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November 29, 2007

Vernacular Fun Rendered Transparent

“Shorty has been riding the Victrola lately” didn’t just spring from nowhere, that much (and more) I can tell you.

I was visiting my friend in Portland, see, and we had stopped by this place to see this installation he had curated, and I really liked it, especially the photographs of the Knights of Columbus Evening School classes. Then we were walking back and there was this little white dog. And I said, “Little white dogs,” and then I set in to tell him about how my friend down in Texas had found herself saddled with this little white dog, this Bichon Frise, and how if the little white dog didn’t shape up after a couple of visits from the dog trainer, the little white dog was entering a world of pain.

Then later that night we got to talking about dreams and how we both like to tell our dreams and that some people like to hear about our dreams but not everybody. And I told how sometimes when I wake up I’m in no-man’s-land between the world asleep and the world awake and that it takes a while to cross the border, how sometimes I’ll be talking and be talking to the world awake as though it were the world asleep.

So after we ate and drank and listened to records on the Victrola it was time for sleep, and he showed me another Victrola there in the bedroom and records, too, such as “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”. He said if I wanted to listen to records in the night it was okay to crank up the Victrola and play them. But I did not.

And then it was morning, and I arose. There he was, up already, in the kitchen making coffee, and I went in and said, “Good morning,” and he did too, then asked how I had slept, and I thought to trick him and he would think I was still in the world asleep. So I said, “Well, if you think it fit to let that little-bitty white dog run a-round and a-round and a-round on that Victrola all night long, that’s your affair, and it may be none of my business but it was me I’d think about signing up for those obedience classes they offer through the Knights of Columbus Evening School.” Thinking to fool him that I was talking dream-talk but I spoiled it because I commenced to laugh once I got to the part about the Knights of Columbus Evening School.

On the day after when we went up the old highway and over to the coast to see the Pacific Ocean we were at this place where we walked on the beach and on the way back there was this man and this woman and they had a little-bitty white dog. The man and the woman, they did not look thin or rich or young but they had this little-bitty white dog and the man said, “Shorty! SHORTY! Get back here!” We sat in the car for a while till they were all out aways on the beach, then I started the car and turned it around and said, “I would have hated to have run over Shorty.”

That was when we drove back to Portland, and the very next day I went back to Illinois.

“Shorty has been riding the Victrola lately” is what my friend wrote me in a message the other day. I do not know for certain what was in his mind, but he said it sounded like some kind of dope talk, and that is how it sounds to me.

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