Author Archives: Chris

Pitt

December 12, 2012 – 7:01 pm

When I walked in the house, I could hear Pitt talking to himself in the kitchen. I have not always shown up at the best time but always at least in the nick of time.

“She’s driving me crazy. She wants every little piece I work on to be perfect before I can move on to the next. I can’t work this way. Am I supposed to stand around doing nothing until the right parts or fixtures show up? Am I?” He turned to stare at me fixedly. He was close, I could tell; like he was on that crossing from England to the mainland all those years ago when we first met. He was close to stircrazy then too.

That was when we met, on the crossing. Back then he was Brad Pitt. This was before there was another Brad Pitt out there in the world whom everyone knew. During the course of the last few moves Pitt’s name became what it is: Pitt. When someone would ask if it were his first or last name, the response would come: just Pitt.

We stepped outside on to the flagstone patio. Pitt pressed his hands onto the top of a wrought iron chair and leaned into it as if trying to plant it into the stone beneath. Pushing himself off, he turned to face me. “What do you think I should do?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. His face relaxed and he rocked back on his heels. He came up short. “Wait…wait…” I repeated. I’d been feeling the moisture increase out here and had driven through the storm on my way up the mountain.

The approaching storm began as an ever-loudening hiss. I could see Pitt’s shoulder’s noticeably tighten. “Wait,” I repeated. The first drops snuck up behind him, overcame him, and consumed me all within the space of three seconds.

“Yeah?” He said it as half-question, half-plea against the reality of it.

“Yes,” I said as confirmation. Pitts face went slack: total awareness of his surroundings and acceptance. It was time to leave. This was not working. She was not the one.

“Why?” he asked in hope of a reprieve of the verdict.

“You know why.” I continued to hold his eyes, not letting him go.

“Shit….yeah. I should have known when I saw you this time. It was so good to see you and I was having such a bad day; I didn’t put two and two together. How do you always know?”

I can always tell by the tone of his voice when we talk on the phone what stage of a relationship he is in but I say, “I just know.”

“Should we wait? She should be back soon. She just ran to the store for cigarettes.”

“That’s your call. I’ll do whatever.”

Pitt drew his slackened shoulders up again. “I’ll tell her.” There was a resolve in his eye that was not there a minute ago and I knew his old self was back again.

“This won’t be easy now,” I said, “you’ve changed back to who you were when you met her. She won’t want to let go of you if she notices.”

”She changed me though. How can I stay?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. She will see what attracted her, the old you, and she will make it hard because that’s who she wants.”

“OK. Noted. Go start the car,” he said. And then, almost as an afterthought, threw in, “She can keep the house.” And he walked away into the kitchen. Out front, I heard a car door slam and decided to take the route around the side of the house.

Tags , , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

The World Has Always Been Round

December 2, 2012 – 6:57 pm

As anyone who has ever spent time at the ocean or on a boat can attest, it is quite obvious to the unaided eye that the surface of the world is round. In fact, hundreds of years before any scientist discovered this a man in a sea town in, I believe it was, Portugal figured out the circumference of the earth within under 1,000 miles just by noting the arc of the curvature of the Earth between two points at the mouth of a bay. Extrapolating that arc, this man figured the circumference of the planet. He did it by sitting beside the ocean and staring at it and noting that the horizon is not a straight line.

This being true, it seems more reasonable that sailors, who spend entire lives on boats, would notice the same thing as well. I find it far more likely and reasonable that some sailor, as a joke, began telling tales to naive landlubbers and neophytes about monsters and sailing off the end of the earth.

So the lesson today  is that one should learn not to joke around with ignorant or foolish people. You may have a good laugh at their expense and marvel at their stupidity but if you do not let them in on the joke, and they repeat it as fact, you could end up with another Inquisition. Tens of thousands of people tortured and killed because the Earth is FLAT and Rome is the center of the universe and the Sun revolves around the Earth.

The entire philosophy of Catholicism grew into a notion that the closer one is to G-d, the closer they are to perfection. G-d is the unmoving Mover and the Pope is closest thing to perfection on Earth. The Earth does not move and Rome is the center of the Earth. Like the idea of ‘Chinese-ness”, by which the closer you are to the Forbidden City the more ‘Chinese’ you are, so too it was that the closer you were to Rome, the closer you were to the center of the Universe, to G-d. Science dispelled this notion by dethroning the Earth from its place of privilege.

At first blush, this may seem innocuous enough and not a reason to imprison Galileo Galilee under house arrest for the remainder of his life, but Rome, the Pope, was enough of a student of politics to understand (or at least his adviser’s were) that one cannot unseat the Earth without by inference unseating Rome…and the Pope…of their power and mystique. Science was after truth and, like all entrenched powers, Rome could only think of crushing opposing thought instead of taking the new thought by this new thinker; this new thinker who educated the Pope in his youth; and re-working their power within this new Truth. No, the Pope found himself and the Church under attack and instead chose to issue a Papal Bull to torture all those whose heresies (heretica meaning ‘to choose’) threatened to break the ties that bound all men to the power of Rome.

All because some sailor thought it would be funny to tell some ignorant soul in a pub that the Earth was flat and he almost sailed off the edge last week.

Tags , , , , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

The Watering Can

December 2, 2012 – 6:54 pm

The two-gallon, galvanized watering can looked out of place sitting in the open on the otherwise manicured front yard. The house behind it sat on an level two acre plot. A white two-story Colonial with a slate roof and copper gutters, the house had the traditional black shutters accompanying each window. The first floor was raised slightly allowing for basement windows which were well hidden by the encircling shrubbery. The three steps and a landing giving access to the front door were all granite and covered by a portico in the federal style.

The property was rectangular, twice the length as its depth. The house, similarly proportional to the property also sat length-wise to the street. A neatly manicured lawn stretched fifty feet from the house to the curb, interrupted only by a large Sycamore, three rock gardens, and the slate walkway that stretched from the sidewalk to the front door. Up the left side of the property sat the cobblestone driveway which, after its fifty foot run-up, turned right and sloped down, down, below grade-level and into the basement garage atop which sat the home’s library. The edging along the granite walkway and on either side of the drive was clean and crisp, as if it had been tended by professionals. Given the neighborhood, one would find it most unlikely that the owners would have the time or inclination to perform this maintenance themselves.

But that can, that galvanized watering can, sat in the dappled shade under the Sycamore tree in the front yard not ten feet from the largest rock garden. From the street, one could clearly see that grass had grown up around it. The grass was high enough to lead one to the conclusion that it had not been moved for at least three mowings. And if one were to lift the can, they would expect to see the grass underneath white and dying from a lack of sunlight. This lone, disjointed, unkempt resident greeted passersby in this coiffed Greenwich neighborhood; no clue left as to how or why it was so glaringly exempt from the ministrations given the rest of the land.

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »