Memoir

It occurs to me that I haven't spoken in sometime about a subject dear to me, my inconstant progress though life.

This installment finds me tending shop in a small township in Washington's eastern prefecture, bordered on the North and Northeast by the grand Spokane Valley. To my proximate west lie the channeled scablands, an undeservedly bad-ass name, and all the tedium they bring. Here, in this mining camp of malaise, this border fort at the confluence of nothing in particular, fierce libertarianism and grain subsidies live together without the slightest irony. Farmers till and sow the very soil, or not--depending on the mood of the USDA--and earn the same either way, while the youth of other small towns converge on a regional university to ensure that they will not, ultimately, meet the same fate. Somewhere, in the midst of this, dwell I, attempting feats of suggestion to discourage these disparate types from parking their cars here and engaging me in acts of business.

I will not be accepting your currency today, I project--kindly but firmly--through the sounding board of my frontal lobe, there will be no goods offered hence, nor any services rendered. Most people get the hint.

Father says January and February are his slowest months. With me in the shop, he's right.

It's not as though I wouldn't want to parley with some frontier type--I'm terribly lonely here--but I haven't yet met anyone who lives up to my mind's lofty expectations. Ideally she would be an elderly trapper, a widow. Fattened by her prodigious trade and able to settle down, She'd spin yarns of her continual march back to the wild, pulled by a love of nature's creatures. A love expressed in the simple desire to kill them and take their skins. We'd talk of Baudelaire and the territoriality of feral cats. Upon meeting, monthly--she in town for dry goods and hardtack, I quietly tending shop--we'd hug the big hugs of bawdy folk, unashamed of our affection for one another. She'd hail from the forests of Baden-Baden, but speak the queer Gaelic inflection of a Newfoundlander. To bad no one like that exists.

As it is, my only companions are foul-mouthed drunkards who hide their considerable wealth in vast expanses of fallow land. Their complaints are numerous but uniform and hinge on an apparently startling number of people hereabouts who's fat, and so gatdammed ugly you can't hardly stand it to look at 'em. One of these elderly gentlemen, a real-estate mastermind I'm told, sports a red ball cap with an upturned bill and the finest set of manufactured teeth you're likely to ever see. He affects a slack-jawed ignorance that hybridizes Columbo and Moose from Archie and Veronica, yet he has steely, intelligent eyes. His stupified look and penetrating gaze make me feel like a joke is being played on me. Watching his interaction with others, it seems as though he's playing it on them as well.

So I try to keep my mind sharp against such trickery by undertaking feats of science and induction. Today alone I discovered the exact number of sheets the office shredder can handle without jamming. Utilizing the myriad newsprint flyers at my disposal and through careful planning and execution according to accepted standards and practices, I've concluded the number is 24, no more, no less. If fed incorrectly, leading edge off-parallel with the device's teeth, that number often drops to 18.

I've also begun to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, written this thing here, studied up on the dialects of Newfoundland and Labrador to add depth to a passing comment made about a fictional woman, then looked further into Hiberno-English and it's variants, which are funny and quaint.

What have you done with your day?

Now, as the 4 o'clock hour approaches, I conclude that my mind tricks have been mostly successful, for a Wednesday, keeping all intrusions at bay save that of that gatdammed Newfoundlander Graham Bell's soul projector. The phone is outside my mind's range, as I lack both the psi-rating and technology to project such distances. I'm currently fashioning a crude transmitter from discarded aluminum windows, from which I hope to blanket the area in brainwaves like a wireless hotspot of psionic coercion.

In the meantime, it's edifying to watch people drive through our parking lot on the way to other businesses. Makes me feel generous and sad--maybe a little noble--alone here, waiting to serve.