A few days ago when I got home from the gym, I stopped by a local (grand)mom-and-(grand)pop shop to buy tuna and a sports drink. I had to wait a minute behind another customer and his son (?). Their backs were turned to me but I sensed they were shuffling their hands around a shelf. They said nothing. They turned to leave the shop and came at me with bright red daggers of fingers. Oh. They had merely bought sweetened, dyed strips of squid for a snack. Turns out the father was mute/deaf and he and his son were bickering over how many squid strips they had bought (or could still buy). As they were bickering, in their audibly halcyon way, a middle school girl sidled up to them to join the debate, even though I don't think she spoke sign language. Realize, of course, that whatever fluency the father and son had in sign language was gone with the wind, unraveled by the strips of squid seizing their stammering fingers. I was tired from my workout but also rushing to get a shower to go to work, so the whole thing felt like a time-lapse film.
And the other…
I forgot while writing this post and multitasking on the Internet.
[UPDATED:
I remembered my Lynch moment. Tuesday at my cram school, I got there early to sub for someone, so I was surrounded by students I don't normally see. I was making copies with the machine near the bathroom door and one boy, maybe five years old, came closer, pointing at the bathroom. "It's changed," he chirped. "It was pink, now it's not." Another teacher corrected him that nothing had changed. "It's changed, it's not pink now." As my copies extruded sheet by sheet, I had an insight. I reached over and flicked the light switch on. The floor tiles took on a dull patina of pink. He and the even smaller girl beside him waddled closer to examine the change. "Yes, it's pink, see!" Then I flicked the light off and they giggled. I stepped away and they proceeded to play with the switch for themselves.
This may seem more like a Norman Rockwell than a David Lynch moment, but the reason it struck me is because I imagined myself morphing into a child as I had my epiphany about the boy's perception of bygone pink. And in my reduced state, he swelled to an incredible intellect, like a boyish wizard. And when he pointed into the bathroom again, through the drapes wafting in the doorway, the lights flicked on and off, each second of light revealing Twin Peaks Bob hopping in a crouched ball of sadistic glee.]
But I can tell you about a dream I had a couple nights ago.
I was being extorted by a mobster into pulling a hit on his main rival. I was staked out in a building under construction and was given a long-range bolt gun (a super nail gun, really). The weird part is that my shooting position was across the hallway from the mobster's office, perhaps so he could keep an eye on me and be sure I "done de t'ing right." I think the building was the mobster's new headquarters, and it was already partially in use even while still being built, so all kinds of people were popping in on me. I tried to escape once or twice, I think to go save my family, but I was always brought back to finish the hit. I remember a few close-up views of my targets through the scope and although I killed the rival early on, I had to keep fighting his henchmen as they were firing back at me. This led to a sequence of me shooting numerous nails into a few video-game-esque henchmen on the roof a couple blocks away. At one point they shot a grappling hook cable onto the girder on my (third) floor. I killed the henchmen, unhooked the grappling hook, ran downstairs and refastened it on the girder on the first floor so as to mislead them of my location when other henchmen rushed into the building. My plan was to ambush them from the stairwell as they looked for me (they knew the grappling hook had been fired accurately by the henchmen I later killed). I woke up thinking, "But wouldn't they just rush up the staircase and outgun me?" I realized, grimly, that I'd just have to take them on with my bolt gun.
This may seem more like a Norman Rockwell than a David Lynch moment, but the reason it struck me is because I imagined myself morphing into a child as I had my epiphany about the boy's perception of bygone pink. And in my reduced state, he swelled to an incredible intellect, like a boyish wizard. And when he pointed into the bathroom again, through the drapes wafting in the doorway, the lights flicked on and off, each second of light revealing Twin Peaks Bob hopping in a crouched ball of sadistic glee.]
But I can tell you about a dream I had a couple nights ago.
I was being extorted by a mobster into pulling a hit on his main rival. I was staked out in a building under construction and was given a long-range bolt gun (a super nail gun, really). The weird part is that my shooting position was across the hallway from the mobster's office, perhaps so he could keep an eye on me and be sure I "done de t'ing right." I think the building was the mobster's new headquarters, and it was already partially in use even while still being built, so all kinds of people were popping in on me. I tried to escape once or twice, I think to go save my family, but I was always brought back to finish the hit. I remember a few close-up views of my targets through the scope and although I killed the rival early on, I had to keep fighting his henchmen as they were firing back at me. This led to a sequence of me shooting numerous nails into a few video-game-esque henchmen on the roof a couple blocks away. At one point they shot a grappling hook cable onto the girder on my (third) floor. I killed the henchmen, unhooked the grappling hook, ran downstairs and refastened it on the girder on the first floor so as to mislead them of my location when other henchmen rushed into the building. My plan was to ambush them from the stairwell as they looked for me (they knew the grappling hook had been fired accurately by the henchmen I later killed). I woke up thinking, "But wouldn't they just rush up the staircase and outgun me?" I realized, grimly, that I'd just have to take them on with my bolt gun.
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