Roar
I was down at Baja Fresh yesterday, my customary chicken Baja burrito in one hand and lunchtime reading in the other, when a grating metallic sound worked it’s way into the periphery of hearing. It had a texture similar to when I’d get sand in the bearings of my skateboard wheels, only lower pitched, rougher, like an blender dying. It was intermittent and irregular, and extremely annoying – and I still like industrial/noize, like Wumpscut and Pan Sonic, so you know this had to be bad.
Looking around for the culprit, I find a small child with what appears to be a Godzilla head mounted on a handle with a trigger. Every time he fired, Godzilla’s eyes would flash and he’d his his electronic roar. Over the course of a microsecond, neurons fired in a trajectory something along the lines of:
My lord, why doesn’t his mother stop him from doing that constantly?
She must be totally de-sensitized to it, I feel so sorry for her.
Thank god I haven’t bred.
You’d think he’d get tired of that thing by now.
Actually, I was just as easily (and repetitively) entertained at that age.
I wonder if, right now, I can find the joy in that toy that he’s found.
Well, I didn’t. I tried to re-capture that youthful wonder and enthusiasm and self-centered-ness, but I couldn’t. Until, that is, he took me back to the magic of childhood, when he tugged on his mother’s pants legs and asked, “But what’s he saying?”
Yeah, what is he saying? Why can’t he be alive and communicating? Who says you mother can’t speak “Godzillian” (or some other lizard dialect)? Why not?
I tried to be young intellectually, when what I really needed to do was to throw away all that I know, and let the unknown be just as possible; I need to drop constraints. It’s an incredibly wonderful feeling, a buoyant, light accord with the environment. I savored it for as long as I could, although it slipped away quite quickly.
That roar was still fucking annoying.