Shawn Huelle

An Experiment, pt. 5

Today, I met a man who claimed to have shopping carts instead of pubic hair. Perhaps I misunderstood him. I have been having a lot of trouble with the other language today.

I smiled and nodded at him in the way you do when you're foreign and you've only understood 85% of what's just been said to you, and all of the important information was in the other 15%. He asked me if I had understood him. I said I thought so, but perhaps not entirely, that perhaps I had misunderstood about the shopping carts. He smiled and nodded, touched the brim of his hat, and walked away.

Everyone here who needs to talk to me, but who has not met me in person, thinks I'm a woman. I do not know if anyone who has met me in person thinks I'm a woman. I would like to know if they did. I would like to talk to them—not to correct their assumption, but to observe how they talk to me.

There is a word in the German language that might be translated (by someone who understood the stem and the adjectival suffix, but little else) as "ladylike," but which actually means, "dimwitted."

I don't believe for even one moment that that old man has shopping carts in his pants. I'm not sure what he believes.

I wanted to tell the woman selling me ground coffee that I already knew all that, but that I was happy to hear it in her language. Instead, I just smiled and nodded, and afterwards, sitting in the sun with a scoop of cherry & cream ice cream, I closed my eyes for a moment, and the image of the body exploding on the shoulder began again in slow motion. I opened my eyes, and enjoyed the ice cream as well as the sun. I suppose I enjoyed them both in English.

Once upon a time, there was a young man. He wasn't really that young. There was some question about his manhood. He held the other Shawn entirely responsible for this. In truth, he himself was the other Shawn.

Es war einmal ein postmodernischer Nihilist. Oh hell, all nihilists are po-mo, aren't they?

Once upon a time, there was a man who had shopping carts instead of pubic hair . . .