greenstorm | (no subject) (Reply)

When I got back home there was the usual post-trip crap to take care of. MAil and messages. Had to get a birthday present for Auntie. Had to sign a bunch of papers to continue Tanya's "studies" at GEE. They shut off our phone service so we had to sit down and thrash out about three months' worth of unpaid phone bills. In the middle of s spirited discussion of who had made seven consecutive calls to Santa Cruz at three in the morning, Ike got up and announced that he was moving out. He was tired of the plumbing problems, he said, and the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come down while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our front balcony. That was okay. Ike was a shitty gardener anyway and he complained when I ran my model trains after bedtime. Tess and Laurie, the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better after we'd untrashed it and cleaned it up so why not try to keep it that way? I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone. Should we call this place a "co-op" or a "commune"? How about calling it a "house"? Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan? Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get? Whose hair predominated in the shower drain--the women's, since they had more, or the men's, since they were losing more? Was it okay to pour bacon grease down the drains if you ran the hot water at the same time? Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine? Did we agree that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative toxin? Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from between the tiles in the bathroom?

Well, that's the Zodiac quote from the beginning of chapter 20. I absolutely love the sense of interaction it conveys. It's so real-feeling... how many discussions have you had that looked like that?

Now, most of the book is not like this, of course, but I do so love that particular part.