The Parameters
fiction by Colin McGowan
On the bed in the evening, when the air is cool, I read excellent and important books while she watches movies on her iPad. I hate the iPad. The moving images in my peripheral vision distract me from the lyricism and insight of what I am reading. I have told her this. She has replied “ugh.”
Relationships require compromise. I have permitted her to stay on the bed but suggested that she watch movies with “not too much quick-cutting, directors who like to hold the frame.” I have suggested parameters. Nothing made after 1985 (the year before Top Gun came out). If it’s newer than that, it has to be foreign or made by an American director of European sensibilities.
These parameters have done the trick. I am less distracted. The excellent and important books are enriching my mind. I understand things that I previously did not about insects, horses, rocketry, criminal investigation, the establishment and integration of the pharmaceutical industry into the Nazi state, concrete, urban electrical grids, raising a child, grocery stores, pre-modern geology, and the moon. I don’t have a firm handle on all of it but I am getting there.
“The pharmaceutical industry as we know it today grew out of the synthetic dye business. Coal tars played a crucial part,” I explain to her. She doesn’t hear. She’s watching The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Keep us breathing fire!
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