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Addendum Issue 096
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#96 : Tuesday 8 July 2003 : http://addendumtextfiles.org
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Passing By, by Oregano
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You can't see it from the road; it is a fading bright blue and 50 feet
tall but you cannot see it. Don't blame camaflauge or a tree, this
is in plain sight, not hidden by anything, but you still cannot see
it since it is too much a part of the background of life -- too much
of what the eye ignores, the immaterial, the never relevant.
We stopped at the foot of this water tower and the heat was baking us.
Could the water up there be boiling? We thought that. And then
someone said it out loud and we saw it was silly but no one said it
was silly, just something about 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
I went off and took a pee behind some bushes.
I came back and people were sitting on this large concrete footing at
the bottom of the water tower and we drank from our bottles of water
that we all had forgotten to bring. But one person remembered and
remebered that we would all forget and so he brought enough water
bottles for everyone.
The water was warm and had a stale plastic taste to it. The ground
around was dry. Tall brown grasses and so many different types of
plant. Who knows what they all are? But I trampled down some and
took a seat too and this whole time, and I swear this is true, we no
longer noticed the water tower. It disappeared for us, just as gone
as for the people on the road who drive by every day of their lives
and cannot see it.
I can remember the sounds, I can hear the crickets or grasshoppers or
whatever it is that buzzes far away -- far enough that the wind
distorts it, with the sound wavering in the humid air.
What we talked about can no longer matter, old worries that never had
meaning, it was about nothing, all I recall is that first was talk of
the water tower and then the water tower disappeared.
Artists can see it. Here is one funny thing then I have to get the
group moving again. R. Crumb draws comic books, these tend to be set
in America, but he lives in France, and so he hires people to go out
and take photos of things that don't exist: telphone wires, TV
antennas, street lights. Things that we don't see but would have an
unease if they did not fill in the rest of the pictures. Crumb adds
them to his comic books so readers can comfortably ignore them.
But then we all get up, we had a lot more walking to do and we got up
and moved on and the water tower that never existed now had no chance
to live. At least until yesterday. I was on a bus and was bored and
tired and looking out the window at so much in the world and there was
a water tower behind a church and then ths whole scene from my past
came back to me, and finally I could see it.
And now you see it too.
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