Pipe Dreams
This isn’t about what one may think. Yes, in that way the title is delightfully misleading.
It’s got something to do with the larger universe, tucked away under the mattress of your bed.
Yes.
It’s to do with the power of corners, cervices and conduits that beckon like Haydes to the underworld. Lurking within the periphery of your vision, but never truly visible—the evil that hides in the space between the elevator itself and the floor it is standing on. The abyss of gutter and manhole covers that threatens to swallow up the trinkets in your hand.
Yes, dear, this piece is about the inevitability of the Unknown.
Scenario 1: Manhole Covers At Home
Destitution and poverty has its advantages. Two case; either there is a cover, or there is nothing. Round, solid and heavy, the Manhole Cover at Home has no spaces. No odd grill, design ingenuities or dents. By design or otherwise, this design has logistical advantages. A) Ungrateful, greedy and opportunist citizens (who find anything from school aquarium fish, to KFC caution boards, to British Council ‘Exam in Progress’ signs useful to their existence) cannot run off with the cover. B) The cover keeps all manner of things ‘undesirable’ out of public view. And C) By virtue of being, round, heavy and solid, nothing can fall through them.
Scenario 2: Manhole Covers Here
Of course ‘here’ being the great vast unknowns that are not home, let us stretch the conversation (much like the proverbial Clingfilm to the very extreme to try and make it stick to the sides). NOTE: cling fling has no proverbial use in the English language, its use thus far only circumcised to within the realm of the kitchen and a song in Chicago. Though the use of the words ‘cellophane’ and ‘Clingfilm’ interchangeable still remains nothing short of dubious (if not downright incorrect), this writer assumes them to be one and the same REGARDLESS of any mention in the proceeding paragraphs.
Manhole Covers Here are not round, but rather square, with a grid representing a noughts and crosses board--double the originals. It sits snugly with one to one-and-a-half inch gaps that invite a variety of sudden movements to dispel small, but very important contents into its crevices beyond the subtly unassuming façade of the hole cover itself.
THE RUB
Picture this. Pretty girl (We assume certain things. Play along). Bent double, albeit in as charming a manner as the words “bent double” suitably allow. Manhole cover—grid. Object: car keys lying in a pool of shiny liquid, with a squish of semi-solid, at this distance murky-coloured mass on the side. Much like a parsley garnish to a main-course dish. The grid too heavy to lift, and alas fitted to avoid theft.
The punch line: Even if somehow a fellow Subcontinental guard on duty can manage to get the car keys out through a series of events that will not only draw huge amounts of attention but also take time, effort and pools of patience that temperatures above 42 degrees C to not support—WOULD you actually use that key to drive home?
The Theological Debate: The Space Between
Half-an-inch long running the entire one side of the elevator, the Space Between is the only indication of how many floors you’d fall in the unfortunate event of the elevator crashing to the ground. Measured in terms of the Air Sucked From The Space when you enter the elevator, the Space Between offers a momentary (but enough for the imaginative) glimpse into how definitely one would lose the key (the hypothesized object for this discussion) into the conduit, currently suspended X number of floors about the ground. Moreover, anything falling from that height would inevitable be rendered useless on impact.
When crossing the threshold of the floor onto the elevator, the Space Between beckons the key to plummet with a deliberate, heady exhilaration to ‘let go’. As Milan Kundera explains it, it’s like vertigo. You want to fall and feel the exhilarating, and compellingly finalistic rush of the inevitable.
One of these days, I will throw the keys myself, and with heady euphoria, backed by black humour watch my precious trinkets fall into the murky abyss and not worry about retrieving them. I’ll walk off smiling.
Till then, I hold on tight.
It’s got something to do with the larger universe, tucked away under the mattress of your bed.
Yes.
It’s to do with the power of corners, cervices and conduits that beckon like Haydes to the underworld. Lurking within the periphery of your vision, but never truly visible—the evil that hides in the space between the elevator itself and the floor it is standing on. The abyss of gutter and manhole covers that threatens to swallow up the trinkets in your hand.
Yes, dear, this piece is about the inevitability of the Unknown.
Scenario 1: Manhole Covers At Home
Destitution and poverty has its advantages. Two case; either there is a cover, or there is nothing. Round, solid and heavy, the Manhole Cover at Home has no spaces. No odd grill, design ingenuities or dents. By design or otherwise, this design has logistical advantages. A) Ungrateful, greedy and opportunist citizens (who find anything from school aquarium fish, to KFC caution boards, to British Council ‘Exam in Progress’ signs useful to their existence) cannot run off with the cover. B) The cover keeps all manner of things ‘undesirable’ out of public view. And C) By virtue of being, round, heavy and solid, nothing can fall through them.
Scenario 2: Manhole Covers Here
Of course ‘here’ being the great vast unknowns that are not home, let us stretch the conversation (much like the proverbial Clingfilm to the very extreme to try and make it stick to the sides). NOTE: cling fling has no proverbial use in the English language, its use thus far only circumcised to within the realm of the kitchen and a song in Chicago. Though the use of the words ‘cellophane’ and ‘Clingfilm’ interchangeable still remains nothing short of dubious (if not downright incorrect), this writer assumes them to be one and the same REGARDLESS of any mention in the proceeding paragraphs.
Manhole Covers Here are not round, but rather square, with a grid representing a noughts and crosses board--double the originals. It sits snugly with one to one-and-a-half inch gaps that invite a variety of sudden movements to dispel small, but very important contents into its crevices beyond the subtly unassuming façade of the hole cover itself.
THE RUB
Picture this. Pretty girl (We assume certain things. Play along). Bent double, albeit in as charming a manner as the words “bent double” suitably allow. Manhole cover—grid. Object: car keys lying in a pool of shiny liquid, with a squish of semi-solid, at this distance murky-coloured mass on the side. Much like a parsley garnish to a main-course dish. The grid too heavy to lift, and alas fitted to avoid theft.
The punch line: Even if somehow a fellow Subcontinental guard on duty can manage to get the car keys out through a series of events that will not only draw huge amounts of attention but also take time, effort and pools of patience that temperatures above 42 degrees C to not support—WOULD you actually use that key to drive home?
The Theological Debate: The Space Between
Half-an-inch long running the entire one side of the elevator, the Space Between is the only indication of how many floors you’d fall in the unfortunate event of the elevator crashing to the ground. Measured in terms of the Air Sucked From The Space when you enter the elevator, the Space Between offers a momentary (but enough for the imaginative) glimpse into how definitely one would lose the key (the hypothesized object for this discussion) into the conduit, currently suspended X number of floors about the ground. Moreover, anything falling from that height would inevitable be rendered useless on impact.
When crossing the threshold of the floor onto the elevator, the Space Between beckons the key to plummet with a deliberate, heady exhilaration to ‘let go’. As Milan Kundera explains it, it’s like vertigo. You want to fall and feel the exhilarating, and compellingly finalistic rush of the inevitable.
One of these days, I will throw the keys myself, and with heady euphoria, backed by black humour watch my precious trinkets fall into the murky abyss and not worry about retrieving them. I’ll walk off smiling.
Till then, I hold on tight.
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