Christopher Goes a-Progress

Yesterday I got hit by a car. Actually, that’s not quite true. “I got hit by a car” is a useful bit of shorthand, but it’s more accurate to say that the car presented itself in my immediate path so suddenly that I had no recourse but to hit it. I was on my bicycle, moving at considerable speed down M Street in downtown Lincoln when a car squirted out from a blind alley. The breaks did their utmost, but it was too late. My tire kicked the driver’s side front hubcap. Unable to continue, my bicycle left me to continue forward progress unassisted. I did well enough without it. Crossing the hood, I watched my loafers trace a half-circle across the sky. “This has got to look so crazy to whoever is driving this car,” I thought and then “Will I stop now?” Not quite. Reaching the far side, I descended like the morning dew upon the pavement below. I leapt to my feet, the crunchy riffs of Drive-By Truckers' “Lookout Mountain” still pounding through my iPod. I felt like a trillion dollars. The driver was halfway out his open window, eyes wide. “HOLY SHIT!” he screamed, “Dude, are you okay?” More ejaculation than proper reply, I shouted “THAT WAS AWESOME!” A crooked grin cracked half his face, not quite reaching the terror in his eyes, “I guess you’re okay.” “Yeah, I guess I am . . . my wrist is a bit scratched, but that’s all.” I walked around to retrieve my bicycle. “Oh, good – I didn’t dent your car.” “Aw, I don’t care about that,” he said. “It’s a piece of shit.” I grinned back at him. “Well,” he said, “have a good one. Don’t . . . um . . . get injured or anything.” Today I have a bruise halfway between my wrist and elbow – it’s a little sore. It was absolutely worth it. PS. There are supposed to be various and sundry spaces between the paragraphs of this entry. I don't know what happens to them when I post. Feel free to imagine that spaces are present wherever you feel their absence. I know I do.

Elementary

Today I spent approximately fifteen minutes debating a fellow graduate student about whether or not we can safely affirm that Sherlock Holmes has exactly two nostrils. You will be glad to hear that I was on the side of right - shoulder to shoulder with those who strike their chests and shout "RUBBISH!" when someone asserts that Sherlock Holmes, for all we know, had three nostrils. And we scoff at the medievals with their angels and pinheads.

He Ain't Heavy - He's My Cross

Yesterday I passed a man on the sidewalk. He was carrying a large cross - mabye twice his own height. Scrawled from top to bottom and side to side were various apocalyptic slogans, all in bright colors. It was odd how he carried it: slung over his shoulder, one arm draped across the center-piece. There was nothing at all golgothic in his stride. Though it stuck jauntily into the air some ten feet or more behind him, he walked as if the cross were no more a burden than an umbrella in the rain.

The Insanity of the Irish

"The person who is excessively fearless has no name . . . He would be some sort of madman, or incapable of feeling distress, if he feared nothing, neither earthquake nor waves, as they say about the Celts." -Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (1115b25)

The Return of the Player

I have become The Player’s regular confidant. Almost every day he finds me. Our conversations always begin in the same way.

“Mind if I sit here for awhile?”

“Not at all,” I say, “Go ahead. I can’t really talk too much—I’ve got tons of school stuff to do—but you’re welcome to sit.”

Most people would take this as a not particularly subtle hint to come back later. He never does.

So he sits.

I continue with my studying.

For a few minutes he will sit in respectful silence. Then he opens up.

“I tell ya . . .”

Boy does he ever.

The two most remarkable monologs this week were as follows: (I) his recent enjoyment, on the self-same day, of a massive t-bone steak and a visit to “The Night-Before Lounge;” (II) the terrifically lewd comments of his coworkers about passing females. Monolog I was notable for the truly disturbing ease with which his appreciative description moved from the steak to the stripper’s breasts and back again in an ever-broadening snowball of detail. Unfortunately, there was significant cross-polinization of metaphor in these descriptions. He was deeply moved. Monolog II had mostly to do with a coworker’s expressed desire to top a female acquaintance with the postural assistance of a fence-post.

“I laughed for half-a-hour,” he said, “People kep’ walkin’ by and saying ‘Wassofunny?’”

“And you couldn’t really tell them, could you.”

“No-friggin-way, you betcha I could not! No-fa-riggin way!”

Some joys we must keep to ourselves.

A Player in the '80s.

People tell me things. By people I mean strangers. By things I mean odd things/strange things/unexpected things. Apparently I have a face that says to the burdened world, “Go ahead and tell me about that stuff – I won’t mind.” This is not surprising really, given that my face is modeled very much along the lines of my father’s, and people have always told him things. The face stands him in good stead as a minister - and as a father, for that matter. What follows is one of the more startling recent examples of this “Go ahead and tell Christopher” phenomenon.

The other day I was sitting outside a coffee house in downtown Lincoln. A man shuffled up to me. His eyes, behind smudged glasses, were dull and bloodshot. The teeth you could see along the margins of his chapped lips were crooked as Stonehenge and yellow.

“Mind if I sit and talk with you for awhile?” he said. “Not at all,” I replied. So he sat. And he talked.

"See that?” He pointed to a dark circle of ink on his forearm.

“Sure. What is it?”

"I got tested for a disease.”

“A disease?”

“Yeah, it’s called . . . um . . . well . . .” He squinted. After several false starts, he managed to pry a disease-sounding name from his unwilling memory—“I think it’s tribino . . . chronomona . . . itis . . . kenosis”—then immediately rejected it. “Aw, I don’t remember what it’s called. I think it's in your bones.”

“Ah.”

“It’s one of them diseases where if you got it, you got it and if you don’t got it, good.”

It wasn’t obvious what to say at this point. I gave it my best shot: “Well, that sounds like a pretty good description of most diseases.”

“Well, I don’t got it.”

“Um . . . good.”

“Yep.”

At this point, the conversation took an unexpected turn—though I can't say I know what an expected turn would’ve been, given the prelude.

Suddenly he looked at me very earnestly: “Man, wasn’t it great back in the '80s when you didn’t have to worry about diseases? I mean, you could have sex with any girl you wanted, and you just didn’t have to worry about it.”

Now, I suppose it is possible for the scythe of time, over twenty years, to rough-cut a man’s features so that an Adonis circa 1985 could look like this man in 2005, but it occurred to me that the fear of disease would not have been the only obstacle in the way of his having sex with any girl he wanted – even in the roaring '80s.

“Well,” I said, “I was just a kid during the '80s.”

He went on without considering my reply: “I mean, there was no AIDS or nothing. It’s not like now.”

All at once he started. “Am I boring you?” There was real concern in his voice. I take it he was used to boring people.

“Oh, no – not a bit.”

It was absolutely true.

He smiled.

After a few moments' silence, he remembered where he left off and picked up the thread. “Now, you gotta use a rubber. I mean, that’s what I do. Every time . . . well, unless I know the girl pretty well, then I don’t bother.”

I managed a nod.

A red car pulled up to the curb. “Well, that’s my ride,” he said. “Nice talking.”

He waved and walked away.

Pains Nobly and Ignobly Got

I am in pain. There are two possible explanations for this, one of which is normal and perhaps even noble, the other of which is neither. Normal, perhaps even noble explanation: I spent three hours yesterday painting our new house. This involved stretching to reach the trim along ceilings and lying down to reach the trim along the floor. Moving repeatedly between these positions might explain why my back aches as it does. Neither normal nor noble explanation: I discovered that when I pressed my bare back into our wooden floors, the former would become sealed to the latter. A quick sit-up would break the seal, producing an unmentionable but extremely amusing sound. (Yes, that sound exactly.) I was so amused that I repeated the sound-producing motion for approximately ten minutes, laughing heartily all the while. Perhaps I should mention at this point that I do not often perform quick sit-ups, which is perhaps part of the reason why my bare back seals so easily to wooden floors. Of course, these explanations are not mutually exclusive. Pains may be nobly and ignobly got, and at the same time.

Here My Face, There My Face

Today a woman walked up to me in the coffee house and said, "I'm sorry, I know this is an odd thing to say, but haven't I seen you somewhere before?" I counter-queried: "Do you have any idea where?" "Maybe at school," she said, peering into the space above my head as if it contained the school in question, "in statistics. I don't know." I replied: "I've not taken any classes in statistics. So I'm afraid I don't know either." She laughed nervously. "You just look really familiar. I had to ask . . . now I'm embarrassed." "Please don't be," I said, "it's a question I get a lot." It's true - once a month at least. It is hard to say why. My face is not particularly generic. My lips are overlarge. My nose is crooked, as are my teeth. I wear thickish glasses. I have a long scar on my chin. Even so, I would like to meet all these people who look like me. We should all get together and talk about our odd face over a beer.