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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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The Demon Who Can't Remember the Word for...the Word for...
The Demon Who Always Does The Right Thing had to have her car alarm taken out the other day. She never uses it, but the other night it decided to arm itself without telling her, and so the next day she couldn�t get into her car. The alarm went off when she tried to open the door, and then as it dawned on her that this meant that she was not going to be driving anywhere that day, the car sat there quietly snickering to itself while she, the good Demon that she always is, probably cursed under her breath something like �Darn it.� So she had to have her car taken in and since she needed a ride from the car place, she called me and asked if I would come. I said, of course, yes, and met her and The Demon Grrlfriend outside the ubiquitous Starbucks near the car place. They were sitting at an outside table, both of them resplendent in red, sharing a cup of coffee and a piece of some snacky cake. I sat down with them and basked in the glow that radiates from them when they are together. The Demon and I started talking about the gym. She had run into the ex-Grrlfriend at the gym and told me the story. I tried to regale them with a story of my own, set at the gym as well, but here�s the thing: I�m not much of a gym rat, and so my story got hung up when I couldn�t remember the word for the�uh. For the, um. Yeah, like that. They sat there looking at me as if I had just disembarked from some short bus that had pulled up to the Starbucks. �That room,� I said helplessly, �You know the room? The changing room? That room?� They continued to look at me as if I had ceased to speak English. I finally said, �The room where all the naked women are.� And The Demon said immediately, �The locker room?� By the time I figured out where my story was set, I couldn�t remember the whole point of my story (and kindly keep any comments about seeing trends to yourself), and so I just sort of lamely joked about how, if there�s any information that you can elicit from a lesbian, it�s the location of the greatest concentration of naked women in any given building. Also? Seems to me that a lesbian will pay much more attention to a given story if you include a naked woman. Because they�re such boys that way. (And, of course, I mean that in the nicest way possible.) But I love sitting outside coffee shops. It�s always so startling a cross-section of yuppie behavior�at least it is to me, the po� brown amateur cultural anthropologist that I am. Take, for example, this one sighting I logged of a woman probably in her early 20�s, sitting cross-legged at an outside table, smoking a cigarette, reading a paperback with the title No, Daddy! Don�t!. Or another time, when I was sitting outside, drinking my coffee, smoking a cigarette, reading a paperback (I don�t remember what paperback, but I�m sure it was something by Sartre, all right?), and this guy came not quite over, but quite nearby, and looked at me. And I gave him the old Sublingua raised-eyebrown, don�t invade my personal space warning look, and he moved on to another zaftig chick sitting nearby. It was obvious he didn�t know the woman he was coming to meet, so probably we�re talking about a situation that involved some advertisement, some �seeking� (as my friend Dena calls personal ads). So, pretending to read, I watched as these two greeted each other just a bit too enthusiastically and began a conversation that was just a bit too bright, and then I had one of those Holden Caulfield-type reactions in which, having noticed that my fat sister was a bit too made up, a bit too dressed up, certainly had over-prepared for this guy who was not that cute, not that young, who had, underneath one of those driving caps, an almost mullet, for chrissakes, I just got kind of depressed at the whole thing. So I finished my cigarette, and took my coffee and my Sartre (yes, I�m sure it was Sartre), and moved on. I have never placed a personal ad anywhere�, I�m sure I�d sound like a raving lunatic (or, worse in terms of finding heterosexual love, a raving feminist, which I am) if I tried to reduce myself to 25 words or less�but Max�s sister seems to have had some luck with a recent one. That�s really another story, though. For another time, yeah?
More lies:
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