PLUMBESS SEG
TRIVIA
Mowing and Bacon
I promised myself I would never write again. It was a good promise. What more could be said than what I said in Mad Cow? Those of you who know Mad Cow know that there is nothing more. Instead I dedicated myself to mowing the lawn, and trying to get my daughter to eat something other than bacon. And then Mr. Wears came along and said, “I liked your weird Car book, what would you say to contributing a short story to one of the following anthologies I’m making: uncharted territories, science fiction, or magical women? I’ll give you 50 dollars. You’ll understand, whoever you are, that principled life decisions are one thing—good, humane decisions like never writing again—and 50 dollars is quite another thing entirely. I said, “Give me a week.” That was two years ago. Which anthology did I stake my flag in, you ask? You know for an alternative fact that science is out of fashion, and uncharted things are by definition indescribable—I wasn’t about to get myself stuck in a paradox. But what did I know about magic, or women? Magic, to me, is a mix of the unknown and the terrifying. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that women are the same mixture at a different ratio. I thought about it for at least half an hour, and settled on plumbing. You use a toilet, you desecrate good water, and then it disappears down the drain. And then clean water—possibly the same water—appears in the sink. A cycle. It is both unknowable and terrifying. It is magical. Plumbess Seg was born, although tragically as an orphan. She fixes pipes, and thus makes civilization possible. Sounds less than heroic, you might say. But would you do what a plumber does? I collected my fifty dollars, I bought an edge trimmer for my lawn and another side of bacon. But I realized there are more pipes to follow, more drains to unclog—so I wrote a whole book. Plumbess Seg was exhumed. I won’t say you should read it instead of Mad Cow, but I will say you can’t read Mad Cow. |