The House of Triangles

You told me analytical thinking is your gift, but I threw that thing out like a chew toy at the mercy of a jackal's gravel-scratched fangs. There was always something better to do than to play with that slobbering mess- now which I'm sure might as well cease to exist. As for my own gift, I can remember my grandiose descent into the magnificent universe of illusion well- I was maybe five or six. The house was interesting for a suburb; the right half of it consisted of an expansive area reminiscent of a studio due to its lack of walls, with an exaggerated, high ceiling. The ceiling height was not reciprocated by the other side of the house, however, leaving anyone on that side of the house with a disquieting paranoia that they were in a giant scalene triangle. (We didn't have a lot of brunches.) The room on the right side took up both of its respective stories, but through the rooms and stairs on the left side of the house, including all of the second-story bedrooms, one could stand on their toes and peer over the ledge in the upstairs hallway, located right in the middle of the house's divide, to peek down- as well as gaze upward in awe and/or confusion- at the giant triangle of the right side room that still, beyond all logical explanation of a relatively sane architect that was only on antipsychotics during that one summer in college when everything started to really catch up to him, towered above the height of the second-story hallway. I had devoted countless afternoons (read: 56) to my covert missions of peeking down (as well as up) into the giant triangle. Nietzsche said that if I gazed into the giant triangle long enough, that it would gaze back into me. My mother also told me that I shouldn't cross my eyes because they might get stuck that way. There are a lot of things you aren't supposed to do with your eyes. A six-year-old can't be expected to remember them all. Nonetheless, the giant triangle proved more fun than my vain attempts to kidnap my goldfish (Patty Hearst) for the ransom chocolate, or my hobby of terrorizing my brother's REM pattern by sticking a refrigerator magnet under his pillow that, even when only lightly pressed, made the piercing, brutal and obnoxious cock-a-doodle-doos that only the most betrayed and spiteful chickens could cluck. Luckily, as far as I can tell now, my eyes are not crossed, a giant triangle has not gazed into me, and my brother has not bought a live chicken to avenge me. (Yet.) This afternoon, however, I had more on my mind than mere peeking or gazing or cock-a-doodle-dooing. My parents seemed to have gone where ever it is that parents go when they are not over their children's shoulder, so I aptly seized this opportunity of freedom. As I was downstairs, I began my trip upstairs. I was like a ninja, but a ninja baby. I simply wobbled up the stairs just as a ninja baby would have done: with admirable curiosity and limited motor skills. Determined, I climbed to the onto the hallway ledge, making sure something I was holding didn't slip from my grip. The top of the ledge was laminated over the usual rough texture of household walls or columns, leaving it smooth, white, and a bit slippery. Steadying my stance, I felt closer to the exaggerated, high ceiling than ever before. At first, the experience of the excitement that had made my pulse quicken entered my body strangely- it was a bizarre ambivalence between movement and standstill hesitation, not unlike the ambivalence any regular digester of something more than Ultra Grain Wheat Thins experiences when deciding whether or not to fart in a public place. Then, just as one feels after farting, I felt right at home. All my doubt diminished and I was excited to not only be doing something I'd get in trouble for, but to know that I'd have done it all by myself. I jumped from the top of the ledge to the main room one floor below. I don't think I felt anything in that moment so much as a calm expectation. It simply seemed like The Thing to Do when I held on tightly to the stem of my Barney-magenta umbrella and floated gracefully, albeit more abruptly than I would have hoped, to the carpeted room below. I remember thinking to myself, I don't remember Mary Poppins ever landing this hard on her bum. And then I went on to find the next Thing to Do. Or perhaps a more definitive moment of my disconcern for rational was when I saw Kiki's Delivery Service for the first time. I instantly developed the main characters as my new role model. I can't remember who she replaced- maybe it was Pippi Longstocking, whom I admired because she outsmarted burglars, lived by her own rules, and could also make great pancakes. Not to mention walk upside down. Of course, Kiki reigned in then as my girl of the day and I idolized her accordingly. As a thirteen-year-old witch in training with a talking cat named Jiji, she had a lot to teach a six-year-old something-in-training with a rather introverted goldfish named Patty Hearst. I loved Kiki and her delivery service. It was real to me. If you were around on Awanee Lane around 1997, you might have seen a girl feverishly attempting to fly on her broomstick. It was an ordinary broomstick- a bit dwarfing for a six-year-old and complete with a painted orange handle. You might have seen a neighbor give her an incredulous look, that look that all adults have around kids. It was that look that said "what you are doing is ridiculous but I am amused by your obstinacy". You might have seen this neighbor's left eyebrow slide so high up into his forehead that you would logically reach the conclusion that a hairy leech was about to take a lick at his hairline. And you would have seen the dirty-blonde haired little girl roll her eyes, an eye roll impressively snobbish that said "this guy thinks I can't ride a broomstick, how ridiculously behind HE is", as if she were a queen that had been interrupted eating caviar by a beggar. It might have gone on forever, this believing anything could be real if I convinced myself hard enough, until one day my brother brought home his girlfriend. I toddled out to say hello. I remember her as unctuous and admirably nervous- either that, or carelessly underestimating my intelligence as a third grader. She must have not known that I was just that day deemed responsible enough to take home the Class Bee, a highly coveted rice-filled creature, complete with a few Bit-O-Honey candies along with a journal to write about the adventures that we would have while spending our day together. She could not have known about my recently number-two-penciled hardcover book about the triumph of love over class entitled A Helpful, Funny Person, illustrated using crayons pushed down on the page so hard they split in halves. Sure, this meant that she also didn't know that earlier that day I had also walked straight into a pole with its school-beige paint already peeling off of it in anticipatory protest, smashing all but the the frames of my glasses into my nose, but that mean that she also didn't know that my classroom was now a maelstrom of rain forest themed installation art, or that I would have totally won the spelling bee if I had known how to spell that one 'bicycle' word. She just didn't know, like how that silly man before just didn't know about the use of brooms as transportation vehicles. We were all outside, and she told me that her car could talk. Half of me was excited, and the other half of me thought I had also encountered a hairy leech sliding up my forehead that lusted for my hairline. She may have been nervous at first, but now, now, she thought she had me. Her and her talking car. No doubt expecting her little boyfriend's little sister to be dazzled momentarily into adoration, she reached into her left jean pocket to grab her car keys and attached remote. The anticipation seemed to mean more to her than to me, and with a smug, assumptive smile she pressed the remote's red button. The car beeped. It did not talk. Rene Descartes would not have argued that the car's grasp of language made it more than machine. It. Just. Beeped. Like anything a six-year-old hears when the parent has to do to some important business while the six-year-old does important business of her own in a car. So, yes. I may have convinced myself of what I knew to be incompatible with a concept called logic. And perhaps because no one really bothers to tell six-year-olds otherwise, I also may have assumed that television was merely a window to various another dimensions that were as real as our own. (You can imagine my disappointment when I sprinted for the TV to go join Scooby and the Gang only to be left rejected and with static-frizzed hair.) But while I may have believed my own delusions, illusions, inner labyrinthine creations, or plain old fantasy land, I would want never fall for someone else's illusion of something they didn't even believe in themselves. It's just no fun that way. “Wrote this out of the blue. a silly short story in the persona of a pretentious six-year-old.” November 25th, 2010