The Philosophy of So [what]? Excerpts from the So? Narrative Relating to the First Meaning

I live alone. One night, last week — I think it was Thursday — I was getting hungry and started to look through the cupboards for food. I found a can of vegetable beef soup and started to warm it in a saucepan on the stove. It began to boil and I dished up a bowl. I was standing over the sink still holding the bowl and I decided to taste the soup. I took a spoonful and then another, then another, and another and realized I may as well eat my dinner right here.

Then my girlfriend walked in the door, because we’re in that stage of our relationship now where she keeps a spare key to the apartment. Without so much as even greeting me, the first words that jumped from her mouth were, ‘You’re eating your meal standing over the sink?’

‘So?’

I mean what rule is there that dictates where and in what position one must eat? Right?

- Troy, Sacramento, California

It’s 9:50 on a Sunday night. The restaurant closes at 10. The place is deadsville. We haven’t had a new table come in over 40 minutes. I’ve cut all the servers but Tracy, and she’s spent her last half hour emptying and refilling every last salt and pepper shaker in the building.

I’ve already told the boys and Sharla in the kitchen to break down as much as they can, thinking we’ll get them out a little early. They deserve it.

In walks some middle-aged guy wearing a mustache and a cheap suit attached to a middle-aged blonde girl who looks like she’s been around the ringer a couple of times, and who’s dressed suspiciously like a hooker. Not in the new style, either, where all the girls now are dressing like high-priced hookers in their lingerie shirts, short skirts and leather boots. No, she’s dressed the old way, late eighties or nineties where you could actually tell a hooker by how she was dressed. Like in Pretty Woman. Only this lady’s no Julia Roberts.

The man – Mustache, I’ll call him asks for a table by the window, normally a tough request to grant. But I can get it for them, because the whole restaurant is empty, an obvious fact that one might assume would be just as obvious to these two lovebirds as I bring them to their table.

The problem is it’s my job to keep the posted hours, and turning away customers is not smart business. Still, for the sake of Manny and Jim and Sharla who are working the line and nearly done scouring all that needs scouring and Tracy who is done with the salt and peppers and now talking to her daughter on her cell phone at the corner booth in the bar, telling her she’ll be home soon, and for the dishwashers Luis and Robert who can either catch the bus at 10:15 or have to wait until 11:15 before the next one comes along, I politely remind the pair, “Just so you are aware the kitchen closes at 10 PM.”

Mustache, is looking nowhere near the menu I have just placed directly in front of him, nor his watch, nor the 43 other empty tables around him. No he’s staring right into the eyes of his date, right at the pair of bullseyes between the double bags and wide swaths of dark purple eye make-up.

For a second I doubt he even heard me, until I hear him say it,

‘So?’
- Charles, Chicago, Illinois

There is this homeless black man that I see nearly daily in my neighborhood. I let him use my cell phone to make a call once. He asks me for change whenever I see him. Sometimes he’ll ask me twice, if I pass by him twice on the same walk, not remembering he already hit me up.

The truth is I don’t carry change, or cash for that matter. I mean, my check card is just so convenient.

But for whatever reason, the last two times he’s asked me, I did have change at the bottom of my coat pocket. Probably left over from buying a candy bar or something small. Anyway it must have been 33 cents, because the first time he asked me I gave him two dimes and a penny, thinking I had scooped it all out, only to later that night feel a couple more coins as I was rooting around the same pocket. The next time I saw him, he asked me again. I reached in and pulled out two pennies from the pocket, once again thinking I had grabbed it all. And wouldn’t you know it? Later on I found another dime, when I was emptying my pockets of receipts.

Oh well, what matters is that when I handed him those two pennies the second time, I noticed how leathery and black his hands were. Not the skin color black, which I never really understood, because peoples’ skin aren’t ever really black. I mean, it’s brown isn’t it? No, this was like really black, like charcoal. Like his hands had been on fire and when he put them out they looked identical to charred bits of wood. They were black like bad frostbite is supposed to make your hands. Like they were stained by residue of oil, or dirt, or ash. Whatever it was, I remembered thinking that they must have been like that for years, and that the black is permanent.

And as I’m looking at his hands while I’m giving him those two pennies, I say, just trying to make conversation, ‘Wow, you’re hands are really black.’

Guess what he says?

‘So?’

And, I guess, why wouldn’t he?

- Theresa, Saint Paul, Minnesota

There’s a homeless guy in my neighborhood.

So?

- Pete, Saint Paul, Minnesota

The Philosophy of So [what]? In the Beginning.

Though it may seem like an exercise in tedium, it is important that from the very onset something be said about the significance or insignificance of small words and conjunctions. This is fundamental because in the very word So we have both a small word and a conjunction. Those facts, those pieces of identity, those properties, those characteristics that are the very foundations of So? are important not entirely in defining its very meaning but more in understanding its quiet and humble beginning, which is only now a simple part of its meaning.

In short, it’s a place to start. A Genesis. A manger birth. Or Matthew 1: 1-17.

There are few words shorter than So. I can think of only I and a. An argument could be made that, as a stand-alone, a has no meaning at all. Only when paired with another word will a indicate that word as one, singular or of a certain category.

And I, well it only has the one self-reflexive, egotistic meaning, doesn’t it?

Though So is as short as it is, and often accused of having limited meaning, we will see in due time and through revelation its dynamic qualities.

People of a certain age might recall with a certain fondness that brilliantly entertaining, effectively educational, dare I say edutaining body of informative musical cartoons titled School House Rock.

Arguably, one of the most memorable episodes, (and from what I know the only to be given homage by Snoop Dogg in one of his songs, Hydroponic), was titled Conjunction Junction.

When the question is sung in call-and-response style by the female chorus, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?”

The answer from the animated train conductor comes, “Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.”

Though So itself is left out from the song for favor of and and now and but, the definition covers our beloved conjunction too. It is a word first drawn for the sole purpose of bringing other words together. In almost all circumstances it has no place on its own. It is designed only to be used in relation to other words or clauses or to ‘coordinate words in the same clause,’ as one definition would have it.

“Do your homework now so you can play outside later.”

The temptation is to believe that like a, So is useless on its own, that it must only serve its function as a conjunction hooking up word and phrases and clauses.

But then recount from your own uses of the word, the multiple times you’ve thought it or declared on its own. You might even be thinking it now, reading this. So?

Though it cannot be denied the work it does to bring words and clauses together, this little conjunction is brave enough and has the power to create meaning standing all alone.

Not just one meaning, but three.

A Trinity.

The Philosophy of So [what]? Introduced.

Today I submit the philosophy of So? Understand 12 minutes won’t even provide enough time for laying the complete groundwork. I’ll need 12-plus-more-this time, and 12-plus- more next time and 12-plus-more a third time, and fourth and an infinite amount of times more just to barely plumb the unplumbable depths of So?

For I assure you, in the small field where these two letters, S and O, meet there is a space expansive enough to build an entire religion. Whether the religion is indeed built is not for me to determine. No, that’s the work left to the hands of So?’s followers.

Instructions to the followers will come in due time and by way of biographical examples as you’ve come to expect from any religious narrative. But no delay can be made at the current time in introducing the very fundamentals of So? In other words there are no believers until there is something to believe, and preaching that which is to be believed is the matter at hand.

can’t write my way free

I laid on my bed tonight, tired early. As I let sleep overtake me, I looked straight at my guts. I saw my inside hollow, with stone walls. My breathing was a wind passing through.Waking up in the middle of the night desperate for a way to describe it, I can’t.But for the always constant twitch for sex, it seems very much like the absence of every other desire. 

The Girl and the Red Egg

10 to 9. I’m leaving the apartment because I’m meeting the guys, for our ritual.
She comes on the videophone.

I guess we don’t call it a videophone, but that’s what they were calling it in sci fi books and sci fi movies right up until about 1990. I guess we call it video chat. Now that it’s 2008.

This girl she’s in another country and here I am talking to her like it’s no odd thing. She’s in her bedroom and I’m in my living room thousands of miles apart, and then suddenly she’s in my living room, on screen. She smiles big. She always does. It’s a dying art, the way she smiles. Big and earnest, always like it could loose its balance at any moment and fall into a laugh.

“I’m on my way out the door,” I say.

“Aw, where are you going?”

“To meet the guys.”

“Can I show you something?” still smiling.

She puts up a painting to her camera – my screen – except I can’t tell it’s a painting because videophone technology hasn’t been perfected yet, even though it’s 2008.

What she’s holding up is a mash up of chunky squares.

She tells me the title.

“Huevo Rojo,” she giggles.

Like I said, just a mash up of chunky digital squares. No egg in sight. But it’s funny. I didn’t need to see it. I mean I still want to, hope to, and was eagerly looking for a digital picture over email of Huevo Rojo upon return home at 10 to 12.

But I thought about the girl and her work of art all night not because I saw it. But because I know how much she delights in doing, in creating, in pushing around oils on canvas.

Even if it’s complete nonsense to paint an egg in red, it makes all the sense in the world when she smiles large and says, “Can I show you something?”

A Reading of On Eating Oatmeal: A Companion Guide for Creating Significance from a Rather Insignificant Food Essay.

Oatmeal can’t just sit there — a still, cold lump in the bowl. It has a life as the perfect metaphor.

I mean how tidy. How neat. How ripe. The thing is Adam’s apple for Christ’s sake. Oatmeal — coercing you to the first bite by a bit of a promise, repulsing you in its last. The way it’s been written here you could make it stretch to say it has an almost shaming effect.

Oatmeal is every intention good or bad ending with an undesired result. It’s the first glass of whiskey or wine, the buzz on its way up, the first cigarette, the first high from weed – the one where your ribs strain from the pressure of your laughing. It’s your first time masturbating, and arguably every time since. It’s the first kiss given to someone you don’t have any intent on loving, it’s the first kiss received by someone with the power and follow through to crush you, it’s that first act of sex in which you succumb to a lover and wake up with a thief. 

But it’s other things too – a stubbornness for aloneness on Saturday, that turns to hate for your loneliness on Sunday. A means to create wealth that over time fortifies a type of misery. 

Well whatever it is, it’s just the right metaphor because you think you’re capable to make the decision that oatmeal is most assuredly not for you.

However, the truth is decisions like that are never resolute because oatmeal is incredibly patient, knowing the longer you stay away the longer it has to work up its promise again. It will lick your ear and blow on it.

Then you get to that part where he writes about harboring responsibility for it, and for ‘putting it away’, so to speak. I mean if you bend the words just right it’s really talking about mankind shoving it in, or burying it deep out of sight, or hiding its vulgarity behind the bushes, or serving a penance for the choice.

How brilliant a metaphor, in fact how brilliant the device that is metaphor. Anything — no everything can serve as little lens shaped story capable of magnifying the very nature of human existence.

 Why not? It’s how Jesus teaches, after all, using his tidy parables the way he does.

 He gives his exact meaning through metaphor saying, The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

On first listen you know precisely what he means. You believe you understand. Until you realize you’ve never done it, not sure you’re capable. I mean, trade it all, everything for that one thing? That one treasure that has the staying power to actually stay a treasure?

No, the transactions you make look more like a fool catching lightning bugs. At times you sweep your paw through the dark believing you trapped one, only to open your hand to its own emptiness. Other times you get one in your grasp, but you’re quick to close it up tight in a jar, to make something less-than-living out of something that once was fully alive.

You will be ever hearing but never understanding, come the words form Isaiah, repeated by Jesus before all of his the kingdom-of-heaven-is-like parables. This starts to sound more like the truth, because while stuck in the habit of resetting our appetites for the things that just leave us sick, we have never traded it all for that one treasure.

 

At least not like he has. Selling off might, power, prestige for that one thing. Siding with foolishness, brokenness and poverty over posturing, governing and greed. Literally selling it all for the one, just like the crazy old preacher in some story has it: He had died one death for all, but he would have died every soul’s death for one. Did they understand that? Did they understand that for each stone soul he would have died ten million deaths? 

Do we understand? 

 

If this is what the kingdom is like maybe it will always remain beyond our total grasp.

I wonder, can we at least understand how worthy a king he is for such a place?  

on eating a bowl of oatmeal

Oatmeal is one of those foods, maybe the only food that for me starts as a promise and ends in repulsion. I like oatmeal for its first bite. I abhor it for its last.

See it begins well enough.

In its favor, the warm cereal is served with a certain familiar sentimentality. The very characteristics of a piping hot bowl of oatmeal – the steaming warmth and sweet aroma – entice the senses, much like cookies fresh from the oven. They evoke a feeling of comfort, of welcoming…of home. Which for me is a particularly good trick since the number of times my mother made oatmeal in my boyhood could be counted on one hand.

The first bite stays true to the fabricated nostalgia sending a good blend of sticky, sweet, hearty and warm down near my heart. Which explains how recently stealing a bite or two from my girlfriend’s bowl on two separate occasions had created a fresh fondness, albeit short-lived, for oatmeal.  Because with each new spoonful, sticky seems less and less appealing, and hearty subtly transforms to something far less attractive – lumpy. The temperature cools, and the warmth evaporates, along with the original lure of the chunky mush.

Oatmeal settles in my stomach differently than other foods. And what I mean by that is that it actually doesn’t settle at all. I can picture how it feels, which will reveal how very little I know about human anatomy, and probably is without an ounce of accuracy as to what is really happening.

I visualize a lump of the stuff reaching the end of the food-pipe and stopping. Whereas other foods get to the tunnel’s end and empty into a larger chamber, even settling to the bed of the stomach, it seems to me, inside of me oatmeal clings to the end of the food chute it was sent through. Then with each succeeding swallow I’m adding a lump to the clog, slowly building a long column from some middle region in my abdomen up to the very back of my throat, until finally when I swallow, I imagine the that stuff is actually going nowhere down, but just back. And then I think that if my throat had more in common with a gate or a door, and that if swallowing itself did not enact some sort of directional force on food, that as easily as I could push the food back, it could on a will of its own come forward, or out, or up.

Then while still imagining the exodus of oatmeal from an open hatch, I realize that what it would look like upon escape would be strikingly familiar. In fact I believe it would be indiscernible from the very substance still sitting in my bowl. A dead ringer. And when I get to this point I begin to resent it.

Dually, I feel some responsibility for it. I, after all, bought the stuff; convinced it was the right thing to get in the moment. And now in this moment I am propelled by the notion that the right thing to do is to put it away, not to waste it.

I begin to tell myself, “It’s good for me,” an argument turning out to be its last remaining selling point. Such an appeal is almost silly, since no matter how well I can concede in my mind to one of oatmeal’s more salient attributes, my thoughts will always be offset by feelings. And right now, what I feel is sick.  

this is killing us.

What is with us and killing? Of all the ten, I think I struggle least with Thou Shalt Not Kill. But assasinations are the headlines. Bombs under cars, threats against nations, students against students. I’ve been racking my brain for clues as to what has always – what has ever- made it easy to dispose of another life. Is our victimhood a weight too difficult to carry? Is it lighter when carried with a gun? How long does a hate seed need to incubate before it’s brave enough to touch a trigger? 

I want to desperately know the end of our evil.  

And at the same time I feel fortunate to be surrounded with those who are just as interested in chasing after the hope of boundless good.

Father, have mercy.

take the try out of a guy

A working list of barriers to trying, what? Anything.

• Disinterest. 
• Boredom. Are they the same? 
• A stronger faith in these things:the collapse of time, the security of money, a genie rather than Jesus Christ, entertainment. 
• Someone else already did it. 
• Someone else will surely do it better than I.  
• It doesn’t work, 
• it can’t work, 
• I’m pretty sure it never worked. 
• No heart, 
• broken heart, 
• dyslexic heart (not sure what it means but it sounded good, thanks Paul Westerberg).  

 A working list of reasons to try, what? Almost anything: 

• He’s been making something from nothing his whole life — creation, exodus, immaculate conception, love, resurrection, redemption. And he has the audacity to say: “Follow me.”  

Tire change. Post dated 2.9

“Geeez-zus cri-est.”

She isn’t praying when she speaks the name. Though each syllable is enunciated clearly and delivered at a measured pace, it’s clear she’s not calling on him. She’s talking into the cold and toward her car. She’s mad at the flat tire. She’s worried the nuts aren’t budging.

I am too, until I step on the tire iron, bounce my weight on it a couple times, and hear a sort of grunt from the metal threads giving a little on the lock they’ve made. I repeat the same act 4 more times wrenching the nuts loose, one by one.

“Really it’s no big deal.” I say, shrugging off her gratitude. This is what we do, I think. This is nothing more than what we automatically should do.

“If you just get them loose, I’ll do the rest. I know how to change a tire.”

“It’s okay.”

Laura, convinced the jack is upside down, lowers it down, flips it over and re-raises it. I’m certain it’s upside down now. But it’s her car, her jack, and she knows how to change a tire.

At first tug the tire won’t budge though all the nuts have been freed. Laura goes into the car to disengage the parking brake.

I raise the jack further until the tire completely clears the ground. Then  try once more to wrestle it loose, this time succeeding.

“You want it just back in the trunk, here?” refusing her attempt to reach for the salt covered tire.

“Yes, just back there, Phee-el. Thank you so much.”

I rest the tire in the trunk, clear a bag out the way, and shimmy the tire further into the space to lay it flat. I realize very quickly but already much too late that I’m not pushing the tire alone. The whole car lunges forward, toppling the jack and landing the front left of the car on the now empty tire rim.

“No…no,” I repeat in disbelief.

I know little about cars, but I’m worried about the repercussion the fall could have. I know little about Laura, but I’m worried about how far I’ve fallen in her eyes, having just (as she will describe it later) dropped her car.

It’s not long before the Son of God’s full name is being declared again in the emptying parking lot. But this time she speaks the name in between drags of a recently lit cigarette.

“This right here is giving me a headache.”

It’s more difficult raising the jack again because now there is no room to wedge it closer to the front wheel well. I have to start it further back, halfway between the front rim, on which the car is slumped on and the back wheel. The jack is more difficult to crank, and eventually I retrieve my own from my car trunk, to slip further near the front, once the car is raised just enough.

The spare goes on, I tighten the nuts. Finally, better than a half hour after we first began , the deed is done.

Laura gets into her car, closes the door and turns the key. Headlights and display lights go on, but the engine doesn’t turn over, doesn’t even make a sound.

What I hear instead is Laura, whose voice should be silenced closed up in her car’s interior. Instead its volume carries a muffled, barely audible name through the shut windows and doors.

“Geeez-zus cri-est.”