this question all the time.) So I said, “Well I try to contribute to the type of stuff that I love to read, which is experimental: personal, poetic, strange.” And I named William Wordsworth and William Blake as my idols. Then my sweetheart said, “See?” as she pointed to the box that was open on the table in front of us. We were all standing around the kitchen table while BOB was composing his cost estimate, and there were no other items in sight, because we still haven’t unpacked any of our other belongings; but the first and only box that we had just opened was the one that my sweetheart pointed at; so she said, “See?” and BOB looked into the box, and there at the top was The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake.

At this, BOB said “Oh.” Then he added: “My wife likes to read.”

Then he placed both hands on the sides of his belly, and he held it like it was a basketball, and he said, “I gotta lose this” (presumably meaning the extra weight) “—and then,” (he continued) “after I get my knee surgery, I’ll be able to walk easier; but while I’m bedridden, maybe I will try to read a little; I usually just like to watch football, but maybe there’s something to all this reading business; but I think I’m going to learn how to play the guitar, because my daughter says she’s planning on loaning me her guitar, when I’m in the hospital, so that I can have something to learn when I’m laid up with this bad knee of mine. So what kind of instruments do you teach?” —This last question was aimed at my sweetheart, so she told him that she teaches mostly piano and violin. Then BOB says:

“So what do I do then, if I wanna learn the guitar?—do I just go take lessons at your music shop?” And my sweetheart answered:

“Everything is on the internet now. There are videos that teach you how to do everything. You don’t have to pay for lessons to learn the guitar.”

& upon hearing this, BOB looked crestfallen.

*

I’m not satisfied with how I’m recounting this event; I’m repeating our talk exactly as it happened & getting carried away with merely reflecting the experience. What I really wanted to do is focus more on that moment when BOB reacted to my fib about being a writer. I didn’t capture his shocked disbelief in the account above. So here I’ll try again.

*

BOB said, “What do you two do?”

I said, “Well I’m a writer, and she teaches music.”

Now BOB stopped dead and looked up from the figures that he was writing on his contract form & exclaimed:

“Wait—you’re a writer!?”

I said, “Yeah but, I mean, look: you’re a writer too; you’re writing on that paper there – the cost estimate for the spider petting, etc. – I only meant my answer literally, in the sense that I write words a lot. I don’t mean to claim that I’m GOOD at writing, or that you or anyone else would LIKE what I write. But the fact is that I spend time shuffling words — and that, by plain definition, makes me a writer.”

Then BOB repeated “Seriously, you’re a writer!?”

I said, “I mean, only technically: it’s just a factual label, not a value judgment. I feel ashamed to state this; please understand that I am not implying any accomplishment or making a boast about myself. I would far rather copy my hero Duchamp and answer your question by saying I am a BREATHER (as opposed to an artist or poet); for every living thing breathes automatically, by default; therefore to label myself a breather would fall more in line with my life’s goal, for nothing is more important to me than to seem unprepossessing; but the scientifically measurable data prove that I actually spend more time writing than I do breathing, so I cannot simply steal Duchamp’s nice quip; I must succumb to the truth: I’m not a firefighter, a nurse, a philanthropist, or a cherry-tree chopper; I’m just a low down dirty scribe.”

Then BOB said, “You know, I don’t really enjoy reading very much.”

& I said, “Me neither! That’s why I chose to forge my own books. Ever since I was a youngster, I hated reading, and I always wondered why no one like myself, a reader-hater, ever wrote a book: I mean, there are plenty of books available for those who love to read; Why doesn’t someone who despises reading make some books for those of us who prefer to cultivate illiteracy?”

Then I grabbed the copy of my big dumb collection, which was just under the Blake book, and said, “Here—flip to anyplace at random, for an example, just to prove that you and I are on the same page.”

And BOB lodged his finger into the rear of the book – at the very last text, in fact – so I opened it there and read aloud:

Gas Hotel turned on his computer. “I’ll order us some food,” she said. “Okay, looks like up to three hundred dollars has been given to someone in a manila package. I see a sloping green field and some fir trees beneath a cobalt sky. What do you guys want?” Just then the computer caught fire.
     The purple circle “A” took its last gulp of brandy and sighed. Flames of fire kept buzzing over the lea. The money was crying.
     “Is this a history or flexible and young?”
     “It is a heart,” hissed a voice from out of the gunshots.
     “How fortunate,” said Cash Sign Up, “for we can use the youth. I just came from the laboratory, and they are constructing a blob.”
     “It must be that we need to retrieve our eveningwear from the fizzing supermen or stun them younger, Sign Up Now, don’t you agree?” And the computer exploded.
     One touch was all the daily moisture needed to meld itself above the saucers. The computer was what pushed it so high. There were stone angels, and burning books from heaven, and three hundred dollars.

“You see,” I said; “I compose anti-novels for those who keep in touch with their inner illiterate. Long story short, I write books for people who remain illiterate by choice – people who can’t stand plot, who hate stories & characters, & who recoil from meter & rhyme & all the conventions of poetry. And who loathe prose too. People who only like scripture, which is to say Holy Texts, because these books are not designed to be READ but to be pounded upon while preaching, or thrown at people (like when one says ‘The judge threw the book at those innocents’, but also physically, like when you hear of a Christian chasing a sinner thru the park wielding an erect New Testament) – for books serve excellently as blunt objects – or you can display such titles in a bookcase behind you while you’re being interviewed for a documentary film: a bunch of books blocking the background while you hem-haw to a camera can make you appear intelligent. I’ve found that audiences inherently trust what you say when there are shelves of books filling out the shot. Pay attention, next time you see a lawyer being interviewed for TV or whatever: they always pose in front of a library of legal volumes. It gives the viewer the feeling that the content of all those gilded spines is somehow infused in the mind of the being who—”

Here BOB interrupted & said: “Yeah, I’ve noticed that! I watched the whole trial for that guy who murdered his wife, and every time the news networks would interview one of his attorneys, they always put them in front of American flags.”

And I said, “Yes, it works with other symbols too. Tho I was talking specifically about books…”

Then BOB said, “Yeah, no; I know what you’re sayin.” —Then, after an awkward silence, BOB held up the paper that he’d been filling out and announced:

“Well here’s your estimate: you’ll see that the wasp treatment would’ve been ex U.S. dollars but I changed it to ex times fifty cuz your planet has not just one but more than four imagined corners, and the treatments of the other souls that I’ll be killing bring the total to an even seven hundred.”

Then BOB asked, “Do you have a ladder anywhere around here, like a step ladder?”

And I said “Yes.” And my sweetheart added, “We have two ladders in the garage.”

Then BOB said, “Well my son-in-law might be willing to get up there and caulk those holes in the underside of your eaves. He would use a white caulk that fades transparent when it dries. That’ll keep those wasps out, after we treat them. There’s probably a nest in there. And you probably have hummingbirds in your attic. You’ll see millions of baby hummingbirds cascading down the walls from time to time— ...Ever notice any droppings anywhere?”

And I said, “No: no sign of hummingbirds at all.”

And BOB said, “Well I saw evidence of scratching and pawing on the cinder blocks in your garage. And the places where the electricity comes into your house – all those wires that go thru the wall, including the one for your internet connection: that’s a DANGER – those entry points are places where invaders can chew & creep in. So they will get you. They’ll ravish you & kill you. The angels WILL win, in the end.”

So we thanked BOB; & he lurched toward the window, clutched the tree branch, & clambered down the trunk. Then, after fielding a call on his cellphone, he drove away in his enormous jet-black truck.

Now all we need is to schedule a few more appointments with other services, and compare their proposals to BOB’s, to make sure that we’re getting the best deal on bug care.