Egghead-Hayseed Wars
“The Silver Missile”
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Egghead-Hayseed Wars |
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“The Silver Missile” |
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You're Gibbs from NCIS on a solo mission in Venice. You don't speak Italian. Every day you sit at a small café and some Italian guy approaches your table and says something incomprehensible in Italian. You're Gibbs. You simply look up and say, “Allegedly. Full of surprises,” pointing to the cashier. Next day, different Italian guy, different words, different question. You look up from your table, gaze directly in their eyes, and say, “Allegedly. What's the sense?” |
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You have to be careful. When you're escaping the cage of your conditioning it can feel like you've decided not only to cut a few classes at college, you've realized you might as well skip the final exams as well while the tsunami of time sweeps over you. Not a It dropped off. Or it may feel like you've reunited with the dogs you had as a child, and out for a walk, one of them suddenly bolts away onto the pavement, barking at something, which you quickly realize is a lioness escaped from the zoo. Things can become dangerously switched around. You could be on your way back from a Sufi retreat in the country and see a pileup of cars because one of the other adepts has taken the teaching to mean he should switch lanes into opposing traffic on the freeway. Don't you be the one leaping fences! Just do what makes sense, which usually is nothing, besides being normal. |
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I may not speak Italian :: I certainly understand Italian. My cover is linguistic studies. Specifically, how to navigate the simple byways between yes and no. The Italian men were really saying simple things. On the first day at that café, the man approaching me said, “Do you know what time it is?” I said, “It dropped off. Ask them.” The second day, the man approaching my table said, “A little snack? Giving you suicide?” Cryptic. Again I said, “Allegedly. What's the sense?” Later in the afternoon I saw the missile go off between the trees. The sunlight streaming through the leaves almost made me miss my shot. It's a handheld camera, this iPhone, and as I swiveled, the camera wouldn't track. A silver missile, is all I got. The second missile, which surprised me as I turned away, was perfectly caught through my lens as I almost fell over on the forest floor. The streak of the missile, the pretty smooth action of my forearm capturing the bright afterburn, and the silver missile itself. And there I am in the hay to arrest an insurgency. |
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Sunday's The New York Times had caught my attention. An article entitled, “Feelings Aside, It's Time for a No,” by THE WORKOLOGIST Rob Walker, dated October 1st 2017, swiveled between a lament from A.D., in Cleveland, trying to learn how to politely decline snacks from a co-worker, to a suggested response from the columnist, “You're very nice and I enjoy working with you, but I'm picky about food. I feel bad about having to turn down the tastes and snacks, so, nothing personal, but can we just agree that you don't need to offer me anything?” The endlessly polite people, the Eggheads of Feeling. To them it's all Yes or No, never a diversion :: “Allegedly. What's the sense?” pointing out nearby co-workers. I made notes for the Backtalktionary, which occupies much of my time. Years ago I taught a neighborhood girl to say, “Hold it! What's the password?” and “You never know! There's a pack of electric little phony girls. What's the sense?” |
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That night I went outside a little cautious and bemused at my writing myself into this story. I wondered how that conceit would play itself out. Half a world away the mass shooting in Las Vegas was stupefying everyone expecting their ordinary shows. I smoked half a cigarette beneath a sky partially obscured by clouds, with some stars somehow shining through. My hotel room suddenly had company. The door had silently been removed, as if by a can opener, and the halls were teaming with dark Italians. It was actually a double room with an adjoining passage, and as I came around the corner, I realized I was pretty safe. People were sleeping all over the hallways, as if they were exhausted soccer players intending to stay there, until a couple of them cautiously, and stealthily, made their way into my room. I backed into the other room to find my cell phone. “I'll call the police!” I said in a loud enough voice. In fact, I dialed “911” hoping that would work. No answer. One of the men went so far as to collapse on the sofa behind the glass coffee table in the front room and I pushed myself forward to get hold of the sleepwalker. Drug dead, or so it seemed. I grabbed handfuls of black hair to help pull him up, reassured at least one other man was assisting in some way. As we managed to get him into a sitting position, I turned and saw a properly dressed gentleman with the short-cropped hair of hotel security. “See if anybody can do those things,” he said in a half-challenging way. His words somehow hypnotized me. I went back into the other room to see if anyone had disturbed where I had hid my guns, saw the stack of both cell phones still on the counter where I'd left them, then decided to see if I could dehypnotize myself by using the Backtalktionary. |
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Hayseeds think they're being whimsical and their whimsy makes them wise. It would be true if it wasn't crap. —Oh, look at the precocious little dumb thing! is what people were really thinking when the hayseed was two years old. In an adult whimsy just makes work for people, and most often it isn't even wise. Maybe on the third or fourth try a whimsical utterance conveys some kernel of truth, either built-in, or somewhere to be eked out. Whatever its source, it's serious work! Meantime, all it's really doing is annoying everybody. Wisdom itself, if that is the intent, can be expressed quite directly. And even poetically. |
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Femmes fatales understand, on a very deep level, eroticism thrives in ice. It's almost like a recipe: One part ice, two drops meanness, and a touch of anger. Voilà! The counterpart for males is much the same, though much Easier. For a man, you just sense your belly and be yourself. You really, really be yourself. The fish will see that. |
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A hayseed gets almost nothing right. They're like flotsam on the sea. They hate meaning. And if they do mean something, it isn't pretty. They mistake wordplay for whimsy, or even worse, for sexual innuendo. Underneath their sea is nothing but seething anger, laid out like submerged ice. Treacherous! They're trying to overturn Nature, and it doesn't work. Ice floats, now doesn't it? When hayseeds string together phony words & phrases, you simply get deep crap snagged in the nets of reason. No fresh fish there! You just get that sinking feeling. |
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Listen carefully, from your being. If you have any talent whatsoever, the phonies will try to trick you into being a big shot, or a whale. Then they've got you in their nets. The way out is to pretend you're a minnow in an undersea cathedral, a sovereign space. |
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The Silver Missile reenters the atmosphere and plunges into the sea. It doesn't even explode. The first yokel in a fishing boat says, “Is that one as big as yours?” and the second yokel says, “Well-grounded.” |
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