Ribbons, a novel -- Chapter Three

Ribbons

THREE

Excerpt #3 from Burl Wonder’s Journal
Dated 12.24.2010
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         My right eye makes everything a little bit bluer.  It’s hardly noticeable, but it’s there.  My left eye makes everything sharper and a little more golden.  So, my right eye is my soft artist-eye and my left eye is the one I use when signing contracts or balancing my checkbook, regardless of what a neurobiologist might have to say about it.  If you were depressed, you would want to be comforted by my right eye.  If you were disillusioned and wanted the raw truth about yourself, you would need to consult with my left eye instead.  Both eyes are hazel according to my state I.D. card.  I don’t really think they are hazel, which is a kind of golden-brownish green, but it says so as plain as day.
         My I.D. card also says my hair is brown, but that’s only partially true.  A lot of it is silver and white even though I’m only thirty-two years old.  Plus, I accidentally shaved it all off last month due to a happy accident with the clippers--not in a betting accident concerning the NBA team, the L.A. Clippers, where points were shaved and I won, but thought I was going to lose so I shaved my head prematurely and liked it, so, no harm done--no, I mean, “clippers,” as in the shaving tool, in case I was being too vague.  Anyway, I liked the way it looked and especially once my bald head got a little color up there, so I kept doing it.  A lot of people say that you can tell a person’s true hair-color by looking at their eyebrows; but I’ve found that to be false in as many cases as it is true and particularly in my case, which is what I’m writing about.  So my true hair-color is known only to micro-organisms living deep inside my scalp, and to God, of course.
         I’m six-feet and three-inches tall, according to my state I.D., and weigh about one-hundred seventy-five pounds.  I have no problem with those measurements.  And I don’t have a problem with the word, “pounds,” being abbreviated, “lbs.,” even though I don’t know why that is.
         My state I.D. doesn’t say anything about my problem with alcohol, but you could probably guess at it since I am thirty-two years old and carry a state I.D. rather than a driver’s license, which is a privilege to carry and not a right, and you’d do well to keep that in mind.  Trust me on this one.  It also says that I am a male, which I can prove, and that I was born December 8, 1978, which I cannot prove.  Of course, this means that I cannot prove that I’m thirty-two years old, nor can the state, nor can my mother.  Apparently Barack Obama faced a similar inconvenience with state-sponsored proof.  I may have to try and trace my genealogy back through the Bible, but that will take a while and I have a story to tell, so it will have to wait and--at least for now--all parties involved will be trusted by default concerning the matter of my true age.  And that must be what all the atheists are so upset about: How trustworthy can a Book be if it can’t tell me my birthday?
         Anyhoo:
         I’m a good cook.  I’m not good enough to be a chef, or even a sous chef, for that matter, who is like a second-in-command chef, like being Vice President of the kitchen because you couldn’t get the votes necessary to be Chef, and the guy who eventually would become Chef thought you’d still be a good option to have on the ticket because that bitch Susanne already took Andre, and Andre is the obvious first-choice, so Chef thought he’d go with someone who sounded a little less ethnic, and your name is Joe, and sure enough, Chef was right: The fucking General Manager really is a racist!  No one ever believed Chef when he said he suspected that the guy in the office was a bigot, but now he has proof!  Except, of course, racism is impossible to actually prove, just like Faith in God and just like a lack of Faith in God are impossible to prove as being the correct belief, no matter how much evidence is there and no matter how badly you want to prove your position; and going back through the Bible isn’t gonna’ do diddly-shit for this one, so we’re all--believers and non-believers alike--up Poop’s Creek this time, ya’ll!
         Like I was saying:
         I am good at making the things I know how to make and, on occasion, creating new dishes.  Plus, I use my artist-eye to make sure each plate is aesthetically pleasing and my analyst-eye to judge it for nutritional value.  It works out pretty well, enough so that I bought my own knives.  So there’s that.
         My favorite foods to make are Italian pasta dishes with loads of fresh vegetables, sausage, chicken, sauces, cheeses, breads and spices.  It would be great to finish everything off with a nice, red wine--maybe a Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir--but, as I mentioned earlier, I have a problem with alcohol.  So, I usually just go with water or ginger ale and lemon slices.
         Unless I just say, “Fuck it,” and go with the wine, which inevitably leads to more wine and that leads to vodka and then I’ve smoked all my cigarettes, so I have to go get more and--Hey!--while I’m here I may as well pick up another bottle; of course, that means I’ll need an extra pack of cigarettes, too, and--Hey!  Whoa!  Where’d all my pasta go?--that’s when I realize that I made the pasta on Tuesday and it’s now Monday, so I’ve been drunk for six days and that’s no good, and my pasta’s gone and everyone is mad at me because I forgot to pay the light bill--Well, of course I forgot to pay the light bill; who the hell needs light for a week-long black-out?  Where’ve you been?  Drunk?--and so, three days later, I finally accept the fact that I should have just gone with water or ginger ale and lemon slices. 
         I also like to cook Mexican dishes, but don’t even get me started on Sangria; and besides, I only know the basics when it comes to Mexican food so that it just seems like the same meal over and over and over and over and over and over, which is why Italian without wine is absolutely my favorite food to make.
         Before cooking, my major contribution to the arts was painting.  I worked as a canvas artist, muralist, portrait artist and all-around decorative painter from the age of nineteen to twenty-nine.  I was, and presumably am still, very good with color and balance depending, respectively, on the chosen eye.  I used to have an unnatural reserve of confidence, which is necessary when you’re getting paid loads of money to make things up as you go.  I still do the occasional side-project or sell the occasional piece, but mostly I just drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and think about how I would paint certain things if I had any desire to actually do so.  I gave up painting a while ago because I thought it was enabling my daily alcohol-ritual--there’s just too much alone time as an artist--and besides, have you seen the state of affairs in painting today?  A person would need a daily alcohol-ritual to paint some of that stuff.  Probably some LSD, too.  But that’s neither here nor there, which begs the question: Where’d it go?  And those types of Zen-like questions are impossible to answer unless you are drunk and tripping and probably have a little Red Bull in you, too; and as it turns out, my daily alcohol-ritual has survived just fine for a long time without the paint brushes anyway; and so-- Huh?
         I guess the point is that I don’t paint much anymore, nor do I really have any friends these days.  I have friendly people in my life, like Sarah and Justin from college; the librarian from the library, obviously; Sandra from Jacksonville; Jason from when I was a painter; Jax and Bubbles from high school; and Mike, also a painter, although he doesn’t drink which makes me think, “He must really suck!”
         Sometimes I wish I had more friends, but I think that’s mostly just so I could say, “Wow, look at all the friends I have!”  The truth is that I’m not a very social person.  I like people, but get bored easily and then come off as snobby or arrogant, which I’m not, though I can’t prove that I’m not.
         My last, really good friend, one that I saw on a daily basis, was Gabe.  He was, and may still be, owner of a small company I painted for in Indianapolis.  He was, and may still be, genuinely funny and once told me that, according to his stepson, his farts smell like blueberries, which is an example of how funny he could be and how he’s working tirelessly to instill a comic appreciation in the kids at home, too.  He was, and may still be, a very talented artist.  He instructed me once--while painting a bathroom’s walls to look like a pattern of diamond-shaped, pleated fabric--to imagine I was painting skinny vaginas at the top of each diamond and fat ones at the bottom; (it’s a perspective thing and would take too long to explain here and, besides, I’m a guy who likes to stay on target and not go off on tangents because--Hey!--next thing you know, you’re off on some wild goose chase to explain a previous explanation’s validity and, by the time you get there, you’ve forgotten just what the hell you were trying to say originally, which is frustrating and that’s why I try to avoid people who can’t simply STAY ON TOPIC.  See how I used all capital letters there?  That’s how you make a keyboard scream, baby!)
         So, we were painting the fat-and-skinny, diamond-vagina, pleated-pattern wall when a man came through to hang a bathroom mirror at one point before we’d finished completely, took one look at our work and exclaimed, “Whoo-ee!  That is sexy!”
         Gabe then looked at me and said, “See?  I told you the vaginas would work!” 
         And now I say to you, “See?  I told you that Gabe was funny!”
         Gabe’s wife kept the books and took meetings, though her primary job seemed to be to remind me that, whatever task I happened to be doing, no matter how intricate the design, it wasn’t rocket science, which is both an assertion and an assumption that I never made in the first place. 
         I often had to meet them in the mornings at their home, the basement of which served as our studio, and she always insisted on wearing loose-fitting, droopy-necked tops with no bra underneath while helping me to sort through boxes of materials and tools and whatever else I might need for the day’s project.  She would lean forward over a box on the floor filled with small tubes of colorant, for example, pulling and calling each one out while I stood ticking them off a list and looking directly down her shirt at a pair of fully-exposed, jiggling and swinging boobs, nipples and all.  She would look up and smile at me periodically and I would wonder whether she knew or not.  If she was unaware of her exposed breasts, then, it was like my own naughty secret.  Still, the notion that she might know and, better yet, that she displayed herself intentionally for me each morning without acknowledging that she knew, created in my mind an idea for a fantastic, tension-filled, role-playing game to be employed often while trying to spice things up with my girlfriend at home.  I’d play the hired hand and she’d play the housewife who ordered me around, exposing herself purposefully, but only giving me the slightest hints that this was, in fact, the case.  Sometimes she’d ask me to do something without telling me that we were playing and I’d begrudgingly attend to the task under the assumption that I was simply performing a chore; and that was ingenious of her because, hell, if a game is played as a parody of a real-life situation, but then you don’t tell one of the parties involved that there’s a game going on at all, thus eliminating the parody, then the game is no longer a game and has, in fact, become a real-life situation itself!  The game could go on for hours when there was an actual chore to be done; and a lot of things got done around that apartment that would not have otherwise.  I often wonder if the pipes truly did become loose as often as it seems they did, or if, in fact, she had come to love the game more than I did; and, of course, you can’t really prove that one party loves an object any more than another party loves that object unless you own a Love Detector, which I know for a fact that you do not, and so we are stuck with yet another conundrum where the Bible can offer me no help at all.  Thanks a lot, Bible!  (Maybe these atheists are onto something--I kid.) 
         Of course, to willingly give your life for another might qualify as a Love Detector-Detector, like the whole Jesus thing, but who on earth would do that for some silly sex-game?  If my girlfriend died for that sex-game then I would have to concede that she must really LOVE that game, with a capital L-O-V-E, because that’s how you make a keyboard scream, baby!  Of course, L-O-V-E is also God’s favorite nickname, though I cannot prove that He cares for it at all; His favorite nickname might be Captain Crazy or Goddissimo or Lord of the Bling, in which case we’re all pretty screwed.  But even if that is the case, and Heaven is like a big house party with God playing DJ, we’d probably still be less screwed than if He simply doesn’t exist at all.  Because if He’s not in charge, then, that means that people like me are in charge and, trust me folks, you don’t want that.  Also, if there is no God then there is no L-O-V-E, regardless of how much my keyboard loves to scream, baby.  And even if there could be L-O-V-E without G-O-D, I would likely not recognize it because that would infer that L-O-V-E is merely an instinct like any other, and that things like Right and Wrong must be instinctive, too.  But if I’m just an animal like all the other animals--and I really L-O-V-E animals, by the way--and all the other animals obey their instincts at all times, then why do I find myself continuously disobeying my Right-versus-Wrong instinct, even though there’s something behind those instincts that screams at me in ALL CAPS to choose one action over another?  And what in the world-without-God is that thing behind those instincts anyway?  Because, if you ask me, that thing that tells me to deny my instinct to look out for myself first, and encourages me to put myself in harm’s way to help another, doesn’t pass the test when it comes to natural selection--which is something I do believe in, because it just makes sense that the better-equipped would survive whether or not Someone is in charge.  And yet, here we are: rulers of all creation--sorry, did I say “creation?”--despite the fact that we have no claws and have no fangs and are constantly being instructed by some Invisible Force inside telling us to do counter-intuitive things and really should not have survived at all.
         But we’ve got brains!  And that makes sense until you go back to the fact that our brains are telling us to endanger ourselves to help our fellow man.  And that thing behind the instincts playing referee, as it were, cannot itself be an instinct because the ref’s got the whistle, not the ball.  And Who put that referee in there, anyway?  Maybe that’s my herd instinct, which we developed through natural selection a long time ago because--Hey!--there’s strength in numbers and other benefits, too; and this was a long time ago, way before the Colts won the Super Bowl with a referee who had a whistle and decided which team should have the ball and at what time they should have it.  But wouldn’t the self-preservation instinct trump the herd instinct each and every time?  Otherwise, there would be no preserved self to crawl out of the primordial sludge and develop the herd instinct that tells me it would be best to jump off a cliff if it saves another’s life, even though I’m not going to listen.  So that’s no good and there must be Something else.
         There must be Something telling me to save that man in the burning building when I’m thinking I need to hit the gym to survive because I’ll be the fittest then, and I’ll get all the chicks.  That Something must be above and beyond all of my instincts.  And let’s face it: That poor man is a dead man anyway because there’s no way I’m running in to help, no matter what that Something encouraging my herd instinct that is telling me to suppress my me-first instinct wants me to do.  Oh, I’ll feel bad about it later on, and do you know why?  Because I’ll be alive; and I’ll be alive because I disobeyed that L-O-V-E that told me to be brave.  And if that dead man was your friend, I’ll apologize to you because I would feel the same if you had failed to help out, too.  And I’ll ask for your forgiveness because--wait, what’s going on here?  Now, that Something blowing whistles at my instincts is blowing whistles at my conscience and insisting that I ask to be forgiven for saving my own ass.  “WTF?” my keyboard is now screaming in ALL CAPS.  This Something behind everything, apparently, that is supposed to be me, I thought, but doesn’t seem to have my best interests in mind--which I thought was like a staple in the instinct marketplace--is making me feel guilty, which sucks but I can’t turn it off.  It seems I must have faulty wiring that the rest of mankind has not, because anything with a brain like mine that operates in this way--with instincts telling it what to do, and then a referee instinct instructing the other instincts to, “Speak louder!” or, “Shut up now!” and, “This time THAT instinct is to be obeyed, but last time you should have listened to THE OTHER GUY;” who seems to be in charge even though I never listen to him, and “him” is “me” so that I’m obeying and disobeying myself at the same time--would surely have never made it past monkey status and this actually would have turned out to be the Planet of the Apes, which is a good movie.
         Anyway:
         We should get back to the morals of this story.  And they are as follows: remember that eyebrows are not to be trusted when determining a person’s true hair-color; never trust an identification document without first consulting the Bible, which is useless; always avoid drinking wine with your pasta; all true artists must continually be drunk and/or tripping; friendship only matters as a means to boost your social-networking statistics; if my old friend, Gabe, ever farts near you don’t worry for it will smell like blueberries; diamonds are a girl’s best friend, apparently, because they remind her of her sex, whether she’s skinny or fat; and, most importantly of all, when it comes to the case of the real-life version in my boss’s basement, of the sex-game in my head which my brilliant girlfriend turned into its own, real-life version of a sex-game that was no longer a game, whether it was mine alone or an unspoken dance between the boss’s wife and the young day-laborer, at first, it wasn’t a bad way to start the day, though my inventory counts were usually unreliable.
         And that, though I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, is the true moral of the story and the reason I simply had to tell it in as few words as possible.  And that true moral can best be summed up thusly:
         Math and Sex don’t mix, kids.  If you take anything away from my volumes of wisdom, make it this lesson.  The inventory count you save may be your own!