Phlegmy, Unshaven, and Fragrant

[Here I submit a sort of book review I emitted last week. Full names have been withheld to protect the fragrant. Perhaps you, too, will find merit in this recommendation. If intrigued, listen to author T.R. Pearson reading from this very book.]

To: Patrick
Subject: RE: Thinking of you…

Patrick: I must admit that the email below contains a falsehood. You were, in fact, the first person to come to mind as I began this T.R. Pearson novel, but there are two reasons why I have fictionalized that detail for my friend Mr. Stephenson:

  1. I was under the impression that Mr. Stephenson was not his usual cheery self these days and, in my way, thought that perhaps associating him with dog farts might somehow bring him round.
  2. The opening of this book contains an extended account of one Clayton, “phlegmy, unshaven, and fragrant in his ordinary fashion,” which, while not an image I compare to your own, might nevertheless be taken as an indelicate assumption, were I to mention that you had come to mind in the early pages of this book.

So, suffice it to say that the book recommendation below, though I am only one chapter deep, is one I can enthusiastically extend to you. And, more to the point, the suggestion that we continue, in person over beers, such unflattering comparisons of each other to various forms of flatulence, is more an insistence in your case than a suggestion.

Yours Truly,
GH
________________________________________

To: Mr. Stephenson
Subject: Thinking of you…

Mr. Stephenson: a book recommendation for you, assuming, as our mutual friend Mr. Edwards was once queried in the vicinity of your upbringing, you’re one of those types who finds reason to read. You were the first to come to mind as I began reading one of the more recent of that T.R. Pearson’s novels, a book called Polar. And the shade of yourself that came to mind in a fond sort of way for me was not the well-dressed type who arrives on a fine imported motorcycle and drinks imported beers.

No, the gentleman of whose company I was reminded was that variety of Stephenson who emerges conversationally upon the occasion of deep-fried food, served by a pock-faced waitress who nonetheless boasts a figure that inspires indelicate thoughts in the mind of the average male patron. He is the same sort of Stephenson who trades his usual inky English ale without complaint for a lager of the NASCAR persuasion.

And if it goes any further in recommending this book to you, I offer this passage on canine flatulence which brought to my eyes a surprised and, frankly, envious rush of tears as fit for that Pearson’s prose as for the “vaporish toxins” of which he writes:

Then, of course, there was his dog as well, an ancient mongrel named Monroe. She was sullen and unfriendly, greasy, matted and vaporish in a grand and foully intrusive sort of way. She broke treacherous wind, that is to say, with a kind of ceremony. She would still herself and hunker and tauten, and there would come upon her features an expression of devout concentration as if she were running the figures to reconcile the national debt in her head.

The way the chief’s wife told it, she and her beefy unbetrothed niece couldn’t help but watch that mongrel squatting by the hearth where the planking yielded to masonite beneath Ray’s fuel-oil heater. They couldn’t decide if she was about to drop dead or recite a holy psalm, but clearly something of moment was afoot. So they watched her, and they waited. They even went together prattleless for a time which caught Ray’s notice, and he joined the two of them in study of Monroe until she’d broken the wind that she’d been ushering through her tracts and ducts and went back to shoving her paw in her ear and groaning.

The smell arrived shortly and fairly much seized them with its ghastliness. “We stopped out on the parkway,” Ray informed them. “I think she ate a squirrel.”

If, by chance, your day is lacking in personal gratification, perhaps it’s some small recompense that such a passage might bring you to mind. See you soon over either an inky pint or else a “beer that tastes like ambitious water.” Cheers,

Greg

Photo by Vagabond Shutterbug

2 thoughts on “Phlegmy, Unshaven, and Fragrant”

  1. Love TR Pearson… as you well know.

    Also…. What do American beer and sex in a canoe have in common??

    Answer: They are both f-ing close to water.

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