Charles Freeland

An Enquiry Concerning the Yodeling Knives

Avoid lists, especially those involving African deities and the painters who found them irresistible. The kind of thing that wakes you up at night when you weren’t even really sleeping, that startles you down to the very spleen and gets you to making pancakes, just in case someone else has had a similar experience. You can pull catfish from the river with your bare hands, but this is not something you’ll want advertised. Because there are some who will admire you for the dedication involved. For the fearless manner in which you sacrifice your body. You can see where the dilemma lies, like a python. Not in the weeds, necessarily, but in the domestic equivalent. In the space between the armchair and the curtains where almost anything is apt to lurk. And you don’t have to step on it to cause the tragedy. You just have to be in the right mood. A stream, for instance, after an earthquake, may be expected to reverse its flow. But it is still recognizably a stream. This is why it’s best to write your science fiction novels at great speed, and without going back to check your facts against the physics lectures of Richard Feynman. I won’t go so far as to suggest such wisdom is infallible, but you might find something very similar in just about any drug store. In the back aisles, with their unguents and best-sellers. And the children huddled around that one birthday card that reveals too much about the way adults actually live their lives. With their clothes off half the time. And the other half spent huddled up in blankets. As if they are afraid the winter cold will chap their skin. And that the ukulele music on the radio is just something to occupy their minds while the world goes on without them.

An Enquiry Concerning the Apparent Dispersion of the Phyla

You’ll find no footnotes in this neighborhood, though occasionally something seems to need an asterisk. A bit of pottery, say, broken and written on in a language not so easily understood. Even when you are walking down the street and notice the light on in your kitchen. You suspect there are ways of handling these difficulties that don’t involve self-immolation. Or the bed sheets that haven’t been changed, at any rate, in over a week. The chieftains call you before their subcommittees. Each member is leering after his fashion like a rhinoceros, obviously mistaking a talent for mixing herbs and speaking Latin for the kind of thing that makes one a superior lover. And we are afraid they will take this to mean they have no hope of getting out again, of repeating the mistakes that made their ancestors great. Or at least people worth painting. You can see their portraits even now, in the galleries. And the magazines. Next to the advertisements for all terrain vehicles and escort services. Thinly veiled organizations that promote medical massage. That turn a lousy day into something more exciting without having to resort to Scrabble tournaments. Or those meals where the secret ingredients get revealed only after you’ve already eaten. In behaving this way, your hosts transgress against the laws of human decency, and even human nature. Though where the one ends and the other begins is a matter of speculation even the cynics decided to leave to their offspring. Assuming, of course, they got out of the bathtub long enough to sire any. Most of them didn’t. They just spent all day shoving people aside and combing their hair and scratching certain phrases onto the coins they were preparing to stick back into circulation. Homey wisdom involving the color of the milk in the jug. Or the way you can tell someone will be unfaithful. It’s in the pronouns he uses. It’s in the palm of the hand, where the lines are trying much too hard for legibility. For a je ne sais quoi that can not be bothered with skin.