I'm back. Will try to post regularly again now. This story kind of hints at why I've been gone for so long, but it won't give anything away either. In a later post I'l explain the inanity of why I've been gone for several weeks.
Anyway, go easy on me. It's the first thing I've written in about 6 weeks. Having said that - please tell me what you think.
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Grammar's hands
Grammar has had is clammy web of hands on me for the last six weeks or so. It's left me intact, as it usually does every couple of years or so, but I'm exhausted from it. Anyway, this post is let you all know I'm through this grammar storm - it's moved on - to next person, the next village. Who fucking cares? It's moved on and that's all I'm bothered about. Grammar will do that to you - guns don't kill people - grammar does. You either 'are' or you 'were'.
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A small shot of anger, wrapped in nerve endings, is the jolt I get when I see a cockroach above the architrave of our bedroom door. My reflex is: feet off the floor, swear - 'for fuck's sake!', put my thickest shoes on - to decrease the echoes of crunching it underfoot from my bare soles - and then get the spray. I like the spray - when it works - it avoids getting too close to the roach and having to squash it and experience its innards on more than a visual plane. Unfortunately, this time the spray didn't work. I hawked a blast of the stuff onto the stationary beast, but when I released my finger it was nowhere to be seen.
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That's when the grammar kicked up again.
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'Where's it gone?'
'Anyway, where had the evil fuck come from?'
'How could it have disappeared like that?'
'It's around here somewhere.'
'Did it fly off?'
'It must have gone into the bedroom.'
That's a lot of angular, perilous grammar for a cockroach. It was too much for me. My knees wobbled under the weight of the tenses. My breath became shorter and quicker and my heart frightened me with its punches to my ribcage. I sat down, heaved my chest up and down, taking in the stink of the spray.
'Are you okay?'
'Christ! Yeah - give me a minute sweetie.'
'It's just a cockroach - it can't harm us. I know it's horrible, but we'll find it and get rid of it.'
'It's not that bastard. It's the grammar it brings on it's wings. I mean how many inflections, time references, adverbials, modal verbs, and all that gunk - how much does a situation as small as this have to carry?'
'I don't get you.'
'It's just a bug. Just a fucking bug - and it rips its way through every corner of language until my head is spinning. No wonder I can't write anything with all of it screaming in my head. Jesus! Why did God give us grammar?'
'Right. Okay honey - you just relax. Don't worry about grammar - I'll get it.'
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My wife came and got me a few minutes later. I'd heard a few shoots of spray go off, she'd paced calmly past me, to the kitchen, walked into the bedroom and come and got me.
'Come on - I've got it.'
Under an upturned jar, the dead roach lay on its back.
'Thanks - that's better. I like its grammar now. Past tense. Pure, solid, simple past tense - such a peaceful tense - tranquil as a far horizon.'
I leant down close to the jar. The optics of it buckled the view of the cockroach, but I could see it close enough to make out the antennae, the tapered legs, the folds of shell. I whispered to it - well to myself actually:
'Ha! Fuck you - past tense. Just where you should be - past tense.'
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Only then did the grammar take its hands from my throat.
