AUTHOR.CALHO: If I didn't write it, I would be hitch hiking cross country to Maine and then Alaska in that order. While taking frequent breaks to spread leaflets. And sit in diners. And write on things because I wasn't at a computer. I may still do that in a few years. Writing this also helps me forget about and better understand the limitations of being human, and keeps me busy enough to allow me no free time to burn the world down.

THEMATIC.ABOUT : Collapse often. The things that hold people together and hold them apart and scatter brains. The things that make thoughts go boom. The things that ooh and aah and [expletive deleted]. Sometimes poking around the margins where responsibility ends and the only one to look to is the Original Equipment Manufacturer and say "but, I already pressed 9 for more options and the menus are exactly the same. Can you just replace it?" The answer will be: "please hold." Sometimes hanging out in dark corners. Sometimes following the train tracks. Looking for ways out and ways in and all the while sharing the things seen and heard and done and drawn and written and scorched and healed and teased and caged and dreamed along the way.

5/10/13

What Makes You Laugh 2

This cracked me the hell up yesterday.  As a kid I always had trouble with math.  I remember sitting in the temporary trailer classroom in my AP history class.  It was near the end of the year and the teacher was taking some of his sick days.  He may have actually been sick.  I don't remember.  He was kind of an intense guy.  Everywhere he walked he walked like he was walking into a steady fifteen mile an hour headwind.  He couldn't have been more than five foot six, so the combination of the fast and choppy gait and the constant forward lean he rocked combined to create this Charlie Chaplin silent film physical comedy that left people giggling in his wake.

Advanced Placement history was hard enough, but he wasn't there he would leave worksheets for the less than competent place holder substitutes.  There was a steady stable of substitutes so the substitute you had for German two would in all likelihood be the same one you had a few weeks later for chemistry.  Their job wasn't to teach, it was to keep order first and foremost.  If you learned anything while they were there it was incidental.  The worksheets were usually word finds and other time killers.  I don't know why they didn't just pass out crayons and blank paper.  Wait, I do know.  The number of people who could keep themselves busy inside of poorly airconditioned trailers without devolving into the chaos of recess could be counted on one hand.  Maybe two.  The worksheets that time around were math problems.

I sat near the front.  Parents orders, and there was the standing threat that they might check up on you at any moment and if you weren't there or sitting where they told you to sit there would be a body tax to pay when you got home.  So I'm sitting near the front with this xerox of math problems that's faded blue because school infrastructure updates itself about as often as government infrastructure.  Are those basically the same thing?  I don't know why I think of them as different things.  Maybe it's just the division of public and private that happens so glaringly once you finish high school and realize there was a private system when you were just a pint too, but you were light years away from it then and student loans come preying as soon as you can make that decision yourself.

Anyway, I'm sitting near the front and getting nowhere.  I got beyond the first few algebra problems because they were easy.  I remember getting stuck on this problem that had X and Y on both sides of the equal sign and I was going crazy trying to figure out who the hell would torture someone with that kind of difficulty.  Just start off with the Xs over here and the Ys over there, but how will the children learn about life's complexities if they can't fit the building in their heads?  I couldn't.  Half the classroom was, by then, devolving into a dozen different conversations and spoon fighting and pencil fighting and laughter everywhere and I'm just trying to think because I was told if the worksheet was finished, I could start my homework.  If I finished my homework I could go outside as soon as I got home and the faster you could get out of the house and go play and ride all afternoon and not be around the dead air in that building and the anxiety couched inside the better off you were.  Can't get into trumped up trouble if you're not around to get pegged on made up charges.

The substitute teacher came over after several minutes and asked me if I was okay.  I said yeah, of course, just trying to think.  Turns out I had my eyes closed and my head on my desk and I was rubbing the worksheet on the short naps of my hair and it was making this paper on velcro loop sound that was loud enough to distract him at his desk.  I liked the sound.  I didn't like being interrupted.  To me it was really soothing.  It was helping me focus and draw away from the noise of being there and the difficulty I was having and it kinda sounded like the noise the wind makes when you're in a car with the window down and it goes fwoosh by your ear.  Beautifully white noise.  As soon as he snapped me out of it I couldn't get back there.  I ended up making little drawings of airplanes for the rest of my answers and turned it in at the end of the day.  The answers didn't matter that much.  Check, check minus, check plus.  It was mostly a way of taking attendance.

Yesterday though, I was in a similar way.  I couldn't get the windows I was working on to stay up.  I spent hours reading up on the product.  I installed them correctly.  Insulated them correctly.  Nothing over tightened, nothing under done.  There was a slight bowing, but it shouldn't be affecting the sashes the way it was and it was driving me crazy.  Every time I adjusted them I had to take the window out of the frame, adjust the settings, put the window back in and test it.  Hours into this I began to zone out and go over all of the steps I covered over the last few days, from demolition to installation to fine tuning to the now.  Going over the entire ocean of knowledge accumulated over that time and evaluating each nodule for a potential mistake.  While I was doing the sun went down.  There were no blinds in the window.

Sometimes to help myself think these days, an extension of my head rubbing habit from yesterday, I rub and cup my dick.  It's not a pleasure thing, but it kind of is.  Hearing the sound of the paper rubbing against my skull and feeling that movement and motion put me in a good place to think straight.  I don't rub things on my skull as much anymore, but I do enjoy rubbing my crotch when I'm trying to figure out and navigate particularly difficult things that require brain power.  I guess when my bodies happy, my head is freer to roam.

So I'm standing in front of this window, staring blankly into space and eyes defocused to the point where all I can see is my vague shilouette, while I pound the details of why the hell nothing I'm trying to do with the window sash springs seems to be working, and one hand all the way down my pants cupping my cock and bulls and giving them a little go, and it comes to me:  it's vinyl!  If the screws won't work and the springs cannot be moved or adjusted manually, just shim the frame in and that'll create the pressure to keep the window from falling on its own.  Eureka!

I break out into this massive grin and my eyes come back into focus and I look through my reflection into the darkness beyond the glass with my dick in my hand and the sixty something year old neighbor two yards over is scowling directly at me with a cigarette in his hand with a look of disgust so intense I have not seen anything remotely like it since the last time I "disappointed" my dad and was there face to face to see his closed mindedness   It was hilarious.  My brain immediately searched its data banks for the universal sign language of "oh my god, I was not jerking off to you just now!" but it came up blank so I just carefully took my hand out of my pants, turned off the light and walked out of the room... into the next room over which also had a light on... so I pretty much hid behind the wall of the door until he finished smoking and went back in his house.  I laughed so hard I almost pissed my pants.  Speaking of which I once pissed my pants outside of a bar and the guy who was my ride wasn't done yet so I had to go back in and sit down at the bar and my pants made this ridiculous squishing sound and I had to explain myself.  Not a single person there was as upset as that guy was standing out in his yard yesterday night.

Cracked me the hell up yesterday.

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