Deluded Forgotten Writer
Short Story
Or This is Water by a Snoot
This is water, what a great eternal title;[1] this is why authors were to start the character’s journey through the day at the point of waking up because it is not a true beginning and the internal Interphase between sleeping with one dream are willing up and even to be touched and the conscious world where one has only a few moments to snag the meeting that has been unwaveringly unfurled.[2] Unfortunately, unlong sentences are in vogue.[3] So that would need to be rewritten and dewritten.[4] And made more descice.[5] Clarity is everything to the pitch. 4-to-6-word sentences. Even if it is not a sentence.[6] And being a snoot, the parameters for a sentence were extremely precise and written down.[7] For this he needed glasses as an adult because everything being written down means small type.
He knew that he was conscious because the light came pouring through the large window and flooded his eyes. It took a moment to ratchet down the white noise to a more bearable amount rather than the extreme that was in sleeping mode. The top was to Interphase, and fortunately, he had a strategy: put on the robe.[8] That allowed him to steady himself and modulate the level of light by squinting his eyes and looking for his glasses that were always on the nightstand by his side. Having fun with them he brought them up to his face and gently picked them to be small squares where they can’t snugly but not clench. After he did this, he put on a red bandanna and straightened it. This was a ritual that he shared with no one but his wife.
“Want” is more concise is that the characters of the authors do not have an idea rolling on their tongues which means that the authors create an entrance into the world belonging to the sleeping to waking apocrypha does not have the same balance in the world of their characters. For the characters is just waking up, and perhaps thinking of coffee. Double on the coffee. Espress yourself.[9]
This is one of the things about being a story: everything begins in childhood when one understands one’s place in the universe. Being a snoot was wanting the adult sense of what things were and how they related to each other in time. At that point in years, there was no downside because learning the rules of childhood English seemed to be a waste of time. But that was not true because every dialect has its role in the structure of a language. It was later understood that being a snoot was a disadvantage in that the snoot did not parse a dialect which was important to the social level that was being spoken by his or her peers.[10] And so the snoot made a zone of comfortability that the other children instinctively could point at and make the snoot suffer. And better the other suffering child than the child himself.
He touched with his right hand the wall just before the doorway because he had only once tripped and fell flat on his face. This was an incident that was not going to be repeated even if he had to hold his hand gently engaging the fingerprints to keep his balance and composure. He slid easily through the door in two the hallway and then we had a right-left shuffle into the back stairway that curved so gently into the kitchen. He could tell that his wife was already there because of the smells that emanated from various appliances: coffee, orange juice, and the fresh smell of gently browned toast. It was a feast for the all olfactory senses to be consumed as being appetizer for the main menu of gustatory dissemination.[11] He admitted that he was more a gourmand than a gourmet, but at least he could sense the precision of tasting a meal that was truly séduisant.
His wife asked to get orange juice, but he shook his head no. his wife assumed that the would be working late to get the grades in so was not really perturbed.
But once he was out in the car, whose sole purpose was to drive him to work.[12] Everything was different. Now it was about being schedule. In this schedule was the after-class schedule for turning in the grades for the last semester. He drove in after the crush hour had subsided and up the long circular circle that held the inner sanctum of the “Quad” - the Fortress of flesh and Stone which conspired to have almost all learning of the secrets that the University could offer. As was the case in a college built in the 1960s, the modulo was pristine white. And it had that raise of line that said “Metropolis” in the minds of the men who designed it, approved it, and built it.
His objective here was to submit the final grades for each of his four classes, one of which was graduate. He drove up but he was thinking inside all the last revisions. Fortunately, he had done all of the grading and putting in the grades. And then there was the moment of truth when he hit send and committed the grade “to the record books.” He parked the car, he walked to his office, the only people who were sweating for those who did their grading late, and he only needed to nod to each of them before setting himself down in his tiny office. Once closed the door he was completely alone.
He sat down at his desk with the computer directly in front of him. He pulled up the grading system. He hesitated, but then with a force of will compressed a single key with a single stroke. And it was done. All stories published in respectable journals would make that the moment of decision. He knew he had written one like that five years ago.
And he turned his attention to the short essay which would be the introduction to his short stories. And “This is water” was exactly what he needed to create the diction and syntax of the essay that had been churning in his mind. He looked out onto the young oak trees and white buildings that marked a new campus. It was new because be buildings stood out rather than the greenery which would later take over. It was also a light green because the grass and low hedges dominated what was. He could see no flowers except the small dots of forget-me-nots. And he knew that the forget-me-nots were wild. From coast to coast the wildflowers claw into the land only to be evicted by herbicides that you were told by his wife were going to be made illegal because of the Carcinogens.[13]
But then he focused himself on the LCD and opened up a document in Word.[14] Then he was transported to a land where words became, in some sense, as real as the things that they described. This symbolized becoming symbol paradigm happened without conscious thought and his fingers caressed each letter knowing that the auto-correct would make it pure. And if that did not work he had a dictionary, thesaurus, and usage. Being last he knew was what made him a professional in the use of words, because a dictionary would tell you if you could use a word in any syntactical situation, and a source told you what words might be appropriate in such cases, but the usage told you if it is socially acceptable for any syntactical situation.
He poured over the means of words, clauses, phrases, and sentences knowing that the jostling between these modes was in fact what he was trying to create. The vulgar needs to be there as well as the refined because a reader is supposed to be defined which means that he knows the unrefined even if he does not use it very often. So, using it is a vulgarity that must be indulged at least once in an introductory essay. [15]
He waited just a minute because, for reasons that were unknown to him, he sweat. And occasionally he had to change bandanna, or he would be drenched through no fault of his own. That would not due.[16]
He typed. Paragraph by paragraph he retyped the sections which were not smooth to the touch. And then he edited. He did the one thing that few authors did: he added footnotes by the handful. These were descriptions that were not completely necessary but added a gem-like quality to the prose if only in footnote form, and formal analysis would suggest that they not be added to the main thrust of the essay.
Then in his modern chair, he sat back and read the entire article, finally smiling as he did so. He mentally checked all of the things that he would have to get done and eased backward in the chair as he checked off mentally all of the items on his list. Then he thought of sitting his butt in the chair and gathered up his belongings.
Then be process of going to work was reversed as he it out of work. Once in the car he only stopped in the circle and looked back at the modern metropolis campus. He then focused forward and drove back home. The advantage that he had was that monomaniacal crush hour that the highways could be avoided. The difference was negligible in either direction, the highway moved very quickly or not at all while the off-roads carried him along at an even slower pace.
There were a dozen points where the best and crossed the need-be highway and more often than not he could see that if he had taken the highway he would be stopped by all of be traffic. He preferred the even slower pace because he knew that he could be thinking rather than acting to be an onslaught of people wondering why there was so much traffic. The answer was obvious: they were part of the traffic a did not point their gaze inwards. Because after all, every story is about the person and the struggles that they have with society both general and particular. He chuckled because he too was part of the self-centric view the key did not think of.[17]
There was a white sign that pointed to the town to the right which he knew meant that he was going left. Used to to look out at the vast cornfield that was Illinois, rolling but not to the point of having hills, with gullies to keep the rainwater in. and it was special because be orange sun was just about to set in the West.
The car drove into the garage, which automagically opened with the press of a button. He got out took in his briefcase and wandered through the entrance to the kitchen. He then went into a closet in the corner and took out a few instruments for his last item to check off.
Then he went outside to the in-the-ground pool sat himself up and flexed his right arm. It was only a pinprick the rushing of liquid through the needle was stimulating even though it was a cocktail of depressants and a numbing effect.[18] He stood up because he knew that he would be falling very shortly. Down into the pool. The numbing effect made it so he did not care that surfactant-based liquid was pouring in through his nostrils. He knew that he was dying, and he did not care.
He was floating.
The effervescent crawled up his back and legs. It was like a fizz of an ornate cocktail from the Continent. It had a kind of rush that he tried to enumerate but the depressant was kicking in and so he released his mind from the terms of remembering. Instead, he remembered the faces that were the most precious and closed his eyes for the last time. He had been waiting to release himself for two months once the semester was completed.
Then one last conscious thought emitted from his frontal lobe, it was, and precise and it merged with the tactile sense of his glasses sliding upward towards a heaven which he did not believe in:
“This is water.”[19]
For David Foster Wallace, sui generis[20].
[1] “This is Water.”
[2] The eternal is a go-to move especially if it is an epic or foundational narrative, so for example, Iliad, Genesis, start out with the difference between the eternal timeline and the personal timeline. Other stories and with it for example, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or in Russian: Один день Ивана Денисовича, that ends with the leap days counted as part of the sentence.
[3] This is because the Hemingway ask style sentence is in the in media as opposed to the long drawn out sentences of William Faulkner: “From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that.” But Absalom, Absalom! ends with “I don’t hate it!” which is more than short enough for anyone.
[4] “Dewritted” as in deconstruction in a Derridaesque sense. “These precautions are taken, it should be recognized that it is in the specific zone of this imprint and this trace, in the temporalization of a lived experience which is neither in the world nor in "another world," which is not more sonorous than luminous, not more in time than in space, that differences appear among the elements or rather produce them, make them emerge as such and constitute the texts, the chains, and the systems of traces.” Of Grammatology, 65 taken from Derrida, Jacques. 2016. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
[5] “The relationship between passivity and difference cannot be distinguished from the relationship between the fundamental unconscious ness of language (as rootedness within the language) and the spacing (pause, blank, punctuation, interval in general, etc.) which constitutes the origin of signification.” Of Grammatology, 68.
[6] No verb. https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/Grammar
[7] Harper's Magazine, April 2001, http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1811_302/72732951/print.jhtml, 41.
[8] Originally from biology: “Interphase is the portion of the cell cycle that is not accompanied by visible changes under the microscope, and includes the G1, S, and G2 phases. During interphase, the cell grows (G1), replicates its DNA (S), and prepares for mitosis (G2). A cell in interphase is not simply quiescent.” Wikipedia, Interphase
[9] From “Espresso.”
[10] Chand, Ashok. “Do You Speak English? Language Barriers in Child Protection Social Work with Minority Ethnic Families.” The British Journal of Social Work 35, no. 6 (2005): 807–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23720631.
[11] This underutilization of olfactory sense is explored in Bradford, Kevin D., and Debra M. Desrochers. “The Use of Scents to Influence Consumers: The Sense of Using Scents to Make Cents.” Journal of Business Ethics 90 (2009): 141–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40665290.
[12] The problems of lower-class people with transportation to work are analyzed in Garasky, Steven, Cynthia Needles Fletcher, and Helen H. Jensen. “Transiting to Work: The Role of Private Transportation for Low-Income Households.” The Journal of Consumer Affairs 40, no. 1 (2006): 64–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23860562.
[13] https://pirg.org/articles/the-weed-killer-roundup-has-been-linked-to-cancer-its-time-to-ban-it/
[14] Microsoft supplies universities at a discount.
[15] Of course, it can be met head-on. The primary example would be On Bullshit: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.” Frankfurt, Harry G., 1929-, On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005. 1.
[16] Pink Floyd, The Wall, 1979.
[17] See 1.
[18] Drowning is sometimes a peaceful affair, but usually violent as the individual that is drowning fights to reach the air.
[19] See 1.
[20] David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008)