Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

I went to see my aunt and she was talking. First thing, I said maybe you should pretend to be in a coma so they can’t release you.

She said, it was fine. Someone from the soup kitchen, a woman my aunt has never liked, came to visit and is paying for all her care. She showed me a card the woman brought. It had a Jesus face on it (Shroud of Turin style). I guess she has a ton of money stuffed in a mattress or something, and is really kind. My aunt was kind of sheepish about it, because she thinks she is a good judge of people. Let me tell you—no one is a good judge of people.

I said, now you have to live.

Why?

You have to live so you can get the chance to be nice to her.

Right, my aunt said. I can live a little longer.

I asked her how long she was going to be there for. She said a week at least, because they had been finding some other things that were wrong with her. That’s the trouble with the hospital—they find all the things that have been killing you forever, and that you are okay with, you’re okay with those things slowly killing you, but then they find them and get rid of them, and then other things replace the things you were fine with, and you are not fine , not fine at all with the new things, and so you die, slowly, in utter misery, just the way you would have before, only before you were pretty okay with the manner of it, but now you’re not.

I told her my idea about writing some descriptions for her. She said she liked that idea, but I should make sure not to ham it up. She wanted good clean descriptions, no sentimentality. I was a bit offended, I said, who died and made you king, of course I won’t fucking write you sentimental descriptions just because you had a stroke and shat yourself.

It isn’t anyone’s fault what they do at a time like that, my aunt said. The ambulance ride was really bumpy.

I asked her did she really shit herself and she said no.

I got out my notebook and practiced doing typography. I realize it isn’t real typography. It is just me drawing some letters, but I tried hard and made it look pretty good.

I figure I will assemble it all and have it actually printed up on cardstock and give it to my aunt. She likes real books.

The cover proof I made looked like this:

The garden is a pathetic little plot of nothing. Someone once laid stone down to serve as a walkway, but the stone has long ago cracked apart until now it must always fail at its mission, which is to give a person a place to put her feet when she walks there.

The beds, which are raised, or are supposed to be raised, are often broken open on one side or the other, that is, the wood boxes are broken, and the earth has crumbled out and fallen, so the raised beds slump here and there to the ground, crowding or occluding the path.

The choice of plants has no overall rationale. Essentially, the person who plants a plant in this garden does not think about any of the other plants when she does it, she thinks only of the plant she is planting and whether she likes it.

To say that this gives the garden a motley appearance would be a pretty far-fetched compliment. In fact, it makes it not seem very much like a garden.

The garden may be seen from the windows of the converted garage. It may be seen from the bench that abuts the garden just before the converted garage. It may be seen from the space where an automobile once parked next to the converted garage. It may also be seen from any of the twenty windows of the huge house that stands before the garden. Most of those windows are covered with curtains and blinds, however, so in reality, no one ever looks out of them, and that is partly because the landlord lives in only a few rooms of the house and has the rest shut up to preserve it , as if that were a thing.

A person can use the garden by: reading in the garden, playing an instrument in the garden if she has a musical instrument, singing in the garden, sitting in the garden, speaking to a friend in the garden, if she has a friend and that friend is dear enough to be permitted to see the garden, or walking in the garden. Walking in the garden is not much of a walk because the garden is fairly small.

Certainly, you can’t call the garden the gardens as some people do (regarding their own large garden).

The garden is poorly kept. The garden is full of dead things. The garden does not get as much sun as it should. When you are in the garden you can still occasionally hear noise from the street. The garden is inexpert. It appears abandoned.

In sum: the garden has excellent character, and it knows all the right people.

The person is rare who enjoys taking the city bus. Yet, here she is. Here I stand before you, an actual enjoyer of city buses.

The reason is this: for a person who rarely has privacy, the city bus gives you a place that can’t be taken from you—a place where you can sit and read or write, or if you are lucky listen to music on headphones, and not be bothered (too much). For someone who already has the book she wants to read, it is like a library on wheels.

The bus has an awful smell. The seats of the bus are vile and you always feel that you are going to catch ill from touching them. The people who ride the bus collectively smell worse than other people. The bus drivers will not always treat you nicely, though sometimes they appear to be absolute saints.

The back of the bus, contrary to popular opinion, is not the best place to be. It is far better to be near the front. Why? People who vomit and leak tend to go to the back. It is also possible to have people steal your shit while you are on the bus and this happens more often at the back.

When not to ride the bus—

do not ride the bus at rush hour because you will have to stand. Standing on a bus is not an experience I am prepared to defend. Late at night is the best time.

I once took a bus and the driver forgot he was a bus driver. He drove the bus somewhere he wasn’t supposed to and didn’t stop at the bus stops after a while. Finally someone confronted him. He said he had a lot on his mind, and to give him a break. I thought this was a legitimate defense.

One of the other riders called him a fucko, and the others agreed, which has to be the first time anyone has gotten a consensus with the word fucko .

This is a place you have never gone to, and to which you never shall go. It is full of young people who are extremely drunk. I understand that your understanding of what it is to be young is different from what I think it is, probably more accurate, and also full of supporting identifiers that I cannot recognize. Still, picture this abandoned water park as being crammed to the gills with the stuff of life.

That it is abandoned means: it is not being used against you, like the rest of the city.

That it is full of people who are drunk means: you can understand what they are doing and why and you don’t have to fear them as much as when you wonder what they want. You can wander through the water park observing things.

The water park has lots of construction area lightbulbs in plastic cages strung on lines all through it. The man who lives there thought of this as a cheap way to make things nice for people.

Many of the ways to go from one place to another in the water park are broken. Walkways are broken. Ladders are broken. Slides are broken. Bridges are broken. There are fences where you wouldn’t think they would be. It is a bit of a maze.