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“Good point, good point.” Bartholomeus leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t too sure what anyone had been talking about for the last half-hour or so. He had been having a lot of “trouble” “concentrating” “lately”. He rested his high-def chin on his gender–neutral hands, which were locked contemplatively, elbows propped on the conference table, his face twisted in a grimace of thoughtful determination (asterisk!) and then slowly began the complicated biological (not to mention spiritual) process of turning himself inside out.


(asterisk!) It was a face his wife, Barbara, would describe as his “meeting face”, (although she never actually saw her husband in a meeting she liked to think that this was his face (taking the liberty comforted her; manufacturing in her a counterfeit sense of camaraderie between she and her husband) because it reminded her of the bewildered look he sometimes got manipulating a new appliance, or wrestling with a moral dilemma.)

Bartholomeus would laugh heartily at his wife’s joke provided he wasn’t preoccupied with his crazy ideas about turning himself inside out. But if his mind was elsewhereish, or if “things” became too “busy” in his brain he would stare blankly at his “wife”, Barbara, like a hunting dog confronted with math. This would trigger, depending on her mood, one of two reactions in his wife, Barbara.

If she felt confident about her self, she would tilt her head to the right, and a look of matronly empathy would crawl over her face. She pitied her husband in those moments. She saw him as an idiot savant, a capable manager, hardworking leader in touch with the subtleties of his business concern, but ultimately an emotional klutz, an overgrown man-child in need of her compassion and understanding. She felt she and she alone was equipped with the emotional machinery capable of processing his complex readings – machinery uniquely calibrated after years of partnership.

However is she were feeling self-conscious, racked with self-doubt and poor body image, she would interpret her husband’s inexplicable behavior as a judgment of the entire shambles of her quiet, desperate life. In his quizzical look she felt ashamed for doing nothing with her life but tending to the dreary routine of domesticity, like a small town museum-keeper dusting off a diorama hoping for someone, anyone to come and visit.

It was on a day/days like this/these where we began our story… the story of one man’s bio-spiritual quest to turn himself inside out.

Date Written: December 26, 2004
Author: scoop
Average Vote: 2.8889