Eminent Domain

I saw the small flying insect while I was peeing. It was stuck on my hairbrush, on the shelf next to the window in the bathroom. One of its thin wire legs was entangled in one of my old dead hairs and it was struggling to free itself. It had come all the way from conception through its perilous infancy to the mature quest for light. In my haste I tore one of its legs off, mistaking it for a hair, but I finally managed to separate it from the brush head carefully and it flew up and away like a happy helicopter.

I got the hairbrush just before we bought the lot to the build the house on. I remember because I had to go to four Fred Meyers to find that model, which had been discontinued. And build a house! Pop was 9l and I didn’t think he had any business building a house but he insisted, so we had the foundation poured for a small A frame and then finished it over the next two years. I remember the morning we put the shelf there, in the bathroom. I wanted it under the mirror above the sink but Pop said it would be better under the window near the light. “It would be a nice place for flowers” he said, so I gave in, thinking I would change it later.

The night before I got up to pee at 6 a.m. I had decided to quit smoking. I was going to try not to drink beer because that would make it easier not to smoke, but I was reading a Walter Mosley murder mystery. And after I was into it a bit a beer just seemed too perfect, so I nursed a Miller’s cold filter draft and it was perfect, so perfect that on chapter ten I had another one and on chapter twelve one cigarette, then feeling partly proud I went upstairs to the attic bedroom and slept. When the urge to pee roused me out of sleep at 6 a.m. I lay there unable to decide if I wanted to go all the way downstairs or use the urinal next to the bed. I decided on the urinal and lay there waiting for sufficient force of motivation. When it came I raised myself quickly off the Futon and then, in one of those sudden swift reversals of mind, headed downstairs, thinking how nice it would be to come back to bed after the expenditure of effort. Then there I was standing next to the toilet, my right arm supporting myself on the shelf, when I moved my elbow a few inches to push the hairbrush away and saw the silent struggle going on in the other universe. It felt right to see it fly away. It was not a small feeling -- it was absolute, without dimension. Nothing should be where it doesn’t want to be.