I sat against the wall of the Oak Gourmet and listened to cars bottom out as they came off the hill and crossed Buchanan. My head hurt and my feet hurt and I didn’t have anywhere in particular to be until the last train to the East Bay at midnight or so; I cracked left eye just enough to look at my wrist without moving any more than necessary. Quarter to eight.
Boredom is a funny thing. When you’re just killing time, the most comfortable chair you ever sat in will start to feel itchy and uncomfortable after a while; you just can’t stay still... in Iraq, the seats in the Stryker could almost have been designed to be the most uncomfortable perch anybody ever devised, until you spent a day fighting your way through some crappy hamlet on the edge of nowhere and then the Sergeant said ‘OK, load up, we’re outa here’ and you crawled into the back of the vehicle and it was like being in the womb again.
When I was wounded, I noticed that boredom worked differently. It was like all of my attention was being adequately occupied by the various perforations in my flesh, so I didn’t have time to be bored; there were weeks where I just lay there, Being Injured, before I healed enough to get bored.
I was not bored, sitting wedged against the wall on the sidewalk outside that little yuppie food and liquor mart. I was tired and I hurt and the little spot on the sidewalk was being my own little piece of sanctuary, the sounds of the cars hitting that little spot where the hill went flat -- a succession of little scrap-shush, scrape-shush sounds -- somehow fired my imagination, made me imagine that...
Well, I used to have this little car, Japanese thing from the seventies, and every time I went over a speed bump the bottom of it would end up scraping on the bump when it was between the front and back wheels; and every single time, I imagined that vital parts were being sheared away off the bottom of my car, important linkages and brackets being weakened, one scrape at a time, until at some point the exhaust system or the transmission or something would just... fall right out.
Every time I hit a speed bump in that car, I’d wonder if today was the day that the guts would fall out of the bottom, the day I’d leave a trail of arcane bits of broken metal behind me as I chugged slowly to a stop beside the road.
One of the things I learned in the Army was that cars are designed to have their bottoms scraped, from time to time; the guys that design them know about speed bumps and hills with sharp transitions, so they have plates and bars and whatnot designed to get whacked occasionally. The cars out on Oak street did this every day; this was a commuter throughway, the cars going by today would go by tomorrow at the same time.
That little scrape-shush was part of the system; it was supposed to do that. It was how the car dealt with situations which were maybe outside the ideal use case, but not to be unexpected; it was part of the car’s system of resilience against a hard world.
I adjusted the way one of my legs was positioned. I hadn’t brought back any really crippling injuries back from Iraq with me, but I had learned that every time you damage a joint, a movement system in your body, it might regain its functionality but it doesn’t quite feel the same way after; so the way you’ve been sitting since you were a little kid might suddenly be weirdly uncomfortable. You have to learn to sit again, one little repositioning at a time.
I let my mind wander, back over the job interview from this morning, replaying it and mentally adjusting, tightening up my answers for the next time I had to use them. Walked through the places I’d dropped an application or a resume. Re-imagined the words I’d used to ask for an application, considered different angles on how to hand one back. Sitting quietly, I updated my plan for what I was going to do tomorrow.
Scrape-shush, scrape-shush.
Boredom is a funny thing. When you’re just killing time, the most comfortable chair you ever sat in will start to feel itchy and uncomfortable after a while; you just can’t stay still... in Iraq, the seats in the Stryker could almost have been designed to be the most uncomfortable perch anybody ever devised, until you spent a day fighting your way through some crappy hamlet on the edge of nowhere and then the Sergeant said ‘OK, load up, we’re outa here’ and you crawled into the back of the vehicle and it was like being in the womb again.
When I was wounded, I noticed that boredom worked differently. It was like all of my attention was being adequately occupied by the various perforations in my flesh, so I didn’t have time to be bored; there were weeks where I just lay there, Being Injured, before I healed enough to get bored.
I was not bored, sitting wedged against the wall on the sidewalk outside that little yuppie food and liquor mart. I was tired and I hurt and the little spot on the sidewalk was being my own little piece of sanctuary, the sounds of the cars hitting that little spot where the hill went flat -- a succession of little scrap-shush, scrape-shush sounds -- somehow fired my imagination, made me imagine that...
Well, I used to have this little car, Japanese thing from the seventies, and every time I went over a speed bump the bottom of it would end up scraping on the bump when it was between the front and back wheels; and every single time, I imagined that vital parts were being sheared away off the bottom of my car, important linkages and brackets being weakened, one scrape at a time, until at some point the exhaust system or the transmission or something would just... fall right out.
Every time I hit a speed bump in that car, I’d wonder if today was the day that the guts would fall out of the bottom, the day I’d leave a trail of arcane bits of broken metal behind me as I chugged slowly to a stop beside the road.
One of the things I learned in the Army was that cars are designed to have their bottoms scraped, from time to time; the guys that design them know about speed bumps and hills with sharp transitions, so they have plates and bars and whatnot designed to get whacked occasionally. The cars out on Oak street did this every day; this was a commuter throughway, the cars going by today would go by tomorrow at the same time.
That little scrape-shush was part of the system; it was supposed to do that. It was how the car dealt with situations which were maybe outside the ideal use case, but not to be unexpected; it was part of the car’s system of resilience against a hard world.
I adjusted the way one of my legs was positioned. I hadn’t brought back any really crippling injuries back from Iraq with me, but I had learned that every time you damage a joint, a movement system in your body, it might regain its functionality but it doesn’t quite feel the same way after; so the way you’ve been sitting since you were a little kid might suddenly be weirdly uncomfortable. You have to learn to sit again, one little repositioning at a time.
I let my mind wander, back over the job interview from this morning, replaying it and mentally adjusting, tightening up my answers for the next time I had to use them. Walked through the places I’d dropped an application or a resume. Re-imagined the words I’d used to ask for an application, considered different angles on how to hand one back. Sitting quietly, I updated my plan for what I was going to do tomorrow.
Scrape-shush, scrape-shush.
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