One ordinary day, with spectacles

[rolanni]

As previously advertised, we were up early and on the road to Skowhegan, about an hour’s drive from the present location of the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory, in order to do the Annual Eye Examination Thing.

Why, you ask, do we travel to Skowhegan, home of the Big Wooden Indian, in order to have our eyes examined?

When we first moved to Maine, we lived in Skowhegan, where we found among other Wonders, Marvels, and Oddities, the best. eye doctor. ever.  We hired him immediately and never looked back, so to speak.  It’s going to be very difficult, if we ever do pull off a move to the southern, more populated part of the state, to let Gerry go.  Though, really, a three hour drive one way to see the. best. eye doctor. ever. probably wouldn’t be excessive.

After the exam, it was a stop at the Skowtown branch of Tim Horton’s to take on more caffeine then, to SRM Galactic Headquarters to pick up a package left for us at the office next door.

This turned out not to be something that we thought might be arriving, maybe, but a Laser Mouse, sent anonymously by a Fan of Hexapuma.

For the record, the Laser Mouse meets Hex’s approval, and if he wasn’t a cat, he would thank you most graciously, Nameless Fan of ‘Puma.

Package retrieved, it was the post office, then Pearle Vision to order in the new eyewear.  By this time it was rising one o’clock, so we stopped at Sam’s which is conveniently located directly behind the Pearle Vision Centre, for a so-called Italian dinner.

Eh, not so much.  Even the garlic bread was a disappointment.  How can you screw up garlic bread?

Lunch. . .dispensed with, we took off for the grocery, passing the Scene of an Accident, with lots of policepersons, and ambulances and firetrucks and police cars, more uniforms, municipal FD slickers and! a car.  On the lawn of a house, it’s hood on the lawn of the house, and the house, or perhaps the car, gently smoldering.  Here’s an account, with picture.

Passing the spectacle gently by, we arrived at the grocery, took on supplies and thence to home, where we snacked on Steve-made chocolate-chocolate pudding, and I came back to the office to write.

I have now written, and made notes for a scene that goes. . .somewhere, probably just a little upline, and day is now officially done.

Tomorrow, Hexapuma goes in early to see his good friend Dr. Slack, then I will come home and write for a while, before trying to remember what it is that I need to accomplish in order to arrive at the day-job on Wednesday in reasonably good order.

. . .

Man, that was a fast 19 days.

Progress on Ghost Ship:

72,078 words/100,000 OR 72.08% completed

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

Re: The Lecture

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Hmm...

See, the crash was undoubtedly scary while it was happening, and the near aftermath was certainly Impressive to see.

But! By the time the article with picture appeared we knew that: (1) the driver was more or less OK; (2) the people in the house were OK; (3) the gathered animals were OK.

All of which means that we can now notice -- as the reporter intended us to do, or he would not have included what we call in fiction The Telling Detail -- that the car had come to rest on the burning bush, and that, yes, it was ironic.

So very often, humor works off of a near miss with tragedy.

A very long time ago, I saw a television show where the audience was shown a video of a supposed little old lady in a wheelchair careening out of control down a long, traffic-filled hill. It's a horrific ride, as she dodges cars, flies over a kerb, nearly avoids all kinds of hazards to life and limb before finally coming to rest, more or less peacefully, in a park at the end of the hill.

The moderator of the show then turned to -- I think it was Jack Parr, but don't hold me to that -- and asked, Was that funny?

And the answer was, Yeah, it was funny. But in order to have been excrutiatingly, side-splittingly funny, the audience would have had to have known without a doubt that the person in the wheelchair had been a real little old lady.

Re: The Lecture

[keristor.livejournal.com]

According to Larry Niven, the Puppeteers[1] say that "humour is the result of an interrupted defense mechanism"; Asimov pointed out that almost all jokes involve cruelty and hurt ("The Jokester"; the major exception was wordplay and puns); Heinlein said that jokes are never funny to the people in them and that they are a way of getting over bad things ("Stranger in a Strange Land").

So yes, the car hitting the house wasn't funny for any of the people involved, but the detail that it landed on that bush and then caught fire is definitely ironic. The problem is that a number of people can't (or at least don't) distinguish between finding something amusing in even the worst scenario and making fun of the misfortunes of others. I've found that this applies to a lot of wartime stories, the people who were there found them funny (at least in the "if'n I don' laff I sure will cry!" sense) but to others they seem callous. Like the sign outside a shop during the london Blitz, when a bomb had fallen right outside: "Mind the blasted hole!" Or the porter who was asked whether the college gates were a safe place to shelter and replied "Safe as houses!" -- a few seconds later a bomb demolished the block of houses opposite.

[1] For the benefit of any readsers who don't know, an alien herbivorous race who are all cowardly by nature, the few brave ones are regarded as insane. The follow-up to their statement about humour is "and no sane being interrupts a defense mechanism."

Re: The Lecture

[(Anonymous)]

There is a significant part of the world who contend that puns involve cruelty and intent to inflict hurt on the part of the people who intentionally create them. I suppose it must be in keeping with one of the various twisted particle symmetries that physics finds.