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The following is an essay I wrote for a "fictionalized" portrayal of something in my life with an unusual edge to it. It only got a check on the check-minus, check, check-plus system, but I enjoyed writing it nevertheless.
Still Life
The picture is of a giggling baby in the middle of being washed by a man who is holding his nose up close to the baby's chest with a rapturous expression. The slogan above the picture reads, “Sometimes, you just have to stop and smell the baby.” A helpful label at the bottom informs the casual viewer that the picture serves as a olfactory metaphor for “the preferred scent over Johnson's.” Two bottles in the foreground of the picture identify the entire scene as an advertisement for the Grins & Giggles line of baby lotion and wash. No scratch and sniff is included for any readers curious about the visually proclaimed scent of baby.
The picture is taped on the left side of a set of double doors, only one of which serves as an actual door under the Aristotelian definition of considering objects to be defined by their use. The right door is a fully-functional, hinge-swinging portal into another world. The left door is bolted in place at the top and left without so much as a vestigial knob. It merely serves as an occasional poster board, currently used to display the rather disturbing endorsement for smelling babies.
In the back corner of the room, a fireplace filled with lava rocks sits similarly dormant. In addition to the fact that there has been no significant need to fight off frigid temperatures in the city of Escondido since an unexpected snowfall during the winter of sixty-three, its function has long since been replaced by considerably less involved pieces of machinery, such as a sleek gray heater currently monitoring the temperature of the room and keeping it an even ten degrees above what God intended. The fireplace has seen neither the glow of a fire nor the presence of the iconic chubby red man in a suit since the house gained a second fireplace, which serves as the sole outlet for incendiary-related nostalgia.
As you come in through the doors, or the right door to be more specific, a small yellow easy chair sits on your right, diamond shaped patterns stretching over its entire surface, cushions, and armrests. If you were to turn around and face the double doors you'd see a closet stretching into a recess in the wall. An assortment of clothes with hues significantly darker than the national average rests inside, and two shelves at the top store stacks of books, papers, and random clutter unfit for public viewing or even ebay. To the right of the yellow chair a desk of drawers five in number makes itself known. Next to the fireplace on the other side of the room another bureau lies in waiting, while a bed with green sheets is sandwiched in between the two storage units. The last two prominent features of the room are a desk being monopolized by a small gray laptop, and a bookcase along the left wall piled high with volumes of varying density and depth.
Four glass vessels evenly spaced along a ceiling fixture spread artificial light over the scene. The base of the lights is attached to a ceiling fan, which occasionally works to offset the noble efforts of the heater. The entire apparatus is controlled by a small white remote, which allows the occupant of the room to turn off the lights or dim them appropriately without having to worry about stumbling back over to bed through a treacherous expanse of carpet. The current occupant of the room happens to be a white Caucasian male with a predictably impure mix of European bloodlines drawing on the nations of England, Germany, Norway, France, and most likely a number of islands or countries he couldn't find on a globe. The room, incidentally, does contain a globe in the corner next to the fireplace, but its presence has done nothing to clear up its owner's precise racial origin or cultural identity.
The resident of this room is an an engineer, or more precisely, an engineer in training. An engineer is someone who rests on the shoulders of giants and draws on centuries of scientific work and achievement, distilling that specialized understanding of reality to make a quick buck. Simply put, an engineer solves problems of a technical nature. This is in contrast to a scientist who expands a body of formal knowledge for the benefit of humanity, or an artist, who lives a self-absorbed life and tends to starve to death in a gutter mumbling “ars gratia artis.” This particular engineer also happens to be a software engineer, so he has the benefit of solving problems he often creates himself.
As we join our hero, we find him lying unconscious within the previously mentioned bed, resting beneath three layers of sheets and two layers of clothing. His mind is a whirlwind of unconscious activity, while his body shows only the faintest signs of life, turning from side to side at irregular intervals and displaying the occasional facial twitch. He remains in this state for a carefully scheduled eight hours, which, when told in full, would be about as engaging of a narrative as waiting for grass to decompose or watching species evolve.
As internal timers tick away the remaining seconds of his daily reprieve from reality, he is finally brought back into wakefulness by the aggressive moo of a cow pealing across the room. The noise repeats itself several times while the disturbed sleeper tries to drown out the sound by covering his ears with a pillow. A fleeting hope crosses his mind that this just might be another dream, but the noise refuses to go away or transform into something more interesting. His hand stumbles over to the snooze alarm of a digital clock on his right side, but the simulated bovine wail continues unabated. Our hero finally regains enough sanity to reach up and to his left, where a round clock with a cow print reveals itself to be the source of the offending sound. Groaning, he flips a switch on it and sinks back into his bed.
The cow clock is the latest addition to a set of bovine simulacra, which range from the out of season cow ornament, to a plush cow which responds to being squeezed by singing a Christmas carol that has long since entered the public domain, the words all being replaced by the syllable “moo”. Bovine beanie babies, wind-up dancing cows, and similar artifacts serve purely ornamental purposes on a mantle above the fireplace, as their owner has not felt the need to snuggle with an imaginary animal friend for quite a few years now.
Mark Newheiser, the occupant of the room and the disturbed soul currently attempting to regain his rest in bed, shifts from side to side uncomfortably. He tries to drift off again for a quick nap, but the interruption has proved to be too shocking to just weather out. With a grudging surrender to himself and his nobler intentions, he resignedly lifts himself out of his bed and over to his closet, where he will select his clothes largely at random in the dark. His last thoughts before giving up his state of nighttime nirvana completely, are the pressing importance of all the tasks he intends to accomplish today, hopefully culminating in a dramatized account of his life capable of holding anyone's interest, let alone his own. After an elaborate ritual of refreshment and preparation, he returns to his room and sits in front of a gray laptop. He begins to type:
“The picture is of a giggling baby in the middle of being washed by a man who is holding his nose up close to the baby's chest with a rapturous expression. The slogan above the picture reads, 'Sometimes, you just have to stop and smell the baby.' ”