Day 2: the Sound of Silence, and Possibly Judgment

First, re the poisonous diamondback snake that lives under the patio: now it's become a whole thing. My mom says we should just go tell Papa when we see it and he'll come with his snake-killing stick (he has a scalp-count in the hundreds.) But I really want to kill it myself. Even though she is pathologically phobic about snakes, my mom remembers her first snake killing as s kid. She and her sister killed a baby diamondback with a stick (babies = as poisonous as the adults, if not more), and put a stone on its head because they wanted everyone to come see it and pay homage. Every day they ran to gleefully check on the progress of its deterioriation. Shall I be deprived of this joyous bat mitzvah, simply because I am a pasty city dweller with bad hand-eye coordination? I will not relegate the killing to my grandpa! In the battle between me and the snake, I have two things going for me: hands. And a shovel. Finally that BODYWEIGHT's gonna come in handy. So now, when I go down to the water, which is about 25 times a day, I take a 30-lb garden shovel, in case I cross you-know-who. I plan to hit the snake on the head with said shovel. I insist I will have it taxidermied. Mom's against this.
"You drive yourself to town with your snake in your pocket!"
"You'll drive me and I'll put it in a ziploc in the trunk!"
I will have my snake, and the villagers will come pay respects.

Quite literally what we are dealing with here.

Meanwhile, the issue of silence.

Finns are not talkers, apparently with the exception of far Eastern Finns, and expatriots in America. I think it is not an accident that talky Finns emigrate--I have no doubt they are cheerfully put out to sea on a raft to die by the entire laconic town into which they were ruefully born.

One reason that I would be a good hospice worker, in addition to the fact that I already have the orthopedic platform nurse shoes, is that I've been trained over the years to maintain conversation with a backboard. It's not my relatives in particular, who are all wonderfully kind people, it's the whole country. It seems blatanly hostile if you've never been around it before. Like they're MAD at you.

So what happens is, no one talks. And then instinctively, you feel that a terrible, unnatural void must be filled. So you throw something out there-- "I can't believe this wind!" Everyone looks PAINED. On their faces. But it's like gambling. You can't give up! You're just about to win! You throw your hat in again: "I feel like I've never seen it this windy, it's like WEIRD, right?" This is when they will finally talk. By making you seem like an idiot.
"This wind is not unusual." Reminding you that you have been forced into foolish ingenuine grandstanding by your sheer obnoxious need to fill the air with your own voice.

In America, being friends with a bunch of wiseasses, I can't say ANYTHING without a split-second response. But sometimes, the cuntiest thing is really just to let people's own words stew in silent air. Nothing sounds more judgmental than silence. Today, some natives took me along for errand-running in town. We drove into a parking garage and I found myself saying, "Ooooooooh, underground parking, eh?"
Nothing. My idiocy seemed to multiply into the space, to amplify and fill the car to the bursting point. "Underground parking, eh?" And then dead air, as if it was suddenly obvious to all present that I should be institutionalized. And it wasn't even a subtle, Canadian "eh?" It was the kind of thing that should have been accompanied by an elbow into a fellow toothless carnie's rib-cage. It started below middle C and ended at a high A sharp. If someone had replied "No, this is an underground clinic. We're finally going to get you de-farted so we can keep you inside!" Or something like that, well that's conversation. Now we're having fun! But dead silence? Man, it hurts.

Good thing that the 8.5% beer I hid last year is just where I left it! Good work, Jules!

Someone around here knows how to treat me right!