Floor manager of the local grocery was the highest commission he could manage.
His father, a curmudgeon of a man, once asked him, quite rhetorically, “You don’t get it, do you?”
But, missing the cue, he answered... and his father just shook his head.
He wrote a monograph on the Swedish supine, which is, briefly, used with auxiliary verbs to produce compound verb forms. It was poorly received and rejected by all journals he approached. The rejection letters were unusually unkind.
He noticed that when he stood parallel to the digital clocks at his local train station the lights at the centre were brighter than the rest: it was a rare achievement.
There was also a painting: boats on a beach, impressionist in style, but painted in bleached colours as if the painting itself had been sitting in the sun and had become faded.
Soon a second monograph appeared. This time it concerned telephone shoulder rests and their phenotypic similarity to hornbills. It made even less of an impression.
He ate; he drank water; he venerated; and that’s when happiness hit him like a train.
zylinski
Written on Tuesday, 23 February 2010