preposition

about: The Goddamn Bamboo

In spite of my well-maintained cynicsm, i am often very innocent. And it was in this spirit of innocence that i asked benjy, "What's that in the back of your car?"

The answer was bamboo. But because benjy was involved, it was not that simple. Jesus no.

The bamboo sat in a medium-sized cardboard box. It lay in the form of 12 inch tall, 24 inch wide segments suitable for, like, decorative fencing, i guess. You can see something that looks virtually identical to the bamboo in question here. That doesn't really give you a sense of scale, but that's a puppy and not a full-grown dog, if that helps.

Benjy has never demonstrated a need or desire for decorative fencing of his own, so he was quick to add to the rapidly growing tale that the bamboo was for his mom.

"What," i asked very, very stupidly, "is it doing in the back of your car?"

"Well," benjy said, before launching into his most commonly uttered phrase, "It's complicated."

Benjy's mom already had some of this bamboo (which you see in the picture linked above), but wanted some more. Somehow, she managed to find more of this fencing[1], but it belonged to someone living in Hayward.

"So why not just mail it?"

"The bamboo is heavy. It would have been expensive to mail. So i had to go pick it up."

But of course benjy got lost on his way to pick it up, because benjy has roughly the navigational wherewithal of a deaf fruit bat, and then he had to deal with the pivotal weight of the package. Thus, the bamboo continued to live in the back of his car because, as benjy took pains to inform me, it was too heavy to move. Even if he could move it, he said, he didn't have anywhere to put it, and it wouldn't be worth putting it there anyway because it was so damned heavy. And since benjy could always just make me drive to Kirkwood such that the back of his car would never need to accomodate boots and bags and snowboards and groceries and muddy, intoxicated, hummus-eating skiiers and snowboarders, the bamboo just stayed in his car.

For five months.

Until, finally, benjy had to get something out of the back of his car for someone else.

"What's that?" mark asked, pointing at the mythic box.

Benjy began to launch into the full, exhaustive explanation, but i interrupted.

"Hang on," i said. "I want to see how heavy this bamboo actually is."

I reached down, affirmed that my grip on the box was true, and heaved. And much like the Sword before Arthur, the box came free from the trunk.

It weighed perhaps 20 pounds.

To verify that it was the box's low mass and not any Arthurian powers on my part, i handed the box off to mark, who promptly and without any apparent strain hoisted it to his shoulder.

Well, i thought, there is still the issue of storage. Except that i forgot, as i often forget, that benjy lives in a cracky ass apartment which among its many features boasts an entire room between the hallway and the apartment's single bathroom whose sole purpose is and can only be to store junk. While i am not an artsy or craftsy kind of guy, i think i can charitably call a box of bamboo fencing "junk".

Also, benjy's room is converted attic space, so the ceiling of his room is the roof of the house. Thus, it meets the floor at a 45 degree angle, which creates a triangular shape useless for anything save the conspicuous, shining exception of... a small box of junk.

So really the problem isn't figuring out where benjy could have stored this box, but rather to choose one of the cornucopia of suitable places for its storage.

Indeed, this remains a mystery, for a man could die of thirst searching for a single specific box of junk amongst benjy's sizable collection of similar boxes. Fortunately, the box has finally made it out of my sight and, blessedly, out of my mind.