Posted by Adam Cadavrian is writer of books six feet tall. He equivocates between the lines with phrases in a dialect meant for all. Edwin Immemoriam; institutional language in one’s own tongue. A regional variant become a national standard, like Harry Truman and Snuffy Smith; like pictograph to tongue, the mind to self, mirage invariant.
What are your linguistic features? Adolphian. Strong verbs, changing vowels in their root. Drink, drank, drunk. Weak verbs are vowels unchanging. No new strong verbs. Yo, waxen was once strong but now weak: waxen.
Noun declenscions. Case endings. Masculine, feminine, neuter. Witherwearnesse is a feminine noun.
Religious Latin is a devil with a cross, looking toward the west with an erection.
Z
Connie Cliffnut asked me to drive her to her friend’s house, wait for an hour and then take her home. She told her mother I had to do some shopping and was going her way. She has me drop her off to get fucked by some guy or another once a week, and has two other boys drop her off at other boys’ houses to get fucked once a week. Connie lost her driver’s license the day after her 16th birthday. The new lady sheriff pulled her over for rolling through a stop sign and smelled weed in the car.
I saw Edwin Umbrian talking to Skip the other day, did I tell you that? Connie said absent mindedly.
Yeah? He talks to everyone. Wish I coulda heard that exchange.”
Yeah? She smiles and gives a shake of her head.
What?
You have no idea, do you? You spend all your time drawing and writing, and that makes you who you are, I guess, but you don’t know much about what goes on around you.
Is that what your dad says?
No, it’s what mom says.
How does she know? She never talks to me.
She asks my dad about you. What you talk about.
What’s her interest in me?
I don’t know. (Hastily, indicating she does, but is uncomfortable talking about it.)
Anyway, did Skip tell him to go blow himself or something?
Hah hah! No, Edwin doesn’t pay that way.
No way!
Oh, yeah.
Jesus.
(No wonder Edwin’s always talking about speaking in tongues. He be talkin’ jibberish with Skip’s dick up his ass! I think to myself and laugh. The things people want to believe about each other in order to laugh at them. I deplore Connie now and need to change the subject.)
Anyway, this Bill, the character whose notebooks I’ve been reading…
Look of boredom. Eyes turned toward her window.
There is silence between us for the five minutes until I pull up to her friend’s house.
See you in an hour.
Don’t make me wait this time.
She turns away from my insignificant words.
Z
The summer is moving on through August and it is a new school year for professor Cliffnut. I often think of why the Cliffnuts, including Connie, have no problem with me, a forty four year old man hanging around their daughter. I want to ask Prof Cliffnut but he would probably say that I already knew the answer and it wouldn’t be fair to make him tell me so I can be resentful toward him.
Edwin is different lately. He no longer gives me a solid stare when he sees me. He looks away. He knows I know. There must be a war going on for his soul. Will he beat himself? It is a story that has usurped the one I was writing about Bill Dinklpfuss. I have often wondered at women during sex and how some just let themselves go, and some could be awarded a safe conduct medal. I think of a cob assed Edwin dancing on a dick in a St. Vitus dance of ecstasy and he doesn’t have to hide it or deny it anymore. He is so wild with desire he doesn’t care who sees or what he has to put up with after.
Z
I have come across passages in Bill’s notebooks that are eerily coincidental to what I was theorizing. He speaks of language as a network of contexts merging and divesting, alive and throbbing. Bill’s writing is referential. His story and the things that are important to him are a sort of feeling for understanding of himself and others. He is a gentle person. No doubt a shunned and misunderstood individual. Reading his story puts me in a dark place. I am not like Bill. I am more emotional. Every moment about me is willfully selfish. Bill is selfish, but because he doesn’t care to share himself. I wish I could but I’m anxious about others all the time.
Reading his notebooks I am certain he was a sort of house boy for his mother, who seems to have lacked a conscience. I shouldn’t judge but I don’t think I like her much and it is getting in the way of conceiving a character around her.
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