Unsummable parts

My English major upbringing has me pretty well conditioned to look for themes in my life or my thoughts or whathaveyou, so that my blog posts can be approximately thematic themselves (I’ve said in the past that I don’t think the whole blogging exercise would have sufficient value to justify the time and effort if entries consisted of nothing more than unexamined inventories of things that happened over the past 24 hours). I suppose, though, that it’s inevitable that from time to time the theme would have to be themelessness itself, not that I couldn’t be bothered to take the time to sort through what’s passing before my eyes and whizzing around in my brain and construe the connections, but rather that I did take the time and after a respectable interval concluded that there are no connections to construe. So not a cop-out, I insist awkwardly.


This reminds me of an English class assignment from eighth grade, when we had to read Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart in our massive lit primer and then answer the four or five study questions at the end. Question 1: What is the setting of the story? I was stumped by that one and so I went to my father (who had himself been an English major and remained an appreciator of literature who shaped my own voracious reading habits in many ways large and small) and asked him to help me find the answer. It was hard enough swallowing my thirteen-year-old nerd pride and asking for help in the first place, but the indignity became too much to bear when my father tried to tell me that the answer was that the story has no setting. I distinctly remember favoring my father with as withering a glare as I could prepubescently muster and informing him that this particular lit primer did not traffic in what you would call “trick questions” – if what’s-the-setting were being asked, then there had to be a specific and correct answer. Of course all my memories are unreliable at best, and the fraught nature of my relationship with my dad means that he probably comes off worse in certain recollections than he actually truly behaved at the time, but I am still at least partly convinced that he did a poor job explaining the homework to me in that case, mostly because he had the right answer and the fact that I didn’t just take him at his word, believe him, write it down and move on was vexing to him. I like to think that if he had explained that it wasn’t a trick question, and that really a more nuanced answer might be not so much that there is no setting as that the setting is anyplace, anytime, universal, because the story is so purely psychological that it works in multiple contexts, or even perhaps that the setting of the story is inside the tortured soul of the narrator, a place that the reader can never really escape from because the narrator himself is already imprisoned there, something like that might have gotten through to me. (It’s not necessarily true, but I like to think so.) Instead my dad just kind of obstinately insisted that there was no setting and kept pointing to the literal text and urging me to show him where a setting was mentioned if I was so sure that there-is-no-setting was wrong, and my head just about exploded, and probably so did his. I think finally I wrote down ‘There is no setting explicitly mentioned in the story’ which I thought was a cop-out way of saying ‘I don’t know what the right answer is because it’s not in the place I’ve been trained to look’ and turned in the homework, and my teacher marked the answer as correct and I started to get my first inkling of a clue as to the dangerous intersection between concepts like artistic usage of negative space, and total bullshit.

So, yeah – the theme of this past weekend is that there was no theme. We had brunch in the District on Saturday, and dinner in Maryland on Sunday, both of which involved good people and good home cooking. In between there was significant advancement of the cause of getting the house painted and in presentable housewarming form. There was also some interleague baseball, and the Yankees swept the Astros and ended up tied for first in the AL East but none of it was televised down here, and the O’s struggled against the Mets, but my wife and I are still speaking to each other, though maybe not as fired up to blow some money on an outing to Camden yards as we might have been in March, say. We have plenty of other things to count down to in any case, between the aforementioned housewarming and my wife’s upcoming birthday and my brother’s impending nuptials and our family vacation to the Outer Banks in August. And probably more which I am incapable of holding in my brain all at once. The point is there is a lot on the horizon and sometimes that translates to a general feeling of marking time here in the present, but even marked time is good time most of the time. And if that feels like a cop out, sometimes that’s the right answer regardless.