EVERYTHING SEEMED ABNORMAL

78. EVERYTHING SEEMED ABNORMAL:

"I wasn't trying to do everything right and I made every effort to be strange and distant but the people around were all able to tell nonetheless that I really was from distant and farther places and I went to the public reading of the Book of Job (staged by The Redemptorist Players of Leyers Green) and they were wearing period cloaks and garments - which was crazy in itself as what 'period' exactly is Job? - and the audacity of them just even saying that stuff threw me for a loop because it wasn't like a fashion set-piece and the people who come to this stuff could care less too and some guy I heard said 'I much prefer my Job in a suit and tie or - if you must - a farmer's costume' and I laughed that one off because even HE was wearing any old clothes and didn't seem to concern himself with that - so I just sat there and watched and it went off OK almost like some Shakespearian play or something even though I knew it was all made up" now the guy saying this was talking to a girl sitting across from me at some downtown station and I do often manage to overhear the darndest stuff but these two I figured to be Hoboken-bound theater arts types or something because they certainly didn't look like summer tourists or winter soldiers either and she was mildly attractive actually and as I watched I was able to sense (I thought) her place her age her youthful story-line too and her name was Mellicent (the notebook said) and she never said a word back to him just nodded and he seemed to go on but with that body-shop air that a man shouldn't have - in some way indeterminate - which is I guess (along with the subject matter) where I got the idea of theater-arts types because who else would care about that stuff except maybe some proselytizers or walking Jesus people - which type one meets often enough on these sorts of platforms anyway and they're always handing out flyers or pamphlets with this or that summation or Bible-lesson and it always seems distracting to me but there are other sorts of people who seem to think this was selected JUST for them by Jesus himself and they then feel personally enriched by the time and the place of THAT person finding them with THAT particular message (in that respect too it's no different than the fortune-cookie crowd which can always be found swooning over the 'precise directness' of that pointed fortune-cookie lesson as it relates to THEM alone) but anyway that's the way of the world no matter what else and most of those people are the types of people sorely in need and pretty recognizable for that anyway - indigent nearly wasted useless burned-out or tired and unsound don't you see - and one night I remember I was dreaming of a gas station and at that gas station there were lots of cars awaiting service and gas and every attendant at this place - working feverishly to keep up - was someone I knew or had met and therefore it was a huge knot of people working and each turned a face up as I saw them and they were exactly themselves whoever they were and at that moment each of them was dispensing gas or whatever to a 'vehicle' which - rather than actually being a 'vehicle' was really instead a something which contained for me their entire life-stories and every attribute of themselves by which they were recognizable to me and it was funny because everyone wore at the same time their 'perfect face' and 'perfect' color - the very hue and being by which - deep in my mind - they were made up so as to be perfectly themselves : and much like these two they were essentially 'fueling' themselves so as to go on and continue within my recognition of them too so I just let it go and I watched and they were still there some fifteen minutes later and he was still talking "the idea was that we were supposed to not be able to recognize the emotion involved just hear it and respond only to what we heard - with you know facial muscles and reactions and such and it worked out pretty well except right then is when John spilled the milk (which he was supposed to bend over with a give to the imaginary cat in a later scene) by hitting it with his arm and it went all over his face instead but we weren't supposed to laugh even though none of this was in the script so we couldn't understand how a 'preordained' reaction to something unusual occurring was supposed to have been figured out ahead of time..."