Saturday, July 07, 2007

The Interpretator, part 1

Well, I said I'd write for an hour every day...but my mind is not cooperating much right now. How's this for an extremely terrible story? Odd that an unproductive mind has born some fruit.





  • THE INTERPRETATOR. INTERPRETATING CRIME.



It was a dark, drizzly day. It always was. Shouldn't even be called day around here.
I was just settling in for a dark, drizzly evening of couchsitting. I wanted to make sure it didn't go anywhere, and, while I wasn't getting paid good money to do it, I was getting something: the opportunity to watch TV in someone else's house.

You might wonder why I don't go home and watch the tube. Well, home doesn't have Japanese game shows. Or Korean soaps. Poorly translated Chinese everything. No, this was definitely a perk of this particular job. And this was a job I intended to see through to the very end.




So, yeah, I was being paid to sit on my ass. Not a bad deal. And not one I was going to leave.


I guess I should mention I was also broke. That also helped make the job.




So I had pretty well settled in, watched a bunch of trash - the usual poorly budgeted soaps from Taiwan, complete with ghosts and insane people setting their homes on fire, some puppet shows, a transcendently beautiful Korean soap that nonetheless was indistinguishable from every other Korean soap ever made, a Japanese show that, as far as I can figure, was about humiliating both children and their parents, and probably some other stuff while I was half-dozing.




I woke up a little when a kung-fu drama came on. It had some guy flying around in what looked like a big red tube. Not sure what that was, but at least it was different. For the hell of it I dug around in the cushions. I'd like to say dag. I really would. But, you know, I'm just real regular about some things, and I guess I'm just gonna keep saying dug. All the usual accumulated crud was back there. I pulled some of the less gross stuff out to see if it was worth anything.




There were the usual keys, bits of popcorn, coins, dead bugs, dog's/children's toys, the remote, just very mundane stuff. I'd wondered about that remote, before. I supposed I could change the channel now, if I wanted. I didn't, though. There was a note, too - "honey, I am putting the speed hat away. I don't want you letting the children near it. It's much too dangerous."



I looked at the crumpled, (soda?)-stained paper again. A dangerous hat?


Well, that sounded better than whatever shit was on TV.