Read Online The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Padgett Powell
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found me inferior to an older boy…do you have time for this?
Do you ever burn loose threads back into place rather than snip them? Were you tormented as a child by perhaps a grandmother’s saying to your mother that she thought you needed to have a “bm,” by which she meant bowel movement? Have you seen a cormorant fly by your window in the early morning? Can you see me, when Jean Baker says “Jimbo said you said you’d fuck me before he would,” say “Yeah, I did” and ride crisply away on my banana-seated stingray bike? Have you ever milked a cow or seen a milking machine attached to a cow or seen the udder washed with that iodiney solution called, I believe, Pro-teat, swabbed up under there sloppily with a rag while the cow stands there placidly, if not a hint impatient for the machine to be already on her? Can you credit that I never went back to Jean Baker’s house again?
Did you try to learn to play the guitar as a child but fail to learn, and can you now not account for what happened to the pawn-shop guitar you tried to learn on, and are you a little mystified that it did not occur to you that perhaps you needed lessons instead of just diddling around with the thing without even a book? Is all of life clueless, or is most of it clueless with momentary bursts of clueness, or is it a spectrum of cluelessness to clueness on which people reside at various points, and are the points at which people reside on the spectrum of cluelessness fixed or variable? Would you expect if you have not been there that the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is predominately brown? What I meant was can you slide up and down the spectrum of cluelessness to clueness like a trombone or do you toot your one more or less dumb note all the livelong day? When people elect to not speak to you, should you not speak to them or deliberately continue to speak to them? If you elect to continue speaking to those not speaking to you, should the motivation be to pique them or to repair relations? If you could live on top of a mountain and grow coffee and not be rich but not have any real economic worries either and once or twice a day bury your face in a big basket of coffee beans to assay the quality of the product and otherwise eat good fruit and slowly read a book or two and wear good locally spun cotton clothes and enjoy seeing the weather come in over the mountains and sleep right there on the porch in a hammock and have a good number of dogs whomaintain themselves without your having to mess with them and not be too bothered by your continuing to not speak Spanish very well, would you do it?
Are you familiar with a certain sort of hard-drinking woman who insists on driving nothing but the largest and heaviest car that can be had at the time? Have you seen a fox run gingerly by on its pencil-thin legs so elegantly that you love the fox and want him to stop so you could say something to him? Have you had very many forms of venereal disease? Do you know that the bark around the base of the limbs of a tree is substantially different from the bark on the trunk of the tree—one of its chief differences, if not the only difference, being that the base-of-limb bark will produce more of itself to cover the wound created should the limb break off or be sawn off at the trunk of the tree? Would the base-of-limb bark be called caudal bark?
Have you ever maintained a swimming pool? Have you ever been bitten by a rabbit? Have you ever studied the green shredded-wheat-like biscuits that come out of tortoises? Can you waltz? Is there in your opinion life after death? Is there death then before life? Wouldn’t it be possible to get life and death mixed upand not be exactly clear what is what and when when? Will you use enamel paint even though latex is so much easier to handle? What is your favorite material in cookware? Would you rather deal with a man or a woman wearing overalls, and with which is it more disturbing to discover he or she is wearing
Do you ever burn loose threads back into place rather than snip them? Were you tormented as a child by perhaps a grandmother’s saying to your mother that she thought you needed to have a “bm,” by which she meant bowel movement? Have you seen a cormorant fly by your window in the early morning? Can you see me, when Jean Baker says “Jimbo said you said you’d fuck me before he would,” say “Yeah, I did” and ride crisply away on my banana-seated stingray bike? Have you ever milked a cow or seen a milking machine attached to a cow or seen the udder washed with that iodiney solution called, I believe, Pro-teat, swabbed up under there sloppily with a rag while the cow stands there placidly, if not a hint impatient for the machine to be already on her? Can you credit that I never went back to Jean Baker’s house again?
Did you try to learn to play the guitar as a child but fail to learn, and can you now not account for what happened to the pawn-shop guitar you tried to learn on, and are you a little mystified that it did not occur to you that perhaps you needed lessons instead of just diddling around with the thing without even a book? Is all of life clueless, or is most of it clueless with momentary bursts of clueness, or is it a spectrum of cluelessness to clueness on which people reside at various points, and are the points at which people reside on the spectrum of cluelessness fixed or variable? Would you expect if you have not been there that the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is predominately brown? What I meant was can you slide up and down the spectrum of cluelessness to clueness like a trombone or do you toot your one more or less dumb note all the livelong day? When people elect to not speak to you, should you not speak to them or deliberately continue to speak to them? If you elect to continue speaking to those not speaking to you, should the motivation be to pique them or to repair relations? If you could live on top of a mountain and grow coffee and not be rich but not have any real economic worries either and once or twice a day bury your face in a big basket of coffee beans to assay the quality of the product and otherwise eat good fruit and slowly read a book or two and wear good locally spun cotton clothes and enjoy seeing the weather come in over the mountains and sleep right there on the porch in a hammock and have a good number of dogs whomaintain themselves without your having to mess with them and not be too bothered by your continuing to not speak Spanish very well, would you do it?
Are you familiar with a certain sort of hard-drinking woman who insists on driving nothing but the largest and heaviest car that can be had at the time? Have you seen a fox run gingerly by on its pencil-thin legs so elegantly that you love the fox and want him to stop so you could say something to him? Have you had very many forms of venereal disease? Do you know that the bark around the base of the limbs of a tree is substantially different from the bark on the trunk of the tree—one of its chief differences, if not the only difference, being that the base-of-limb bark will produce more of itself to cover the wound created should the limb break off or be sawn off at the trunk of the tree? Would the base-of-limb bark be called caudal bark?
Have you ever maintained a swimming pool? Have you ever been bitten by a rabbit? Have you ever studied the green shredded-wheat-like biscuits that come out of tortoises? Can you waltz? Is there in your opinion life after death? Is there death then before life? Wouldn’t it be possible to get life and death mixed upand not be exactly clear what is what and when when? Will you use enamel paint even though latex is so much easier to handle? What is your favorite material in cookware? Would you rather deal with a man or a woman wearing overalls, and with which is it more disturbing to discover he or she is wearing
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