dog in a cafe

after that, the silence stretched so far it smeared and left a weird residue. she kept looking at the car door like she wanted to leave, so i looked at the door too, then she looked at me, and i looked at her, and my first thought was that she was going to tell me that the door was stuck. i was used to that car always doing some damn thing. it was the car me and all my siblings had learned to drive in, and it was really beat to hell. there were dents all over the body, which we’d unsuccessfully tried fixing up with spackle. it had looked nice for maybe a week, but then the sun wrecked it - the spackle cracked up like the mud on the bottom of a dry riverbed and turned a sort of off yellow-white that made the car looked like it had been molded out of chicken shit. it also had a bullet hole it through the cabin that whistled like a toothless old man whenever the car went above 40, so loud it could drown out the radio, and a cabin that smelled so strongly of bugspray that even the arizona summer we drove everywhere we could with the windows down.

(if you have kids one day, you will maybe, possibly, begin to understand how much i loved that car.)

anyway, i was thinking about what else could possibly be wrong with the chickenshitmobile, and she just kept looking at me, and then i wondered if there was something on my face, and she just kept looking at me, and then the penny dropped and i realized she was trying to work up the nerve to break up with me. 

That car was always dying in a million different ways

My siblings learned to drive in with it, and beat it half to scrap

Then filled the dents with spackle that looked just like chicken crap

The plaster cracked like river mud from our sun’s unending hate

The eggshell white turned yellow in the cruelest twist of fate

I loved that car like family, I cannot tell a lie.

But the state of Arizona’s where all good things go to die

The car was good, we understood, and thus it's time was nigh.

Those thoughts were racing circuit loops through tracks inside my mind

When I caught her gaze again and saw our thoughts were not aligned

The door was fine but she was not, I knew what would happen next:

Like the boyfriends all before I knew that I would soon be ex'd

"Oh," I said. She looked at me. She seemed consumed with shame.

"I am so sorry," she said at once, accepting all the blame.

"Don't be," I said. "We took a chance. It doesn't always work."

"And ending our relationship does not make you a jerk."

She gave me a hug then ran inside, and I sat a moment longer-

- before realizing that her driveway was not the place to ponder.

I hit reverse and pulled out slow but was halted with a CRUNCH.

The realization of my mistake then hit me like a punch.

I hit her neighbor's car, and my insurance forms were out of date

My phone was dead, I knew with dread, and thus I knew my fate:

I'd have to go knock on her door and test my constitution

To borrow a phone and call my dad to come with a solution.

I left my car and crossed the lawn in a not unpleasant walk.

The door was opened by her dad who said "She doesn’t want to talk."

I said "Nor do I, but your neighbors car was kind of in my way

And I need to call my dad before I can journey far away”

He looked from me to my victims car then my chickenshitmobile

It didn’t take an empath for his expression to reveal

the depth of pity that this man could look at me and feel.

He said he’d bring a phone if I could wait a little longer

I left to find a patch of shade upon the lawn to conquer

by sitting down and touching grass and centering my soul

while also trying very hard to relax my tightly clenched butthole

He came back a moment later with a phone and juice and olives

The phone was there to call my dad and break the wall of

silence while the juice and olives were nothing more than simple human kindness

I made a sound like horses drowning slowly in a bog

He slapped like my back like someone who wasn't quite sure what was wrong:

If I was crying tears of sadness or upon on an olive choking

Or even if the sounds were mirth and I was merely joking

He went inside eventually and I had no more excuse to stall

I pressed the tones and made what was to be my last phonecall

But if my dad was troubled he did not show it much at all.

He arrived some minutes later, and together we both knocked

The neighbor there was very kind and together we three walked

The man said he'd fix the dent himself, and thanked me for revealing

The dent he knew that others would have much preferred concealing.

Then my dad drove us both, not home, but to a nearby gas station

And bought us both some hotdogs, to eat in commiseration

My first break up: A hard moment, made worse with my mistakes.

We drove out to the canals for our hotdogs to partake.

We sat on red caliche and we watched the sun fall dead.

Then he looked at me, and held me close, and this is what he said:

"Pain lingers in our memories longer than joy alone,

Which is why the oldest people are so very anger prone.

When something hurts so very much, and you know that you'll remember

the way it hurt for decades than make sure you also temper

the pain with something joyful so that you can remember with it too

the joy of hotdogs and canals not just breakups and the blues

And one day when you are a man and have a kid of your own too

Remember that what you say on their bad days is how they’ll remember you.”

--

The year after that, I left highschool and went to learn in college

And frequently got whooped by life in my long quest for knowledge

And on my days where something hurt and I was feeling blue,

I would stop by the gas station and pick a hotdog out, or two

and go sit by the hot canals and imagine my dad who

would ask what I was going to remember. And I’d say

You, dad.

The most jarring thing was, the apes are completely unable to learn grammar, and would say things like "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you" (actual quote by Nim Chimpsky), which their handlers would interpret as a sentence, when in reality the apes are simply mimicking signs in hopes of getting a reward. Those hearing handlers would see things like "Nim eat" and "eat Nim" and intepret those as equally meaning "Nim wants to eat".

More damning, the lack of understanding of ASL by the hearing scientists meant that most of what Koko and Nim Chimpsky "spoke" was purely the scientists just seeing what they wanted to see. A Deaf person was brought in to interact with Nim, and they were instructed to not give him any food until he signed "food". They spent hours with an increasingly distressed chimp who did not sign anything, but Nim's hearing handlers would see him move his hand close to his mouth and go "oh! there it is! he signed it!", and while they spent the whole day signing, they didnt see Nim signing back.

With Koko, her handler would claim Koko would sometimes mix up signs like "need/knee", "I/eye", "people/nipple" because they "sound alike/rhyme" but... they don't. Those words rhyme in spoken English. They don't rhyme at all in ASL. Koko wouldn't know those words rhymed in english because she DIDN'T speak english, she "spoke" modified ASL. Of course, as the scientists did not speak ASL either, they didn't realize it, and just assumed random movements Koko meant were signs, and tried to think what she "could have meant instead" by thinking of what words sounded like the ones equivalent to what she had just "signed", even though an ASL speaker would not make a mistake like that.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that almost all of what those apes signed was due to direct prompting from scientists, the fact that they did not use language when alone, or the fact that most of what they answered was complete gibberish (which resulted in videos like Koko's climate address (yes, really) having to be heavily edited and cut to make it seem like she was actually speaking anything that made sense).

One really nasty side effect of this was like. The amount of hearing people who decided to try learning ASL and other sign languages because of the vague possibility of being able to communicate with apes, instead of, you know, the ACTUAL possibility of communicating with and appreciating Deaf people. (one person even said that Koko inspired them to learn ASL so they could communicate with their deaf friend, like... why the fuck did your FRIEND not inspire you to learn ASL??? did you really have to wait for a fucking gorilla failing to learn sign language to think "hmm, maybe talking to my friend would be nice!"??????)

mom, how do i...?

and dad, how do i...?

^ there are tons of other resources but these two will teach you some personal hygiene, home or apartment repairs, easy recipes and basic cleaning techniques, even how to schedule doctor's appointments

if youre a renter i cannot recommend the trans handyma'am enough, mercury is a lifesaver, and her channel and accounts are always accepting new questions

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but if you DO want to find something new that fits your specific tastes? just use their search bar, unlike on Webtoons it actually does what search bars are supposed to do! within the search page you can pick and choose whatever genre tags you want, and you can filter out major NSFW flags you're not comfortable with seeing.