election 2008, andrew, and a curious device, part ii

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST (wherein andrew describes his encounter with the paradox finding device)

later, as we sat in the kitchen alcove of beth’s house sipping hot chocolate, the man pointed to a series of digits on a print-out. “now, see this? everywhere you see a string of numbers like this—three-eight-eight, oh-two-seven—that represents a potential metaphysical inconsistency.”

i considered 388 027. the number had no obvious significance, no sign of a pattern or mathematical errancy, nothing for the likes of an english major.

the man danced a practiced finger from row to row as he scanned the digits. he grunted occasionally, belched loudly when his finger stopped below a series of seven 9s, but otherwise seemed entirely absorbed in this gypsy math.

then, from behind the curtains i heard the now familiar hum of the paradox finding device. strange that i hadn’t noticed it before, i thought. then the curtain moved—i hadn’t seen the device move before, just the noise and lights. the curtains jiggled again. perhaps i’d found the paradox motherload.

april’s cat stepped out from behind the curtain, eyed me curiously, and turned back into the long fabric.

“hi, josie,” i said. “what do you have back there?”

i could now make out her figure behind the curtain, nipping at what must be the paradox finding device.

“josie, leave that alone.”

leaving the man to his cryptic pages of digits, i walked into the kitchen. the counters were mostly bare. a spicy curry-like substance stewed quietly on the stove. next to the wine rack i spotted the bright blue spray bottle.

“josie!” i called, “you better leave that thing alone.” grabbing the half-full bottle, i returned to the alcove. the cat had batted the strange device into the middle of the room. she pawed at it in what seemed regular intervals.

“are you planning to spray that cat?” asked the man. he was staring at me now.

“maybe,” i lied.

“of course—well, don’t bother. come; sit, sit. there’s interesting stuff here, but i think that all we have time for are these twenty or so pages.” he was pointing to a stack of pages he’d labeled “election 2008.”

“this is amazing stuff. you score a seventeen!”

“is that good?”

“well, it’s a true paradox, that’s for certain.”

“oh, OK.”

“see, look here. these numbers suggest that on both a global and a micro level you hold views that are paradoxical.”

“what do you mean?”

“for starters, you genuinely believe that barack obama is the moral choice for president, and the immoral choice for president, and that there is no moral choice for president. and you believe that mccain is in many ways the best that the republican party has to offer, but don’t expect to give him your vote—”

“i follow you, but you’ve got to give me some credit for consistently thinking that sarah palin is a loon.”

the cat had abandoned the paradox device and was purposefully walking about the room.

“meow,” she said.

“hmm. perhaps. nonetheless, you believe that capitalism, democracy, and the protestant work ethic are keys to the continued success of the united states, that distributism and quasi-socialism are keys to the ensuring equality of man, and that these systems are all myths, half-truths to make us feel that we can build sustainable society.”

“right, i see where you’re going with this. i’m stuck with these non-negotiables—we must have the freedom to earn our own keep, control our destinies, and live our lives without the interference of a malignant bureaucracy, yet the very system that allows such american dreams seems set up to propagate inequality, poverty, and poor health care. the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. and although many churches and social programs successfully address these needs, others create generational patterns of welfare.”

“oooh, boy,” he cried, looking down at the print-out, “and we haven’t even mentioned the abortion issue.”

i couldn't resist the bait. “i buy the arguments of websites like proobamaprolife.com, which describe how obama’s emphasis on decreasing the number of unwanted pregnancies through education, birth control, and condoms will have a greater impact on the number of aborted babies than any policy of mccain’s. and i hate how the republican party has co-opted this issue as the one way to keep evangelicals in their electoral camp. but i’m going to have trouble voting for a candidate that supports increased access to abortion.”

“you don’t even need me!” he flipped to another page. “what about your so called objectivism?”

“what do you mean? i’m a model of objectivity. after all, i’m an ISTP.”

“then how is it that you are so swayed by the call for change, by smooth talking, amazing speeches, and funny jokes? why do you esteem the underdogs and challengers over the seemingly capable incumbents? and why do you allow personal grudges—i.e., the lack of response to your supersonics pleas—to impact your vote? and for that matter, why do you so prize objectivity? ”

i stared at the man, dumbfounded. i looked at the pacing cat, at the hanging drapes, at the curious buzzing device on the floor. “i don't know. what’s the answer?” i asked.

he ran a hand through his hair, shuffled the papers into a yellow attaché case, and stooped down to pick up the device. the cat meowed once, twice, and a third time. with tired eyes he looked at me and then back at the cat.

“she says that you are the answer.”

election 2008, andrew, and a curious device

“the device is used to spot paradoxes,” explained the man as he slapped it against his thigh. “if there is a paradox, these lights here, here, and here will blink swampy moss green, night-shade eggplant purple, and laundry blue.”

“and—those are colors?” i asked.

“yes, the colors of paradox.”

he pushed his chair back and walked toward me. the device dangled in his hand like a strangled bunch of metallic carrots. it whirred and hummed against his side.

“show me again,” i said.

he nodded, gave the awkward device three quick shakes, and dropped it to the floor—not a sign of flashing lights. the device purred but remained inert.

“but first can i touch it?”

nodding, he reached down and grabbed the device by what looked curiously like a stem. he offered it to me.

“don’t worry it won’t bite,” he chuckled.

it didn’t bite, but it kept buzzing. i carefully examined the contraption, testing its weight in my palm, listening for the source of that noise, turning it to explore its edges, grooves, and nubs.

i handed it back to him.

“OK. i suppose i’m ready.”

again, three shakes, and then he tossed me the device. nothing happened. it murmured in my hands just as it had a moment earlier on the floor of beth’s living room and when slapped against the man’s thigh. and then, it suddenly lit up. a carnival of greens, purples, and blues flashed through my fingers.

“a paradox!” shouted the man.

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT POST (wherein the mysterious paradoxes are unraveled)

the visit (a personal essay by andrew david)

Beth’s grandfather talks quietly; his words tremble in the air and then vanish, like hot breath in the winter. There are no other chairs, so we are scattered about the room on a pair of footstools and some empty spaces of carpet.

Grandpa Cole is telling us about a devotional book that he ordered from the downtown bookstore. The book consists of a Bible verse for each day of the year, and Cole has purchased five copies of the book so that the family can read the same daily entries even when they are apart. We are visiting for the afternoon, and he wonders whether we might be willing to give him a ride to the store to pick them up: apparently the books have been waiting there for months.

Cole can’t drive himself. Earlier this summer he accidentally drove his car into Lake Washington. The incident was splashed across the local headlines—MAN RESCUED FROM CAR PLUNGE INTO LAKE—but Cole downplays the event. In his soft way, he thanked the lifeguard that pulled him from his lake-bound tomb and then defended the strange event by complaining of poor signage and confusing roadways.

Since that time, he has lived in three separate retirement homes: two independent living communities and an assisted living community. I occasionally hear bits and pieces of these housing adventures from Beth—the rooms are too small, the people are too bland, something just isn’t right. And when we first arrived, Cole recited a litany of life’s curses. Indeed, we learned a great deal about his canker sore and lack of appetite.

But a wall of sound seems to separate us from Cole. The busy buzz of healthy independent life makes it difficult for us to empathize with this frail quiet man.

When we finally wander downtown in search of the bookstore, we forget the thoughtful generosity that initiated this search and only note that Cole can’t remember its location. And when he confesses feelings of loneliness and ineptitude, we call the nurse to check his mouth. We may try to treat his words with gravity, but they strike us as awkward and strange. It is as if each phrase is as an excuse for lake-driving.

when getting in the head of a female...

i've had a lot of people ask me whether yesterday's post really happened (well, more than one person, anyway). and, yes, it did. i invented the old lady, urns, and pink slippers, but the basic storyline was conceived in the brick and mortar of the real world.

if time grew on trees (like money, leaves, and squirrels), it might be interesting to see whether my future elaborations of whitney's story got closer and closer to the truth or whether they drifted off in an entirely new direction, an entirely different kind of truth. i'm not sure which would be best, but either way, i still think that i'd struggle with writing as a female narrator. however, my brief encounter with SPU's writer types may have offered some encouragment (should i ever choose this unusual path) and affirmed my earlier writing strategy.

one afternoon, as the MFA students salt-and-peppered the room with their writerly epiphanies, mark explained that he'd had a breakthrough in writing his female character. he'd struggled for months trying to make her seem more natural: he'd made her obsessed with alcohol, sex, and sewing fabrics*, but nothing seemed to work. then one day he tried something counterintuitive: he decided to write her as himself, as mark the lumbering tall guy, just without the lumbering tall guy part. and it worked!

then, during an art and faith lecture, the MFAers tossed about martin buber's idea of writing as the other. they discussed the interconnected mirror-like relationship between the self and other seemingly foreign characters. now, all of a sudden, i'm starting to feel like a writer--i broached that very issue several posts ago! weird....

andrew david. "writer's block" greenwood, wa.

*i can't remember the third item that mark named, so i made this one up. it was definitely something less unisex than beer and sex. something like sewing fabrics.

preamble to the crime

this weekend i'm volunteering as a gopher (as in "andrew, go for a...") for SPU's MFA in creative writing. during that time i'll shake hands with budding writers and published authors, men and women who know how to spin a good yarn. i'm a little nervous that someone might ask, "and what about you, andrew, what do you write?"

"oh, i blog." it doesn't sound so glamorous, perhaps even a bit foolish.

therefore, i've decided to use this post the post that follows this preamble as a shield against potential writerly skepticism. i'm going to attempt something beyond my means, a device that leaps several yards beyond the imaginative writing course of my college days. yes, i'm going to pretend to be a writer.

you see, writers make a living by being strange. fiction writers invent surreal plots that push around characters so wild and varied that they seem almost life-like. poets fall to their knees in a wet pile of brush, scrounge about for an ordinary looking rock, and then breathe fire into the carbonate core of that common stone, eliciting truths from the ordinary. but they get weirder still. writers are masters of the out-of-body experience. they jump from the self to the other, and leave little trace of what was.

in she's come undone, for example, wally lamb, a rather trim fellow in his fifties, somehow constructs a first-person bildungsroman of a troubled obese girl. there is no trace of testosterone in this book. indeed, lamb's protagonist annoyed me with her ceaseless obsessing and poor decision-making (which is one of the reasons for my rather medium rating of 09 for this novel), but it all struck me as real.

and that is the magic of gifted writers, a magic that i have yet to attempt. so, if the writing muses smile upon my little blog, i will use a future post to brave the dark forest of narration and step boldly out from my own experience. wish me luck!

a clarification about the future post
the future post

andrew david. "the wicked endophenotyper smiles happily at his diabolical research plan." vapshcs, seattle, wa.

the monkey tree story

i don't really have much to say tonight so i thought i'd post a ten-minute nonsense story. i'm missing beth at the moment, so it's mostly about her (and me and a tree and a surprise guest). all of the pictures in the story are by matt basinger.

andrew and beth happen to like trees. when the weather's nice, they even climb trees--big, green, sappy trees, sweet smelling apple trees, and even tropical palm trees. however, there is one tree they don't climb. it sits silently outside of andrew's house. the limbs look so inviting, says beth. no, says andrew, remember what the landlord said. andrew leans back in the grass, scratches his chin, and bursts out in a deep bass "you may climb any tree on this lot, but never, no, never, climb the monkey tree."

as they sit and consider the landlord's words, a squirrel tentatively hops from the neighbor's carrot patch toward the tree.

"oh, no," says andrew.
"oh, yes," says beth.

the squirrel leaps from the grass onto the bark--zap! with a sudden flash the squirrel is transformed into a wreaking pile of ash.

"that smells disgusting," says andrew.
"yeah, let's leave," says beth as she wrinkles her nose.

the couple quickly purchases a last-minute deal on expedia.com and flies to new york city. as the plane lands, they are so overcome by the beauty of the cityscape that they forget all about the monkey tree and the recently deceased squirrel. "look!" cries beth, "it's the brooklyn bridge!"

after they arrive at the airport, andrew and beth scurry to the bridge and begin to kiss (see below). as their lips lock, a smart-looking pedestrian turns and watches. he adjusts his glasses in order to get a better view. "hmmm..." he thinks.

as andrew kisses away, beth suddenly senses that something is amiss. she opens an eye and spots the intelligent looking pedestrian.


beth whispers to andrew, "it's matt."

"what?" he asks mid-kiss.

"it's matt," she says.

"it's me," says matt.


after smiling for awhile, matt takes the couple to his home in morningside heights. "this is my wife, jacinda," he says.

everyone smiles. "we know jacinda!" exclaims the couple happily.

sure enough, it's jacinda. she asks everyone about the kiss and then feeds them bright green salad from a monkey tree.

THE END