The remarkable knows no color, in the progressive view.
Yes. Are you meaning to specify, by the way, a walnut clubhead or clubs with walnut shafts, because I think that — wooden shafts — is even more…
Remarkable?
Yes. Certainly by that I would mean also more visually striking and more anachronistically arresting. One would ignore the white or black crippled boy in fey spongelike material to focus on the antiques in his possession. One might even worry that he would break them, if you specified that this boy is actually golfing.
Actually he is not. He is sitting on the hood of a new BMW with a Swedish-looking model of tremendous height and minimal clothing posing for photographs for an automobile advertisement. Insofar as I could gather. For all I know, now that I think about it, they may have been advertising her clothes, or his, conceivably they were advertising the girl for a men’s magazine, though it did not appear a lascivious endeavor.
&
I think I want me some morphine.
Why?
Because I ’magine it is good.
You have not had it?
No, not the real thing. I want to sleep in that red field outside of green Oz, with Dorothy. Or without Dorothy. The prospect of sleeping with Judy Garland is not halcyon.
The prospect of sleeping with anyone is not precisely halcyon.
Right. That I can forego. Were it not for the stupefying nuclear force of hormones the race would cease. I just want the morphine — a wide calm sound in my brain, my body itself as smooth and cool as water. An heavenly balm. All my cells whispering kindly to me, “Everything is all right.” This I want.
You want so little. You are filled with jejune longing, for an old man.
Jejune Longing is the chewing gum of Life. It’s what they named Juicy Fruit after.
&
Isn’t the essential question whether one reuses split shot or not? Doesn’t that just about say it all?
Don’t you think it’s configured a bit narrowly? What if, say, one doesn’t fish?
All right. Let’s explain that a split shot is a tiny ball of lead with a split in it which allows it to be crimped onto a fishing line for the purpose of sinking the line. And that usually once a split shot is crimped onto a line and used it is thrown away if it has not been already lost in the course of the fishing. But that a certain kind of person will take a crimped split shot and reopen it, usually by pressing a knife into the original crimp and gently reopening the shot, being careful not to go too far and cut the little shot entirely in half. And that this certain kind of person will take pleasure in this salvage beyond the saving of two cents or ten cents or the effort of buying a new pack of split shot that much sooner. He or she will take pleasure in this microsaving of a tiny lead hinge that is not a micro pleasure but instead some kind of huge and hugely gratifying anal balm.
Have you lost your mind?
Well, yes. And of course that is what we are talking about, don’t go getting Pat Boone on me now. The question that this split shot question asks is whether a man has lost his mind and does not care, or whether he has proudly arrived at the terminus of his adult life, or at the prime phase of it as it bears unto the sunset, with his “sanity” in hand. If he says, “I don’t save split shot,” we know he is correct and adult and proud and all grown up, as it were. If he says, “I save every split shot I can,” we know he is just as proudly crazy and that he has refused to grow up.
And we think that he has actually a superior position in this refusal.
Yes. He would not then also say, for example, “I support our troops.”
That would be one dimension but there are many dimensions to this lunacy that is not lunacy, you mean.
Yes, I do so mean.
I wish that you were a woman sometimes.
I do too. That you were.
Because we could make love instead of talking all the time.
Yes.
We could make love as it is, but…
I just can’t see it. I like the political dimension of it, the nose-thumbing, but God, the actual thought of it…
Why don’t we find us some split-shot-saving women?
It would be better if we found some who would not themselves save split shot but who would humor us in our saving split shot. I would really like to have a girl who would hold open the little Take a Boy Fishing Today tin while I carefully pressed the knife into a used split shot and then let me put it safely in the tin, looking briefly to see if you can tell the difference between the used and the virgin split shot, and then say to me, “Come to bed, sugar, them split shot are safe and sound.” Wouldn’t that be grand?
I think that would be the best thing in the world. Since “It Opens with Two Fingers” she could slide the tin shut with two fingers! You could be a perfect idiot with a girl who wanted you in bed.
And with the perfectly preserved little lead hinge! That is really what the split-shot question seeks to discover: Are you a perfect idiot or are you some kind of custodial correct adult ass? Isn’t that the idea?
Yes. That is the idea.
&
I wake up trepid. Do you wake up trepid?
I fear I do. What does trepanning mean? Maybe I wake up trepanning. I wake up trepanning if it means shaking from trepidation.
Are we but recently afraid, or were we always afraid but too slow or blustery or full of hormones to know it?
We have always been afraid. We are only now sufficiently feeble to visibly shake. We quaked all along but were steadied by testosterone and received bravura. We looked fine.
We stood firm.
We shouted, “Hello! Stand and deliver!” If it were a man before us, we said, “Cross me and I will kill you!” If it were a woman, we said, “Take off your clothes!”
Now we jump off the trail and hide in the woods if anyone approaches.
Lest a woman say unto us, “Cross me and I will kill you,” or a man, “Take off your clothes.”
What goes around comes around — is that not the way it is popularly put these days?
I believe so. You may also say that the chickens have come home to roost, frequently said by people with no knowledge whatsoever of chickens, when chickens do not leave home to begin with. It is apt for their enemies to say upon the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, for examples, that the chickens have come home to roost, and no one will question the utterance.
Such people are people not yet trepid. We should not be uncharitable with them. They will come in time to tremble and shut up.
Out the window I not infrequently see chipmunks.
A chipmunk is professionally trepid all its life.
A chipmunk is a cute and honest poor soul that does not presume.
&
What do you know about the desert?
Nothing.
Okay. End of subject.
Should we go?
Yes. We should go.
To revel in our not knowingness.
To be put off by the desert because we do not understand its desertness and are frightened by it and disgusted by our not knowingness.
But then is it not the case that after we are frightened and disgusted we will fall under the illusion that we have learned something about the desert and be less unhappy with it?
Yes. Our tiny growing familiarity alone, as we sit there or walk around parched and frightened, will convince us we now know more than we did before the onset of the fear and the disgust, and we will feel better about the desert.
Veterans of an hour in the desert, we will like it, a little bit.