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Unanswerable
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Half the Pressure Twice the Speed
All sorts of innuendo is bouncing around on the tube. My husband is watching John Huston's The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart has just hoisted Peter Lorre up, whacked him one and hissed, "When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it."
I heard it, but I'm not watching. I'm not really working either. I have Nap Ear right now and it means I'm in a state of unpleasant paralysis. This is the condition that sets in when one listens so hard to the bleats and yelps coming from the would-be sleeper's room, trying to decide whether to give up on a nap or not. There's no full-fledged wailing or chanting ("Mamamamamamamamamama Ho!"), but there is just enough noise to let one know that this is no nap and the chances are very slim that one will set in.
This is a problem when one had hoped naptime would allow one to at least glance at the thing with the looming deadline. Instead, I just sit, clenched, waiting until I give up.
And I'm back. It is hours later and the nap was indeed, bucked, but now bedtime has been enforced. While I was waiting to become the butt of the naptime joke (I'm still laughing), I happened to read a tidbit on Maud Newton's bookish blog that cast my mind into the past.
She writes with contempt about some highly fetishized pencils that certain writers just adore. Of course they are no longer manufactured and people sell them for enormous sums on eBay.
Years and years ago, I worked briefly for a monster. She was notoriously awful and kind of an embarrassment to the folks around her, but the word was that she was very smart and good at some part of her job, so there is a reason for everything. She was the classic type: angry, snotty, threw things, cold, tricky, testing... the whole box. And she was also deeply affected, which was fascinating. She always wore the same kind of clothing- rigorously shapeless and had a wide assortment of red shoes. There was something novel about her hair, but I can't recall what it was now.
This woman also had a penchant for these, now famously discontinued pencils: the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602. These were the only acceptable implements for some kind of work that she did, which I wasn't allowed to see, but which I served. The pencil was on its way out for years before production finally stopped in 1998, and when I went to special order them from the company's supply man, I was told that no one needed to use a $2 pencil (given their current value, Mr. Supply must be suffering some sort of agony). I was then sent out to various stationery stores, the dustier the better, to gather as many of the cherished Blackwings as I could find. This cost a lot, and here I must confess something: I procured a handful of these for myself. In my desk now, there are 7, I just counted, silver pencils, completely intact, though their erasers are probably quite old. I don't write with pencils, usually, and I certainly didn't admire this woman, so I don't know why I got them, but here they are.
They won't put the kid through preschool, but I look at them now with the same thought I had then. If you're going to be affected, you need to be responsible for your own affectations.
It doesn't do any good to send some assistant; no matter how ridiculous you think she is, out to find these things. It should be part of your rare eccentricity that you will go to complicated lengths to find your costly and easily used up talismans. Look, all of these journalists swear by the formerly lowbrow Tab (cola), and now they have to jump all over the place to get it but I hope they have only limited assistant access and can contact their suppliers themselves.
Pardon my rant. There was no nap. This deadline is scary and I have the nagging suspicion that I am somehow under the weather.
All of which means I should get to the business at hand.
posted by Elise at 7:32 PM
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Laura K. said...
You know, I don't know who that New Yorker writer's been talking to about Tab, but it's right on every grocery shelf here, and was on every shelf in Texas. The problem isn't that Tab's not available, the problem is that many years ago, they stopped making Tab with saccharine. Aside from the fact that adding Nutrasweet totally changed the taste, it meant that I could no longer drink Tab...and I know this because I actually LIKED Tab. Tab held onto the saccharine longer than any other soda, but eventually it, too, fell under the sway of the deadly aspartame.
6/12/2006 8:54 PM
Elise said...
Could it be that there is somewhere a limited production of "original" saccharine Tab that these devotees of the authentic seek out? I am thinking here of the way that people who prefer their Coca-Cola made with sugar not corn syrup lay in large supplies of it during seasons when Coke puts out its kosher - made with sugar - product.
I kind of liked Tab too but not
6/13/2006 4:22 AM
Elise said...
... not so much that I would have special stashes delivered to my house. Regular groceries are almost beyond my organizational skills.
6/13/2006 4:23 AM
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Laura K. said...
Elise said...
