Why I am unfit for human company, Chapter 613 billion
What follows is an entirely true story. If it fails to make you want to flay the skin off your own face and slurp-pop your own eyes out, then the likelihood that you and I will ever be pals is very slight.
I’m a writer. Which means quite simply (if you are not a writer yourself, or do not live with a writer) that I am a person who stares into the middle distance in coffee shops. I sit, vexed, with my fingers hovering claw-like over a keyboard, ready to strike in the unlikely event that an idea should arrive at any point in the foreseeable. I am aware that I mostly look like I’ve had a stroke, or that I am a middle-aged man playing freeze tag with opponents unseen by you. This is what we in the field call “when the work is going well.”
As a Coffee Shop Paralytic Always Like An Ass Hair Away From Frisbee-ing My Fucking Laptop Across the Room, I do not make especially good company. I remain resolutely uncongenial — I am by temperament inhospitable, cantankerous, and bothered. Even, as is invariably the case, when I say nothing, I am an unsettled and unsettling presence. To seek purposefully to be near me, my dry talons poised over these Unyielding Keys Whose Truculence Will Be the Death of Me, I Swear (what we in the field call our “work”), means either that there are no other seats in the coffee shop, or that you are a person of such monumental self-regard, that you lack the sensory apparatus to detect me and my struggles.
Yesterday, while frozen in my “Muse, this is an abusive relationship, and I hate your no-show guts, you withholding witch” posture, I was seated at one end of a couch in the coffee shop where I was working (read: “rankle-staring, immobilized”) one such self-regarding person approached and asked, indicating the other end of the couch: “Anyone sitting here?”
“Nope,” I said. I scooched my jacket over, begrudgingly. I tried, as I usually do in such situations, to adopt a tone of voice somewhere between “Eye-Roll ‘FINE’” and “I am mind-erecting a fence around this couch with a spajillion volts of ‘keep your distance’ coursing through it.” This gambit came to nothing. She says: “Be right back,” like she’s announcing an especially enticing timeshare opportunity.
I hate her already. But lemme tell you something — that hatred? That I felt in that moment right there? I PINE for the winsome pleasures of that hatred. That hatred burned like a kitchen match compared to the cranial mushroom cloud to come.
So I’m knitting my brow, failing to generate anything. And she comes back. And she is a vision of ostentatious chaos. She’s trailing three different sweaters, and as many scarves, like she’s straggling a limp woolen squid. Which might be OK. If she didn’t take like 42 minute to get herself settled in. Like a dog circling before it lies down, but with opposable thumbs and a pathological thirst for attention. Because there were Draping Sweaters for the couch, and a Draping Sweater for shoulders, there was a scarf for Winding Round Neck, and the others for draping. In order to gain some sense of the preening elaborateness of this ritual, google yourself up some videos of the courtship dance of the bird of paradise.
When she had lined her nest, she left again. By this time I wished to bury a pickaxe between her retreating shoulder blades.
She came back. With a tea. Now, this is America and it is a coffee country, but we also believe, for now, in individual liberty, so I can let a tea slide. If your throat hurts, or you are British.
But tea has got to mean fucking TEA — like black tea, or like one of your less exotic herbals, like mint or chamomile, or at most rose hip, and only then if you’re feeling rascally. After you have dog-circled on the same couch where I am Kubler-Ross-ing in vain with the putrefying idea corpse before me, do NOT return with a Tiny Pot of Weird Smell.
It was like if patchouli and sandalwood had a baby. A baby they drowned in a bathtub full of apricot nectar. It was potent. And cloying. And like four feet from my nostrils. She let it steep, vapor-trailing out of the spout in the Tiny Pot, like a decanter of Hippie Poison Brewed By the Wicked Queen From Snow White. While she went off again. The only thing stopping me from pegging her in the back of the head with the Tiny Pot was my fear that the Weird Smell would then fill the room entirely.
She returned. Brandishing a cone of brown paper, three and half feet tall. She plucked and smoothed the Sweater Nest, crinkling like a craft paper Thunder Dome. If my eyes had a laser setting, they’d have sheared her diagonally in half.
She turned to me and said: “It’s rosemary,” in a tone meant to allay any Bouquet-Related Anxieties I might have been suffering from, while also somehow bragging about This Shitload of Rosemary I’m Cradling Like I Just Won a Fucking Beauty Pageant.
I looked around me, in desperation — in part to commiserate with the non-insane nearby, but mostly in the crazed hope that Thor’s hammer lay nearby so I could smash her into vapor. No luck.
I breathed the shaky sigh of relief of the POW who finds no maggots in his gruel. The trouble with declaring you’ve reached Rock Bottom, of course, is that some dickhead always shows up with drilling equipment. This she then did.
She gets up. AGAIN. Comes back, ass-wriggles back into Sweater Nest. Peels banana and sex-eats it, chewing open-mouthed, creating a soundscape like a dildo gyrating in thick pudding. I can’t even bring myself to tell you of the yogurt, so overcome am I by dry heaves when I think of it.
Then. After I have ground my teeth down to jagged Tic Tacs, she starts reading. I can’t look away.
She absently-but-in-a-way-that-palbably-hopes-you-guys-are-checking-this-out snaps off a sprig of rosemary. Which she draws back and forth languidly along her upper lip, theatrically transported by its scent. WHILE READING A THUMB-WORN AND GRUBBY FUCKING BOOK ABOUT HERBAL FUCKING HEALING.
And it is a wonder she is able to read so much as a line, since her fucking eyes are scanning the room, searching for people looking at her, so she could huff at them: “What? I’m just BEING over here. Just trying to BE.” She found no takers. So she started on the Pot of Weird Smell.
She pours a mug of the stuff, from which the Macbeth witches would flee. THEN SHE TWO-HANDS THE MUG LIKE WE’RE IN A NESCAFE COMMERCIAL. And then she sips it, this Tincture of Burning Man bullshit, and she does a little shoulder-shimmy, like she’s a kitty on a sun-kissed windowsill. And if I had the nuclear launch codes, I’d have called in a strike that would have vaporized the entire Midwest. And yes. I am aware that this would incinerate my children. But sacrifices must be made.
And I tried to pack up my shit and walk out of there. I did. But I was transfixed. I could HEAR my beard growing as surely as I could make out the nummy-noise mewling she was doing. AND THEN SHE STARTED STRETCHING.
She laces her fingers and extends her arms as high as they’ll go. She yoga-exhales. And she expels a cloud of Tiger Balm smell with every exertion. She twists her spine this way and that, grunting like newborn fawn, and I, though godless, start praying for a meteor.
She stirs her mug of Weird Smell. Like a raccoon washing its meal.
I feel the veins in my head distend like pythons that have choke-swallowed truck tires, and then erupt like a grenade in bag of gravy. I die, blood geysering out my tear ducts. And she ambles up to the counter to get more hot water in her Tiny Pot of Weird Smell.
A last contented picture, as my brain blinks black: I am Hulk-snapping bridge cables and flogging us all to death. And it is glorious.
You can find longer essays, satire, fiction, and info on the workshops I teach in Chicago on my site: ianbelknap.com — also, check out the WRITE CLUB podcast
