Remember to Live~ Goethe ~
In three worlds I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on~ Robert Frost ~
Knowledge is power~ Thomas Hobbes ~
This exercise is from the book Three Simple Words by David Stoddard. It's simply a book of a wide variety of three word phrases to use as writing prompts.
Here are today's (to do with what you will...):
Not so fast
Now he's dead
You're not welcome
Exercise 49
by Laurie Guerin
You’re not welcome. When I said you were it was automatic, because I am afflicted with terminal politeness. For example, I decided to have dinner alone tonight at this fabulous little diner by the beach. You know the one. I sit down with my glass of cab at the only free, clean booth in the place. A booth for four big people or six reasonably sized ones. I stare at the big screen mounted on the wall. The sound is off, but there are subtitles and I see the Niners are playing and I couldn’t care less. I’m so happy about not caring less that I smile at the table next to me and raise my glass to the four middle-aged idiots sitting there wearing matching red shirts.
“To the Niners,” I say.
The idiots are so frenzied with obsession for the Niners that they don’t pick up on the mockery in my voice, which only adds to my delight. They raise their mugs of MGD high and one of them shouts, “Yay-yah!”
He pronounces the word ‘yeah’ with two syllables.
“A pretty lady with good taste! Where have you been all my life?”
I cringe at the expression ‘Pretty lady.’ Does anything give a man’s nature away faster than the use of that phrase? He may as well stand up and announce himself as a botched swinger whose wife left him at the end of the disco era.
His friends laugh. One clasps a hand over the guy’s mouth. “Keep it down, Dude!” he says. “This isn’t a sport’s bar.”
I cheerfully fire-up my laptop, and type the first two sentences of this letter to you (a letter I may or may not send) when I notice a smaller table has just been vacated. I decide to free up my table once the smaller one is bussed. I’m waiting, when a reasonably-sized family comes around the corner; Grand-parents, a mom and two kids. They’re all carrying green trays, searching for a place to sit. There’s outside seating, but the fog is rolling in.
“Hi!” I say to the little girl. “I was just thinking I’d move to that smaller table there. Would you and your family like to sit here?”
She stares at me blankly with her mouth open. I hope someone will warn her—and soon—about the association people make between gape-mouthed breathing and low IQ. I recently met a family of mouth-breathers and thought what a shame it was that no one had taken the time.
“That would be fantastic!” Her grandfather says. He’s a handsome man with a square jaw and silver hair. He has a slight roll around his middle, so I know more than I care to about how he looks in the nude.
His wife and I gather up my things. He follows and begins to clear my new table.
“Oh, I was going to ask the bus boy to do that.”
“My pleasure,” he says. His eyes are robin’s egg blue. There’s not a better description. He wears a shirt of the same shade. “You were so kind to give up your table.”
“Terminal politeness." I want to say. “I can’t help it.”
In this case it's good. I settle into my new spot and look over at them. His family chats happily while he, his eyes glued to the screen, feigns interest.
In your case it was not good. I am plagued now, by thoughts of all of the things I should have said or done, but didn’t because I was too busy being nice.
I think of your hideous, snorting dog, for one, with his smashed in face—not by accident mind you, but deliberate breeding. How you had to bring him everywhere. How I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my face steamed by his vile breath.
I think of your cooking, of your vegan-ness. I should have run at first glimpse of that soggy, watery bok choy you couldn't get enough of.
I’ve been eating meat daily. I’m eating it this moment, in fact. Skirt steak, medium well. I’ve never craved flesh like I do now.
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