[Name Removed] says that occasionally, like once a year, I’ll
need a really large rubber band. I wonder if it’s because he sees
that I can keep stuff together for a little while, all neat (and bound!).
Or that, armed (okay, palmed; thumbed and forefingered) with one,
I can sting skin into one heckuva welt and be back at the stove
before anyone knows what hit them. Or, horrified, I wonder if
he’s referencing that my presence produces what is for him an
idea of a 21st century one man jug band. I slowly lower myself
onto the couch. I am a 21st century one man jug band. With-
out knowing how much time’s threads have been strung, I am
transported unflinchingly to the beginning of a planned exercise
(or indulgence) wherein I am folding myself neatly but sternly into
the back of the bottom drawer of our fancy chest of drawers (the
one we keep in the sunroom), quite purposefully, in an effort to
better concentrate on the future. Here in the future, I already
know the significance of hot boxes. I live in one about the size of
a coffin. While inside the dark drawer, I remember things I should
have taken care of much sooner, like the squirrels in the attic, for
example, and the sunlight that flickers across the island estate.
And also there’s that two-week suicide watch I had promised a
certain pair of overly enthusiastic interventionists. What’s to be
done of that now? The astonishing necessity of memory! How
inconvenient that it shows up, all too often, a mere half of a
minute tardy (but nevertheless with such bravado!). Of embar-
rassing note: the deep remorse of finding oneself super-saturated,
right at the moment that I’m all but settled in to the (now en-
closed) drawer, agonizing over how I am such a ditz that I might
probably could suck down nearly a dozen bottled waters before
sunrise. The gym wasn’t that thirsty, I recall in an attempt to
make light of my plight (two days, one night, stuck in a dark
drawer in a sunroom in the middle of a long midwestern
summer). I am a real tip-of-the-tongue mystery, I am. My
head was spinning violently, as it began to slowly factor in
that there’d be impending humidity on top of the impending
heat. One thing can clearly be concluded from that weekend:
throughout the duration of it there was one glaring theme:
I could not escape that fleeting sentence about rubber bands,
and there was hardly a minute that did not go by but that I had
come up with yet another flimsy but possible reason he might
have brought that up at that particular moment. So incredibly
out of nowhere, as it were. Perhaps it was a vague Groundhog
Day-type reference, how today mirrors yesterday, which, in
turn mirrors tomorrow as we bounce around in each and all
as if there is something unique about a day; or, along those
same lines, as if there were any factors of significance dif-
ferentiating one of us humans from any other. Or maybe
his passing remark was a subtle pun about time travel.
A knowing nod to string theory? Is he even fond of
string theory? I’m confidently feeling a negative on
that idea, given physics on the one hand, psychosis
in the other. But I remain curious to this very day.
And. Well. Lately, I have let my thoughts move
ever so gently to the fact once a year or two, I do
attempt to utilize a rubber band or two. That is,
in a way that doesn’t cause harm to others, but
that instead provides that modicum of order and
that sense of inseparability that, and this should
go without saying of course, only a rubber band
might provide. They do have a pretty unique
purpose. Or two, it would be argued, if you
could ask my dear grandmother to chime in
on the subject. Whatever, daydreams! ’’
What ever, you inferences from references
and you referenced inferences! We must
get back to the story of the summer I
beat myself up with a bobby pin. I’d
not meant it to be funny, it just was.
