AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Checkers Speaks

I just had the oddest experience.

Here I sat, grading papers like my life depended on it (“as my life depended on it,” I would write, but that exemplifies the sort of situation in which correct grammar sounds outrageously stilted, such that only Oscar Wilde or Steve Himmer could pull it off, and since Oscar is an ex-author and Steve’s far too busy to trouble himself with trivia, the idiom must remain in its solecistic vernacular), when I heard the voice as of a faraway dog (in this case, you may note, “as” works) bidding me, “Take, and write.”

No, it’s ”Take, and read,” I corrected the dog, “Tolle, lege”; I do, after all, teach Augustine in my Early Church History Class. “Take, and write, stupid,” the ethereal canine voice returned. “Who’s got the lines in this auditory hallucination, anyway?”

The dog’s voice — oddly familiar to me, as though once I had heard it before, perhaps even shared a roof with the dog, perhaps even broken bread that the dog would gladly have taken from my hand at the table had I not been warned not to let him eat any of it — the dog’s voice, as I say, bore a note of absolute authority, the sort of tone that obliges squirrels to stop dead in their tracks for a fateful millisecond before they scamper to safety up a tree — not that the dog couldn’t have caught them, of course, but that this dog, a verray parfit and gentil knight of a dog, would not so inconvenience them as to take their lives — a note, that is, that brooked no digression or parenthesis. “I have a very important message for you, about the saga of Andrew Huff and the Pool of Lost Souls.”

“Tsssssss! Do I have to find another password for Alex? Or is he reminding me to write that letter for him? Doesn’t he know. . . ?”

“Rrroooowwff!” the voice barked, decisively. “That authorial digression is Steve’s trick. You just shut up and write what I tell you.”

The voice paused as I obediently sat at attention. “Good boy, AKMA. Have a brown-sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart. Now, write: ‘In the days of the Emperor George, in the city of Daley, when Kerry was campaigning in Wisconsin and the Deaniacs still held out hope of a mind-boggling upset, a word came to a young Jedi scribe named Alex. . . .’ ” The voice ebbed away, and I saw myself as in a familiar room (see it worked this time, too! Oooh — sorry, Checkers), Steve Himmer’s dining room where I had sat at his table and surfed on his wireless connection, and at the table sat a good-lookin’ exquisitely literate man typing intently on his six-month-old iBook. These are the words he typed: “Deep in the tangled nest of flashing lights and blink-blinking things and chirping chirpers and other mysterious noisemakers and diodes and displays and, for some reason, a doorless microwave circa 1973, which is to say pre-safety concerns, that hurled harmless in small doses but deadly over time (the time, say, it takes to cook a years-long constant stream of bags of popcorn. . . .”

Posted by AKMA at February 16, 2004 07:31 PM | TrackBack