Something is happening to Ulmer. Lorca schmorca. Lorca schmorca? A
memory is forming, a recollection of returning from his first semester at
college, prepared by an intro course in economics to defeat his Republican
father's insistence that governments must pay their bills the same as
individual citizens. Keynes schmeynes his father said.
The schmacking of a word; Ulmer once read a linguistic study of insult
that explained the nearly universal quality of this verbalization, with
every language having its equivalent. lorca schmorca.
Ulmer, much to his own surprise, was getting into the official vehicle of
the emerAgency, despite the fact that the emerAgency has no vehicle of any
kind, official or unofficial. Schmorca had somehow made available a
transport that was partly the peddle fire engine Ulmer had when he was
four and the midget car his father sometimes drove while representing the
Shriners in a parade.
Ulmer got into this emerAgency vehicle and found himself instantly
hovering at tree level three miles away at his home, positioned in a way
that afforded a clear view of his own and the adjacent backyard. For the
first time he realized how much he envied his neighbor's swimming pool.
Perhaps until he heard about vitruvius he could not acknowledge the degree
to which his neighbor might be superior to himself, at least in the
metaphysics of swimming pools.
Ulmer also has a swimming pool of course (he lives in Florida, after all).
Despite hovering at tree level Ulmer can see perfectly well the black
algae forming on the bottom of his own pool, the worn patches in the
surface, and these flaws in turn remind him of everything he knows about
the pool that no one else knows but that put it at the top of his list of
impending disasters. At the same time, looking down at his neighbor's
yard, Ulmer saw the only part of that pool still visible: the pair of
steel hand-rails of the ladder marking the deep end. Nothing else of the
pool was visible, since years ago the neighbor had it filled in and
sodded; nothing but lawn. Now and then Ulmer has seen his neighbor
sunning himself in his deck chair placed out in the grass where the center
of the pool used to be. Infrared remote sensing devices would still show
a pool there, perhaps, but the hand-rails are the only clue for
archeologists on the ground.
Pool schmool, Ulmer said to himself, and hit the siren.
Greg Ulmer * * * * * * *
http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/