Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

Do you know how to house-train a dog? Have you ever had surgery on your tongue? Would you like more ballroom-dance skills than you now have? Are the Dry Tortugas dry? Is it Dry Tortuga? Are you afraid of country people? Do you think that an inclination to talk a lot is a sign of weakness? When a woman wears a pair of men’s pajamas and removes the top, retaining the pants, do you find this a sexually stimulating outfit? Are you much good at Ping-Pong? Does having to call Ping-Pong “table tennis” strike you as an abomination not unrelated to a whole fabric of other abomination in the world that is sometimes difficult to codify and identify but which might fit loosely under the heading of global correctification? Is it the case that anyone has been forced to say table tennis rather than Ping-Pong, or am I deluded here? Are children allowed to play cowboys and Indians today? Are rubber army men still marketed? Do you recall my asking you this earlier? Does it gall you that it might be the case that rubber army men are not sold today for reasons of political marketing contraindications during a time when the production of real army men is on the increase? Would you rather operate in a headwind or a tailwind? Do you think you could make a dish to eat from pinecones? Does the noise a bullwhip makes involve breaking the sound barrier? Are there more problems in the world because of historical, linguistic, or mathematical ignorance?

What is your favorite spice? Do you enjoy bundling up in cold weather? Does it interest you that in trying to ask you if you enjoy bundling up I first wrote bumbling and bungling? Do any of my failures, or successes, large and small as they are, both, matter to you at all? What does matter to you? Could you give me, say, a three-zone general answer, and a ten-point specific list of those areas and those exact things, respectively, that you consider of importance to you? Are you disturbed by, amused by, or indifferent to the emergence in the United States of the fancy retail coffee-shop industry? Are you disturbed by, amused by, or indifferent to foul language on T-shirts and bumper stickers? Have you seen in your time good old playground equipment be removed and not be replaced or, worse, be replaced by inferior new stuff? Do you hope that airlines go out of business? Would you put your hand in the mouth of a lion or a pony first? What would you do if the doorbell rang and there stood a woman wearing a set of peach-colored underwear holding a peach-colored poodle on a leash? Would it be appropriate for either party, in the case of the woman in peach with a peach dog and your greeting this pair, to apologize for anything? Do you distinguish between the fox-trot and the waltz when you see them?

If you were told “The photographs she is preparing are designed to scare the populace” what word or phrase would most secure your interest? Similarly, what about “The Scottish horses, heavy on the ground” most piques your curiosity? If you were told you could move to a cabin in the Andes, yours for the taking and with some servants on the grounds ready to work for you and that the farm was self-sufficient with their labor, would you go? Do you recall the last time you made mud pies or took a bite of dirt? Would you anticipate that a given day of the week might have more suicides committed on it than the others? Would you anticipate that a given day of the week might have more murders committed on it than the others? If there is a day of the week higher in suicide than the other days, and a day higher in murder, would you anticipate that they might be the same day?

Do you know the Druids? Do you understand violence or are you alien to it and frightened and appalled? Do you believe in getting out the vote? Is your underwear in top condition or not top condition? What is the most you have paid for a painting? Do you get satisfaction from new tires or more satisfaction from stretching the use out of bald and “dangerous” tires? Is it correct that the New World had the cocoa but that only the Old could make chocolate? Does the number of things you are not interested in exceed the number of things you are interested in? Do you find the overcast day somewhat anesthetic and cheering and the bright day assaultive and depressing? Do you know what is meant by the term “pipe dope”?

Is light rain falling straight down more pleasing to you than a heavier rain going a bit sideways? Can you abide the poodle haircut? What would you make of finding a large dildo fitted with an ejaculatory bulb-and-tube mechanism in an oil drum serving as a trash can in the parking lot of a liquor store? Does one’s having “old stomping grounds” suggest that one once stomped on them? If, properly speaking, one did not stomp but just got by, would it not be more correct to speak of a return to one’s old getting-by grounds? Is it fair to say that the world comprises those who are politicians, those who are movie stars, those who get by, and criminals? If you are walking along and see a really good stick, can you pass it up?

CAN’T YOU BE THERE when the stars explode? How daft are we? More daft, less daft, or just as daft as people were before? Would all the snow in the world truly not change the color of the pine needles? Isn’t it moot to point out that someone is not a political person when we can rightfully argue that he is not even a person? If you are having troubles, can they not always be held at bay by exercising until you are tired and putting on a pair of good shoes? Can’t one just snap back at the world with a little Juicy Fruit? Is your hair not what it once was? Do you find that it cannot rain enough for you, or snow enough, or blow enough? Do you find that interventionists are on the rise or in the ascendant — people, I mean, with plans, and by plans I mean plans they deem superior to yours? Does it occur to you more often than it once might have that you are a nebbish? Can you explain the sudden necessity should you receive, say, a prospectus and annual shareholders’ report from, say, the Coca-Cola Company that you read the entire thing? Are you still living in such a way that suggests you are waiting for the real living to start at some later and unspecified date? Do you think this sense of delay or stalling would be wiped away were you told you had, say, twenty-two months to live, rock-solid certain you’ll be gone in twenty-two months from, say, esophageal cancer — would you set about the actual living you have in theory been not yet doing? Would you go to Italy and eat well and get softer and die? Would you fly to Islamabad and enter the street and buffet along in the crowded market indifferent to what became of you? Would you fly to Australia and sit in the airport bar and drink beer? Would you call enemies and provoke them, or assuage them? Would you call old loves? Would you tend to your shoes? Would you commit crimes? Do you know the alleged benefit conferred by cucumber slices over the eyes?

Isn’t it true that there is a rare kind of person who perceives, as does a good dog, that life is doing something meaningful, and who discovers what it is and goes about doing it with a spirit of moderate hustle, and there is a not rare kind of person who perceives none of this and who goes about doing what is necessary in a spirit of aggrievedness?

Have you ever noticed that pine trees bloom — whether to say they flower or not I cannot say, but they do something that looks seed-poddy and it’s probably those wormlike things, I guess in clusters, like starfish or anemones somewhat, I have…well, just put it this way: have you ever noticed what look like flowers on pine trees? How about this: “That bird came through the forest like the shadow of a bullet”? What kind of condition are you in if what you think would improve your disposition is a thousand push-ups and a barbershop haircut with cologne and hair tonic making you reek up the place? Is it reasonable, productive, and legitimate if, within the current climate that apotheosizes goal setting as the summum bonum for proper living, one sets the goal of no goal setting?