part of what was happening in her paintings, I soon realized. Whether it was Asia or other worlds, the air was thick with diffused colours. It was a beautiful distant place my mother went to when she painted. But I don’t think any of us in the family ever went there with her. The paintings themselves had created barriers, or maybe we had created them ourselves.
I was beginning to wish I had asked my mother more questions when she was alive.
CHAPTER FIVE
Advice
My advice to you today is to shut off your computer. Maybe there are two kinds of people: those who live life and those who are just an audience. We’re all becoming lazy and stupid because of our machines. Get out of the house and do anything that does not involve electricity. You don’t want to hear this, but it needs to be said.
Dave said that Lilly was right on track with her anger. “She is working it out,” he told me. But Lilly was rebellious and angry before my mother got sick, while she was sick, and now Lilly was still angry. She had pierced her nose recently, which would make anyone cranky, I would think. But she was proud of it. And she shaved off all the hair in her eyebrows. I don’t know why a person would do that, but she must have felt it was important. “It’s a statement,” she told me. Whatever that means.
Lilly had given up smoking herself, but she still stayed out late with people who seemed odious to me. Her “friend” Jake had bleached blond hair and wore a black leather jacket with little metal things stamped into it. Apparently, people, including Lilly, thought Jake was really something. But I wasn’t impressed. He always had a look on his face like he had just done something really nasty and felt good about it. I’m sure he had been working on that look for many years. Lilly thought he was “deep.”
If you asked him what he’d been up to he always answered, “Not much.” In that regard, I think he had some sincerity.
Jake, along with the others, encouraged Lilly to stay out too late doing “not much,” but so far it hadn’t seemed to do her much harm. I think hers was a crowd that tried to be nasty, cruel, and even hurtful — but they couldn’t quite pull it off. So they wandered around in some cynical limbo world of what someone once called “quiet desperation.”
I explained this all to Dave and he said that this was a “common malady” of many young people today. (Not like when he was growing up and young people knew exactly why they were angry and who they were angry at.) Anger, even frustrated anger, Dave would explain, is better than apathy. Dave was a real stickler when it came to apathy. He ranted about apathy. Just to get his goat, I told him I was apathetic about apathy. He almost lost his cookies until he realized I was messing with his head.
“Good one, dude,” he said, finally taking a breath. “Physician heal thyself. Right on.” Then he tightened the rubber band on his little ponytail and we continued talking about me and my problem of acting so normal.
Disappointment with my short-lived smoking career sent me back to a traditional cafeteria lunch with Darrell. Darrell was a loner like me, and when two loners go separate paths, well, you just have two individual loners instead of two loners who hang out together.
“I felt forsaken,” Darrell said. I know that doesn’t sound like anything a kid would say, but neither Darrell nor I have ever spoken in the same manner as our contemporaries. This is why sometimes we were referred to as “intellectual snot” — or “snots” if we were being referred to in the plural.
“It was just an experiment,” I said.
Darrell understood all about experiments. “How’d it turn out?”
“I had high expectations, but it didn’t make orbit.”
“Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt for it.”
We liked to mix idioms. In fact, we liked the word “idiom” a lot and fantasized starting a band called the Idiom Idiots, just Darrell and me and about a hundred thousand dollars worth of computerized music and sound gear.
While I’d been trying to learn how to smoke, Darrell had been up to his own experiments. I noticed he was wolfing down a tuna sandwich: whole wheat, heavy mayonnaise, sliced pickles protruding from the edges. “Martino, I thought long and hard about your alliance with coffin nails and came to the conclusion that I too need some way to break out of this shell I’ve created for myself.”
Heck, we were both a couple of geeks but, I had always thought, well-adjusted geeks, in a world that was soon to be ruled by geeks like us: non-smokers, smarter than we let on, not particularly attractive to girls or women, young men who handed in acceptable homework assignments and went to bed early.
Darrell offered me half of his tuna sandwich. His mother always cut it in half to form two rectangles. My own mother never failed to cut corner to corner, creating two perfect triangles. If she made tuna fish, she would always put fresh dill or fennel in it. I accepted the tuna fish and Darrell brushed his hands theatrically, leaned over, and pulled a dozen eggs out of his book bag. He placed the egg container in front of him and, like he was opening some box of precious jewels, he lifted the lid.
“I’ve come to the conclusion I was leading a much too sheltered life. As you know, I studied the Klingon dictionary and became somewhat proficient in the language. But it wasn’t until I found myself staying up late conversing on a chat room in Klingon with people all over the planet — for up to two hours at a time — that I realized I needed to get out of the house and do something a bit more ambitious with my life.”
“Now you’re raising chickens?”
“No.”
“Ukrainian egg decorating?”
“Get serious.”
“I give. What are you doing with the eggs?”
“Revenge,” was Darrell’s one word answer.
CHAPTER SIX
Stuff That May or May Not Be Important
Human kind has never perfected alternatives to war, but there must ultimately be alternatives. Simple co-operation between people and countries is probably not sexy enough. Deep inside the grey matter of our brains, they say, we are still basically lizards. If you dig further, we are probably just amoebas, but we don’t think like amoebas anymore (the exception being the writers and producers of most TV sitcoms).
Our reptilian brains seize on territorial notions, convincing our weaker rational brains that we have legitimate reasons for organized violence, and we become aggravated and aggressive.
It is my contention that we are not evolving into anything more advanced than we now are — at least our brains are not evolving. We may end up without a little toe or a thumb but we will still have urges to do harm and to wage war.
Since evolution will not save us from ourselves — in fact, it may make us more aggressive — we must seek alternatives.
