Thursday, May 1, 2008

Missed Connections

You were the angriest baby I'd ever seen. You sat up in your stroller, your hands clenched in tiny fists. You glared at the people who walked through the quad: undergrad drifters looking for lunch, grad students blinking in the daylight. You did not cry. But I thought to myself: man, that baby looks pissed.


* * *

Also, I found a gigantic wrench.

It was buried in a scientific debris pile in the high-pressure mineral physics lab, which has been abandoned / inhabited by vagrants for decades. It's more than two feet long, two inches thick, and weighs something like 25 lbs. You might ask, so what? It's a long wrench. But it's not just a normal wrench that has been stretched out, length-wise. It's a normal wrench that has been blown up, proportionally, into a comical Novelty Wrench made of solid steel. It's Wayne Szalinzki, "Honey I Blew Up the Kid!" except he missed, and hit the tool box.

The funniest thing about this wrench is that it was, I think, actually functional. Somebody (here I envision a brawny, tanned high-pressure mineral physicist) wielded that thing, swung it up and used it to tighten some massive bolts. I wonder if the bolts are lying around somewhere, too.

* * *

This brings me to my last point. Have you ever encountered something so strange and wonderful that you felt a need to broadcast, to shout it from the mountaintops? I did this today with the wrench ("I found a gigantic wrench!"), and all of my conversations (real and electronic) came to a glaring halt. Glorious non sequitur; electronic silence. Well, once you write it, you can't take it back (can you? is there an 'undo send?'). I'll make up for it by being robustly sane for the next few weeks. That ought to take care of it.

2 comments:

Lila is a complex system. said...

I'm imagining that the Google of the future will correlate the date of your post with satellite pictures taken throughout the day of that particular quad, isolating strollers containing babies. The angry baby, as an adult, will be able to Google himself and find this oblique appearance. Right under his myspace page.

Don't force yourself to be sane -- that isn't sane at all! Just be awesome you. I like the wrench piece.

Anonymous said...

Giant wrenches are really cool, old tools are even more cool. what else is in this pile?