[→NMN.80.418]
PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE
Then just as I was being released in late 1996 Mother won a small product liability settlement and used the money to promptly go get cosmetic surgery on the crow’s feet around her eyes. However the cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times. No doubt you know the way an individual’s face can look in the split second before they start to scream. That was now Mother. It turns out that it only takes a minuscule slip of the knife one way or the other in this procedure and now you look like someone in the shower scene of Hitchcock. So then she went and had more cosmetic surgery to try and correct it. But the second surgeon also botched it and the appearance of fright became even worse. Especially around the mouth this time. She asked for my candid reaction and I felt our relation demanded nothing less. Her crow’s feet indeed were things of the past but now her face was a chronic mask of insane terror. Now she looked more like Elsa Lanchester when Elsa Lanchester first lays eyes on her prospective mate in the 1935 classic of the studio system Bride of Frankenstein. Now after the second botched procedure even dark glasses were no longer of much help as there was still the matter of the gaping mouth and mandibular distention and protrudant tendons and so forth. So now she was involved in still another lawsuit and when she regularly took the bus to the attorney she had chosen’s office I would escort her. We rode at the bus’s front in one of the two longer seat areas which are aligned sideways instead of frontally. We had learnedthrough experimental method to not sit further back in the rows of more regular seats which face frontally because of the way certain fellow passengers would visibly react when they board and perform the seemingly reflexive action as they start moving down the aisle to a seat of briefly scanning the faces facing them from the narrow rows of seats extended backward through the bus and would suddenly see Mother’s distended and soundlessly screaming face appearing to gaze back at them in
mindless terror. And there were a smattering of such cases and interactions before I applied myself to the problem and evolved a more workable right-angle habitat. Nothing in sources sufficiently explains why people perform the scan of faces when they first board though anecdotally it appears to be a defensive reflex species-wide. Nor am I even a good specimen to sit with if she wanted to be inconspicuous because of the way my head physically towers over all others in the crowd. Physically I am a large specimen and have distinctive coloration, to look at me you would never know I have such a studious bend. There also are the goggles worn and specially constructed gloves for field work, it is far from impossible to find specimens on a public bus even though surveys as yet have yielded no fruit. No it is not as if actively speaking I could be said to enjoy riding with her while she exerts all her effort trying to not allow the embarrassment of the chronic expression to make it even more frightened-looking. Or that I can truthfully look forward to sitting in a would-be reception area reading Rotary newsletters two times per week. It is not as if I do not have other things and studies to occupy my time. But what is one to do, the terms of my probation involve Mother’s sworn statement to assume liability as my custodian. Yet anyone observing the reality of life together since the second procedure would agree the reality was the other way around because due to despondency and fear of others’ reactions to it she is all but incapable of leaving the house and can answer the attorney’s wheedling summonses to his office only with my presence and protection throughout the long ride. Also I have never liked direct sunlight and burn with great ease. This time the attorney smells a windfall profit if and when he can get Mother in a courtroom and let a jury see for itself the consequence of the cosmetic surgeons’ negligence. I also carry a briefcase at all times since my own case. One today would call a briefcase a sematic accessory to warn off potential predators. Since the original negligence I have primarily immunized myself to Mother’s chronic expression of horror but am even so capable of being made uncomfortable by some’s reaction to us visually, it takes some getting use to. A bus’s circular steering wheel is not only larger but is set at an angle of incidence more horizontal than any taxi, private car or police cruiser’s wheel I have seen and the driver turns the wheel with a broad all-body motion which is resemblant of someone’s arm sweeping all the material off a table or surface in a sudden fit of emotion. And the special perpendicular seats in the bus’s anterior segment comprise a good vantage from which to watch the driver wrestle with the bus. Nor did I have anything against the boy in any way. Nor is there anything in any state, county or local ordinance restricting what varieties you can study or stipulating in any way that cultivating more than a certain number thereof constitutes reckless endangerment or a hazard to the community at large. If the appointment is AM then the driver sometimes keeps a newspaper folded in a hutch by the automatic coin or token box which he tries to peruse while idling at stoplights although it is not as if he will get much of his daily reading done in this way. He was only nine which was repeatedly stressed as if his age in any way strengthened any charge of negligence on my part. A common Asian species not only has the sematic ventral insignia but a red line straight down the back, leading to its indigenous name,