Mr. Compost

Every day Mr. Compost rides his elephant to work. Mr. Compost rides his elephant, and his fat yellow cat rides on his shoulder. The elephant is about five or ten, maybe twenty feet tall.

When he reaches the university, he rides his elephant into one of the offices there. It is where Mr. Compost used to work. The elephant has to shrink to get in the door. Soon it is only four or five, maybe six feet tall, and Mr. Compost has to do a lot of jockying to remain seated on its neck.

"Do you want to stay here?" he asks the cat, "Or do you want to go to work with me?"

Always the cat elects to stay in the office at the university. All day she will occupy herself nuzzling the secrataries' legs. How Mr. Compost envies her!

Mr. Compost rides his elephant to his current job at the rock manufacturing plant. Before going in, he shrinks his elephant and puts it in his pocket. All day he feels the enormous weight of the tiny elephant in his pocket. He misses his cat, and wishes he still worked at the university. But at least he has an excuse to stop by the office twice a day. He has that bit of contact.

On the way home he stops by the office to pick up his cat. The cat is glad to see him. She jumps up on his shoulder and nuzzles him, prickling and patting with her claws until she is settled for the ride home. The cat means the end of a work day to Mr. Compost. She means home. When the cat dies, he will never be able to go home again.

I know all this because he is one of my neighbors. I notice what goes on around my strange neighborhood filled with sleepwalking robots. I pay attention to things that may or may not be important, like Mr. Compost's longing for his old job and his loneliness, his dreams and his mundane life, his cat and his elephant.

The Gray Days

Some days everything turns gray. Volcanic ash drifts down from the sky. The people look tired and depressed, and when you pass them on the street, they avert their eyes. If you look directly at things, they crumble. People will crumble if you look directly at them.

Once I stared at a large stone building, a church or a courthouse, until it completely crumbled into a pile of gray ash. The wind would have blown it all away, except there was no wind. There never is a wind on the gray days.

There are things about. Things whispering in the trees. Things muttering in the bushes. Sometimes you will notice some thing is pursuing you, dogging your steps. But you feel no fear. It is impossible to feel anything on the gray days.

Some people hate the gray days. I like them okay, except sometimes I do things I shouldn't. I turn cold. I stop talking. Often I destroy things I have worked hard to build.

How to Fix Most Things

This evening I was shaving my head (as I do about once every two weeks) when my clippers stopped working. They've been doing this a lot lately. There will be a kind of snapping sound and the mechanical buzz will take on a different note, and suddenly they are doing nothing. After a fit of cussing I went and got a screwdriver.

Usually I fix them by fiddling with the two Phillips screws that hold the blades in place. I tighten them and the clippers start working again. Well, sometimes they do. More often I tighten and loosen the screws several times before the clippers start humming in the right key and I can finish shaving my head.

Today, instead of mindlessly tinkering, I removed the screws and then the two saw-toothed blades. What I found was hair, lots and lots of hair crammed down in there. After I removed the hair, they worked fine.

It was then that it occurred to me that about 75% of the time you can fix something by carefully taking it apart, cleaning it, and putting it back together. The other 25%? Replacing a broken part. These statistics are scientifically accurate because I made them up.

Same goes for computers: reboot, run your anti-virus, open up the case and clean out the dust-bunnies. Those are all essentially cleaning procedures.

Incidentally, while checking the spelling of Phillips, I discovered that the Phillips-head screw was invented by Henry F.Phillips in 1936. Amazing. I had no idea that it was such a recent innovation. I guess the old machines were held together with nuts and bolts and the occasional slotted-head screw.