Loud + Animated

My girlfriend and I live in a big apartment building in downtown DC. It’s a comfortable place, about a hundred years old, and used to be a somewhat famous hotel until it was bought out and turned into apartments some fifty years ago.

There is a Chinese woman here who deals with the trash and does all the sweeping and mopping and vacuuming. The woman is built like a Panzer tank—low and thick and fearsome—but is friendly enough, especially toward the end of the workday.

Every morning around 8 am, she goes about her chores, starting in the alley below our window. Our apartment is on the third floor, which is just high up enough for us to not be able to see her. (I assume she’s hosing the alley off because it’s always residually wet when I leave out through the back.) The only way we even realize she is down there is because of these loud and animated conversations she has on her phone. I think she’s speaking Mandarin, which probably means she’s speaking Cantonese. (I have one of those brains that run into all sorts of shit when it comes to this or that. I can remember 24-digit codes from Castlevania II from like thirty years ago, but if I think it’s this, it’s probably that, and vice versa.)

I am routinely bewildered by how loud and animated these conversations of hers are, and my girlfriend and I often ponder what she could possibly be yammering about with such unruly fervor like three hours before The Price is Right even comes on.

“I’ll bet you anything it’s just gossip,” I theorize to my girlfriend. “She’s gossiping her huge head off about whatever nonsense is going back home in Shenzhen or wherever… ‘So, my mother told my brother that my sister’s husband was supposed to pick up their kids, but then he’s like, hey, why don’t you pick up the kids, I always pick up the kids, you goddamn heifer!—so now my brother wants to go over there and throw his ass off the balcony,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

“Maybe,” my girlfriend says, putting on layer after layer of black clothing, getting ready to go to work. “She could be talking about anything.”

Indeed. She could be talking about anything.

“So, Joey Meneses is at the plate,” I imagine the Chinese woman yelling into her phone. “Runners on the corners, nobody out, and boom, just like that, he’s down 0-2 because this jerk-off ump’s strike zone is all over the place, right? I mean, basically everything between the Yangtze and the goddamn Horsehead Nebula’s a strike, right? So, Joey’s got no choice, he’s gotta hack at pretty much anything coming in for a landing. But Joey’s a real cheeky hitter, right? What’s he do? He squares up to bunt and then bloops one right over second baseman’s head! But the kid standing on third, our skinny little shortstop who looks like he ain’t had a warm meal in six weeks, just stands there. That’s it, just stands there. He figured the second baseman would get a glove to Joey’s blooper, so he just stands there, like he’s in line at the Krispy Kreme on the corner of 19th and Connecticut. Meanwhile, what’s-his-nuts on first sees him just standing there, so what does he do? Same fucking thing, of course… Just stands there… Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the world’s first game of professional freeze tag! Total disaster. So, yeah, the center fielder scoops up the ball and underhands it to the second baseman who gently steps on the bag for out number one. And then our shithead leftfielder—that utility guy, Dixon or Nixon or whatever, the guy who’s lived out of hotels his whole adult life—steps up to the plate and swings the bat three times and then goes and sits back down. And then that rookie Dominican kid must had said to himself, gee, that looks like fun!—because he gets up there and gives his best impression of Dixon. Inning over.”

Or maybe she’s talking about the rivalry between 19th century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and G.W.F. Hegel. “Ah, Team Schopenhauer all the way. I mean, both dudes were total creepsters and they’d both suck Immanuel Kant’s winkie for a crisp five dollar bill and a trinket, but Schopenhauer’s 1818 magnum fuckin’ opus The World as Will and Representation makes Hegel’s whole oeuvre look like the back of a box of Fruity Pebbles. Granted, I do admit that since I’m, you know, a contrarian, as you like to call me, I’m finding myself dippin’ into Hegel more and more. I think it’s because of all the mopey kids around her, right? It’s like they all went to the same pity party and snorted The Schopenhauer Reader and now they just wanna do nothin’ but sit around and feel sorry for themselves all day all week, right? But, yeah, at the rate I’m goin’, if I keep oinkin’ up this Hegel, I’m gonna see the glass as neither half full nor half empty but filled to the brim with cute ‘n’ fuzzy bunnies, you know what I mean?”

Or perhaps it’s the Men in Black phenomenon that she’s carrying on and on about before I’ve most people have even had their second cup of coffee. “Most people think the Men in Black, you know, these spooky dudes who sometimes show up after a person has experienced a UFO—excuse me, a UAP. Boy, I ain’t ever gonna get used to that—and tell them, hey, you won’t tell nobody you saw nothin’, if you know what’s good for you are, you know, the FBI or the CIA or maybe the rubber gloves department of some kind of deep state officials, but what they really are—at least what I think they really are—is some kind of tulpa, right? I mean, all the reports of them say that there’s just something off about them. Their skin is this, like, weird gray color, and it’s too tight lookin’ or too loose lookin’, and their clothes fit weird, like they’re two sizes too big, or that they try to drink Jell-O, you know, like pick it up and drink it like it’s a cold glass of sweet iced tea on a hot summer day, right? or they don’t know the difference between a fork and a spoon or how reclining chairs work. And their eyes are too close together or too far apart… See, now if they were government officials, they’d be, you know, normal people, right? But, if they were some kind of tulpa, they’d just be ambling around the planet, totally directionless, or with some kind of vague agenda, like going around scaring the silly putty out of UFO witnesses, right? It’s like they’re badly briefed, you know? I mean, for all I know, they could be the same agency as the ufonauts themselves! But FBI? No way. CIA? Get real.”

Sometimes you can hear the person on the other line. It’s a woman, for sure, who also speaks in a loud and animated fashion. (You can hear her metalloid declarations and confirmations over the singing of the nearby city birds.) I wonder who calls who, or maybe they take turns calling each other.