Smiles And Nods

Based on a True Story

A clump of popsicle sticks and rubber bands somehow became animate and set out to free solo El Capitan. It did well until two thirds of the way up, when It was caught in an ice storm. The cold made its rubber bands brittle and they snapped and the clump was undone and the broken bits of rubber and wood were scattered. Someone would’ve gone out to recover the body, such as it was, but only one person knew anything about it, and he couldn’t be bothered.

Pet

Mr. Paper had been running out of money for a few weeks. He tried to get more money, and he tried to stretch what he had, but now all the money was gone. The first morning Mr. Paper had no food for his pet cat, Marvin, he felt so badly about it he tried to share the toast and coffee that was his own breakfast. Cats don’t care for toast though, and they don’t drink coffee. That night Marvin ran away. Mr. Paper was sad about it—he liked having Marvin around—but he was also glad for the cat. He imagined Marvin being taken in by a kind, rich old lady that would love him and spoil him and feed him gizzards and fish heads.

Mr. Paper could get bread from the bread line, and he could swipe a bag of coffee from the grocery store every so often, and between the two he could get through the day, but he couldn’t pay rent like that. He came home from a long day looking for money and found his apartment key wouldn’t open the door. His landlord had kicked him out and sold all his things to cover a little of the rent Mr. Paper owed him. Mr. Paper could still get bread from the bread line, but without a pot he couldn’t make coffee, and now when he was stuck out in the cold and could use it most.

One night, the smell of bacon wafted into Mr. Paper’s dreams as he slept uncomfortably on a park bench, and the smell stimulated in him visions of Christmas mornings like when he was a little boy. A sharp sound startled him awake, and the dreams fled, leaving behind them no memories. Mr. Paper shot up, expecting to find a cop or someone trying to rob him. Instead there was a cat, a couple yards away, sitting under a streetlamp. The cat sat placidly for a few beats as Mr. Paper met his gaze. Then the cat meowed, an urgent meow, and Mr. Paper recognized the voice— it was Marvin! He got up and approached the cat excitedly. They met in the middle and exchanged affections, Mr. Paper stroking Marvin and Marvin snaking around his feet, but then Marvin suddenly broke off and trotted back to his spot under the streetlamp. Mr. Paper followed.

He found a dinner plate sitting under the streetlamp holding two slices of toast, one buttered and one with raspberry jam; two fried eggs; and five pieces of pepper bacon, thickly sliced. Next to the plate was a mug of hot coffee with sugar and cream, steam billowing from it into the cold night air in great curls. He pounced on the food— more food than he’d seen at one time in weeks. He offered the bacon fat to Marvin, but Marvin wasn’t interested.

Once the plate had been cleaned, and the mug had been emptied, Mr. Paper sat cross-legged under the streetlamp a while, with Marvin curled up in his lap, purring happily. But again, after a while of that, Marvin darted off, trotting a few feet away and looking back at Mr. Paper, beckoning him. Again, Mr. Paper followed. They walked a long time. Eventually Marvin led him to a nice looking apartment building in a nice looking part of town. The doorman let Marvin in— Mr. Paper blew in with the wind. They took the elevator to the eleventh floor, and Marvin let Mr. Paper into a nice looking two bedroom apartment, with central heating and air, and HBO, and good internet service— Mr. Paper’s new home.

From then on Mr. Paper had it easy. He’d wake up Marvin in the morning when he was ready for breakfast. Marvin would feed him before going to work. Mr. Paper would hang out at the apartment during the day, napping and watching TV and internetting. Then, in the evening, Marvin would get home from work and make him dinner and chill on the couch, curled up in Mr. Paper’s lap and purring happily until finally turning in for the night. Then Mr. Paper would sneak out of the house to roam the streets, fool around with women, get into fights with men… but he’d always come back in the morning, hungry for his breakfast.

The sky got darker, but not like at sunset. The sun wasn't setting, it was shrinking, smaller and smaller but always still definitely the sun, until all at once there was night, Venus was out, the streetlights were lit, and only a wispy, hollowed out skeleton remained. It hanged there for about a minute, and people set off fireworks because people are obnoxious. Then a new sun grew out of the bones of the old one, and everything was possible again.

Punk Spirit

Punk is an aesthetic, a form of music, a style of dress, but it’s also a spirit, a spirit in two parts. It isn’t concerned with how things are supposed to be done. It doesn’t ask for anything. It doesn’t owe anyone. It does things its own way. That’s the first thing. Consequences aren’t important. There’s nothing worth compromising yourself for. That’s the beginning of punk spirit.

Well the park bench, door, and sleeping in the rain / Little kids sitting in the shooting gallery / Set yourself up from innocence to misery / Well this is what you want, not the way of what they fucking say. —Tim Armstrong of Rancid in the song “1998”, from the album “Life Won’t Wait”

There are consequences. You’ll never be on anyone’s short list, or long list. You’ll never get a record contract. You’ll never have a big budget, or any budget. After you’re dead, no one will do a retrospective of your work, no one will make a documentary about your life, your name won’t be used as an adjective. You’ll always need a day job. You’ll die in obscurity, and you’ll stay there.

These things might not turn out to be true—nothing's certain about the future—but you have to believe they will. You can be happy about it, or unhappy about it, but you have to believe it, and you have to persist.

I had nothing, I had nothing to lose, and all that I was doing I was doing straight, always driven by the motto, “Either this way or no way.” —Blixa Bargeld in the 2008 TV show “Mein Leben”, viewable on youtube, translated by Google and corrected by me

Pig-headedness is only half of it. The other half is solidarity with the other punks, the other people taking their own way and taking it to the end.

Further, ever since ancient times, the skeptical Indra, Lord of Heaven, has come to test the intentions of practitioners, as has Mara the Tempter come to disturb and obstruct the practitioner’s training in the Way. All instances of this have occurred when someone has not let go of hopes for fame and gain. When great compassion is deep within you, and your wish to spiritually aid sentient beings everywhere is well seasoned, there are no such obstructions. —Eihei Dōgen in “Keisei Sanshoku” of his “Shōbōgenzō” as translated by Hubert Nearman

I havn't been keeping up on posting my little bits from Mastodon, so for the next eleven days I'll post one.

I'm not really happy about it. My rule for this blog has been to post a story once every five days. I've also been collecting these little Mastodon droppings into groups of five to post. The problem is that I have eleven and I want to get them cleared out, which would require two Mastodon droppings posts back to back, which is bad enough, but then there'd be one left dangling.

None of this is important, I just need to explain why I'm not doing the thing I said I'd do.

It's not like a post a day is spammy.

And not a Sole for Miles

Halfway across the river, fifty feet of water beneath me, and I don’t think I can swim another stroke.

Mastodon Droppings

I post very very short stories to Mastadon— my handle is @david_pasquinelli. Below are five of them. Enjoy.

Garbage Disposal

I pulled out a handful of noodles and egg shells from my garbage disposal. The water drained, but there was more. Fishing around, I pulled out: several chicken livers, which I couldn’t account for; a clump of moss the size of my fist; a dozen rotten plums that smelled awful; and, most disturbingly, clumps of red hair and teeth. I shined a light down the drain and saw a glint of gold, but when I reached in to grab it I cut myself. After bandaging my hand I looked again, but it was gone.

The Majors

I dreamt of playing Major League Baseball as far back as I can remember. I loved the game, but I loved the dream more. It was my treasure, my dream of making it to the majors. Through Little League, Babe Ruth League, high-school ball, and the minors, that dream was my best loved, most precious possession. I leaned on it when times were hard. I thought I had gone to heaven when I finally got called up. But now the dream is gone. Now it’s a job, and what do I have to lean on?

Poorly Done

He brought the muzzle of the revolver to his eye and, like the others, fired it. Just like that, there was a hole where his eye had been. But he’d done a bad job and made a mess of it. He writhed and screamed on the floor before—pop—he put out the other eye. Then he lay silent and still. The others approached the body, and stood there and starred at it through the holes in their own faces where they had once had eyes.

A Brief Interview with a Homeless Man

“If you were king of the world, what would you do to help the homeless?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“Cuz they’re assholes.”

“Homeless people are assholes?”

“Yup.”

“But you’re homeless….”

“Right, so I know. I know a lot of homeless people; they’re assholes. What do you know?”

A Spider in her Web

I was always a good and diligent wife and mother, wholesome and modest, selfless, kind, tending to her family with the attentiveness of a gardener to his garden, a businessman to his business, a spider to her web. Even after the diagnosis, my first priority was to help my family cope with a future that wouldn’t include me. At first. But now I find all I want to do is fuck strangers and kill people.

Cigarette Paper

I ran my fingers along the surface of her skin gently, careful to touch but not press. The feeling was that of real skin. Her skin. So much so I got carried away. I applied too much pressure. A flame rippled out from my palm. It burned through her like through a cigarette paper. She curled and twisted and lifted off the bed. Bright light, a wisp of smoke, and then it was over. I gasped, and my gasp scattered her ashes around the room, so that if you looked you wouldn’t have seen she was there.

The Nehalem Pyramid

At first the pyramid over Nehalem was a little black chip in the sky. It had probably been there for weeks before anyone noticed, but once it was spotted it was only a matter of hours before everyone in the town knew about it. Which isn’t saying so much— only two hundred some people live in Nehalem. And, just being a speck floating up in the sky, it was forgotten before long, around the time the local paper ran their story on it.

“Is it getting bigger?”, people started asking a few days later, necks craned, squinting into the sky. Someone in town with a telescope made a time-lapse of it, and indeed it was gradually getting bigger. The local paper wrote a follow-up to their earlier story, which included the time-lapse video. The story quickly went viral. Journalists and tourists and ufologists started flooding into the town.

The pyramid got bigger over the summer and took on a definite shape to the naked eye. By September it was big enough that for two hours at midday the town was wholly in its shadow. The population of Nehalem grew along with the pyramid. People came from all over the world to see the it, this impossible thing. All these people came with their money in hand, and a lot of folks in Nehalem—not a wealthy town by any means—found themselves suddenly flush with cash. The military also came to town, with their scientists, to understand the pyramid and mitigate the risk it might pose, but the scientists managed only to learn that the pyramid was made of iron and the military, with no understanding of the pyramid, had no plausible means of mitigating anything.

For lack of any better idea, the town was evacuated. No one was allowed within a mile of it. There was a lot of grumbling about it, but only few people ignored the order to stay out, a group of tourists from California, and they all got caught and spent the night in jail. For a month the pyramid didn’t grow, didn’t do anything. A rich Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who had taken a keen interest in the pyramid and was used to bulldozing with money anything in his way, bankrolled a lawsuit against the government to get the ban lifted, and in mid-October it was.

People came flooding back into Nehalem, eager to have what they had been denied. There was some worry that the pyramid would start growing again with all the people returning, like one had something to do with the other, but the pyramid went on floating there as it had since the start of Autumn.

For the remainder of October the skies stayed clear, but the rain had to come eventually, and when it did the cloud cover meant no one could see the pyramid anymore. Sometimes a dark square could be seen through the clouds and remind the townsfolk the pyramid was still there. The tourists had left—taking their cash with them—and the military had become such a fixture that they went unseen. Everyday life in Nehalem resumed.

The Thousand Year Echo

Meryl was weeding in her garden when she heard the first voice. It spoke clearly, like it was the neighbor calling over the fence to her, but she didn’t understand the words. She looked around after the voice, but saw no one.

“Hello?”, she said, rising hesitantly to her feet. The voice was still speaking— had been speaking, uninterrupted since she first heard it. Meryl peeked over the fence. Maybe the neighbor had turned on the TV, or a radio. But when she got up on her tiptoes to see over the fence, she noticed the voice was gone. She made a sour face, then brushed it off and went back to weeding. No sooner had she knelt down to take up her trowel again than did the voice come back, along with several others, laughing.

“Who’s there?”, she demanded, stamping her foot as she stood up again and holding the trowel like a knife. No answer, just more of the same talking she couldn’t understand. She checked the other fence, and the other other, both with the same result. She returned to the spot she was weeding and listened. What language was that? Russian? Chinese? No, not quite. Was it just a bunch of babble? Was she having a stroke, or a seizure, and this was a symptom? She took out her phone and looked up “symptoms of a stroke”, and “symptoms of a seizure.” Neither seemed likely. Just making the search and reading the results was a strong indication, in and of itself, that she wasn’t having a stroke or a seizure. Then what was she hearing?

She stood there in her garden, completely baffled, listening to the voice carry on. Could somebody be playing a trick on her? How? Could the metal plate in her head be receiving radio signals? (She had no metal plate in her head, as far as she was aware.) Maybe it was time for a cup of tea, Meryl thought. She dropped her trowel where she stood, took off her work gloves and left them with the trowel, and walked to the back deck. When she stepped up to the deck, the voice cut out, like a radio losing reception. She stepped back down. The voice came back. She flossed the step, up and down: Up, no voice; down, voice.

Meryl skipped the tea. She went to the hardware store and bought a hundred orange marker flags. She systematically combed over each square foot of her back yard, row by row, like she was mowing the lawn. She’d take a step, listen for the voices, and, if she heard them, mark the spot with a flag. When she had covered the whole of her back yard there now appeared a swirl of markers, a spiral galaxy of orange flags with Meryl’s gloves situated in the center.

Over the next two weeks Meryl made a few more trips to the hardware store. She dug up her garden, digging along the contours she’d mapped out with the flags, then filled the area in with poured concrete, making herself a nice, if not oddly shaped and bizzarely placed, new patio. She put a wrought iron bench in the middle of it, and on either side of that, a flower box. It became her habit to spend much of her free time out on that bench, listening to the voices.

It had been a man’s voice the first time, but it wasn’t always. She’d hear, now a gang of children at play, now a young man and woman talking, and a baby crying. A whispering woman—and she could’ve been whispering right in Meryl’s ear—frantically muttering what sounded like a prayer was a recurring one. Always the voices came in that uninteligible, unplaceable language— apart from the baby’s.

Meryl looked for that language, scouring the internet for samples of any she’d never heard before. None of them were right. The more she listened to the voices on the patio, the more unlike anything else their language seemed. It was heavy, and solid like blocks of carved, polished stone. Every other language she could find was a twittering of birds by comparison.

One afternoon Meryl had friends over for dinner. She took the table from the back deck and set it up on her new patio, where they all dined that night. She was nearly as shocked as her friends were when they heard the voices. She’d been operating under the assumption this whole time that she’d gone discreetly and pleasantly insane, or something like it.

Jason—she’d had the biggest crush on him in high school, which no one ever knew about, and when he ended up marrying her sort-of friend, Dawn, Meryl drew closer to her out of some masochistic impulse—was particularly excited by the phenomenon and, after a few beers, announced to the dinner party that he was resolved to solve the riddle. Everyone laughed at this, except Jason. Conversation moved on. No one thought much of the announcement.

Meryl herself wasn’t very curious about the voices. Or, she was, just in the way that she wanted to listen to them, rather than in the way that she needed to have an explanation for them. It was troubling enough to know other people could even hear them. Finding out what the were, where they came from, what cuased them— to Meryl that would just be making matters worse. Jason started emailing her frequently, asking questions about the voices. She answered his questions. He was no trouble to her.

Until one day he showed up with a small crew of—were they scientists?—all duded up in hazmat suits like she had E.T. stowed away in her back yard. He promised her that it would only be two hours, tops, and then it’d be like they were never even there. They just needed to collect some data, he told her, that’s all. He pleaded with her, and flirted, like he always used to do in high school. He was old and ugly now, and the display was farsical, but in fairness she was old and ugly too, and anyway it worked. Meryl relented.

They were in and out in two hours, and they had left no trace, just like Jason said. Then, years passed, and Meryl never heard what came of it. Dawn and Jason had divorced not long after, (but unrelated to), the data collection episode, and their divorce had let the air out of her friendship with either of them. She fell out of contact with a lot of people, as it happened, and drew closer to the voices. She had, over the years, developed an understanding of their language, but she couldn’t articulate their meaning. To listen to a language for years, but never speak it… you get a sense of it, in your guts, like a dog must have for the way its human relatives speak. But a dog doesn’t have the equipment to talk back, and neither did Meryl.

In the same time, she had also developed lung cancer, which she fought and “won.” The sad truth is that one does not win against cancer. Meryl was down half a lung. Her life would be shorter than it otherwise would have been, because of that. And still, not a day would go by, from the first day she was diagnosed until her last, that wouldn’t be in the shadow of her cancer, or its returning. She didn’t think of herself as having won a battle.

Oh, and money. Not much of that was left, meaning the voices that had kept her company for so long now would be repossessed by the bank, along with everything else. This would happen, she was certain, save for a miracle. Then, a miracle.

Jason called her, out of the blue, to tell her that they’d found what the voices were. They were an echo. An echo from a long, long time ago. Using a lot of sciencey words that meant nothing to Meryl and that, truth be told, meant nothing to him either, Jason explained to her that any sound waves propagating through the space enclosing that little patch in what used to be her garden would be repropagated exactly, through that same space, some one thousand years later, by a process distinct from the one which causes familiar echos, but roughly analogous. Jason was very excited about all this. Meryl wasn’t. But along with this news, Jason had also called with a proposal: To make that special little patch of hers a destination. People would pay good money just to sit on her bench and listen to the idle chitchat of our distant ancestors, and even better—he said even better, but to Meryl it seemed even worse—they could leave a message of their own, to be heard by who knows who in a thousand years’ time. “Can you imagine it?”, he asked breathlessly.

Meryl hated the idea, but she did believe it would pay. Again, she relented to Jason. She kept the house, and raked in money besides. She even got to hear the voices still, on Sunday’s, when the house—not her house anymore, the house—was closed to the public.

She thought it was kind of sad, watching all these people come to leave their own personal messages for the next millennium. She understood, like she understood the voices, in her gut, not her head, that there simply wouldn’t be anyone to recieve them.