This week’s title is swiped from Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 collection of his early stories, where he talks of what he sees as his late start in learning/writing. Since he had his first short story published at age 22 and his first novel, V., at 26, I feel kind of left in the dirt. It took me close to 35 years to grind out Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania. Now at age 86 – two years less five days younger than Pynchon – I’m trying to wrap up my 4th novel, each of them more or less self-published and every one gloriously unread by all but a signal few of you.
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Somebody recently asked me if I’d be interested in writing a short story about utopia. I made a couple blundering false starts that fizzled out, but did come up with an idea that I’d rank as a high maybe.
One view of utopia would be a world without war – oh, shut up, I know that’s not possible, just hold your imaginative horses and listen:
When some animals, mammals at any rate, get too crowded, they start biting each others’ tales in frustration. So suppose, whenever any two groups are at each others’ throats, we attach tails to all the would-be participants, confine them to a restricted space and leave them free – even encourage them – to bite each others’ tails off.
I tell you, within a generation all wars would stop dead.
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In the latest attempt to quell the continuing explosion of human genders, the White House has decreed that any state having the misfortune of harboring a Middlesex County must change the offending district’s name to Ungendered County. Any state officials who oppose the decree will be met by burly white dudes swinging knotted nylons filled with ball bearings.
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With nothing better to do while Linda was having her teeth attended to, I sat in the dentist’s waiting room staring at the wall-to-wall carpeting. Try as I might, no matter where I looked, I could find no example of a repeating pattern. None. Steph, the receptionist, told me that it had been installed in “pieces,”though of exactly what sort she couldn’t recall.
Here’s the thing: Pieced carpeting (or tile) is usually installed in squares, rectangles or obviously interlocking geometric shapes. If this carpet had a basic shape, I wasn’t able to discover it. The entire spread was laid out in parallel lines of cord that were maybe 3/16 inch wide. That made it a labor of more than love to try to pick out a seam somewhere in these unending parallels. Four or five times I thought I had at least caught a dividing line perpendicular to the cords, but each time, on closer exam, that certainty disappeared.
The constantly mutating color of the cords varied from straw yellow to dark, mottled green, including virtually any shade in between. Some light or dark cording formed small, mostly rectangular blocks of various sizes and lengths. I looked to see how or if these sub-bits repeated. As far as I could see, they didn’t. No two areas, whether they held blocks or not, seemed to be identical anywhere.
I don’t know enough about pattern design or anything about computer coding, but is it possible to generate a truly random pattern, not over just a small area, but across an entire 8 x 20 foot entryway? And if so, does this mean that the factory producing this carpet generates an unending, continuous, random-pattern collection of segments? This might be theoretically possible, but mind-boggling to implement, and, at base, the absurd fixation of a warped mind.
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I suggest that the Israeli military ask leaders of the 1985 Philadelphia government about the most expeditious way to handle a potential uprising. On May 13th of that year, in an attempt to dislodge members of the Black alternative-lifestyle group MOVE from a row-house on Osage Ave. in West Philly, the police ordered the dropping of a C4-explosive bomb on their roof.
Not surprisingly, the house caught fire. 11 MOVE members, including 5 children, died in the blaze. The fire then spread and obliterated an entire city block of homes, 61 houses in all. And the local authorities brought that off within just a few hours, with hardly a trace of forethought!
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Read an article earlier this week about an airbnb renter in London being sued by the apartment’s owner for $20K to cover damage to furniture and other items. One of the pix the owner sent was the one below, showing a purported crack in a wooden coffee table. It didn’t take long to prove that the photos were fakes, but the article didn’t note something that would be obvious to anyone who has ever worked with wood: the crack shown, even if not obviously fake (as it is) is simply not possible: Joined wooden boards cannot break that way.
Ignore the outlined pause in the “crack.” Even if King Kong had whacked that table across his knee, you wouldn’t end up with only a wandering diagonal across a series of boards. The grain has to split lengthwise, probably in several places.
lickhaven 