« In Which We Harken Back To Our First Warm Breath »

Home Depot Oscillating Fan

by MARK BAUMER

The day before I moved to New York to become a mutual fund portfolio manager, I saw a guy at McDonalds holding a medium-sized, oscillating fan that he bought on sale at Home Depot. The medium-sized, oscillating fan was not plugged into a wall outlet so it was not oscillating. Less than thirty percent of all oscillating objects in the world are connected to a power source. About seventy percent of all Americans are friends with at least three people who own medium-sized, oscillating fans that were purchased on sale at Home Depot, but have not been connected to a power source. The last person I met who was holding a medium-sized, oscillating fan that was plugged into a wall outlet did not understand what buttons to press to make their medium-sized, oscillating fan oscillate.

This other time I saw a guy holding a sandwich and this guy said he didn’t believe in global warming. His sandwich eating technique reminded me of a conversation I overheard on a bus between two medium-sized, mid-career goosebumps. One of the goosebumps said, “The air conditioning in my boss’s office does not know that I left work early today.” The other goosebump said, “If I continue to live in the city I will probably become a permanent skin modification that someone will mistake as a pimple that they will then try to pop.” Three million years ago, the entire human race was nothing more than a goosebump on the eyelid of the first protozoa that learned to exhale warm breath. This first warm breath that ever existed raised the global temperature on earth about 2.8 percent. It took thirty thousand years for the first protozoa to invent a medium-sized, oscillating fan. Another three billion years passed before anyone figured out how to connect a medium-sized, oscillating fan to a wall outlet.

The man holding a medium-sized, oscillating fan in McDonalds said he was born three years before the existence of anything that oscillated.

On my first day of work as mutual fund portfolio manager I asked my boss if I could replace the air conditioning in his office with a medium-sized, oscillating fan that was not connected to a power source.

The man holding a medium-sized, oscillating fan was wearing headphones. The headphones played music. His headphone mumbles said, “mumble mumble mumble.” The man holding the medium-sized, oscillating fan sang along to the music in his headphones. He sang in a soft voice that did not interrupt anyone’s meal at McDonalds. I had to lean very close to his lips to hear the sound of his mouth. I heard the small voice of a man holding a medium-sized, oscillating fan. This small voice said, “Once, I went to a party in the late nineties and I brought my keyboardist.” He repeated this line to himself three or four times. These lyrics reminded me of the keyboardist in my brother’s high school band who was allergic to digital photography and died of an asthma attack while watching a basketball game. My brother tried to find a replacement keyboardist, but couldn’t. Four years later, he sold out and went to work for a digital cable company. His days were spent touching wires inside modest and pleasant homes throughout the Pacific Northwest. Once while at work my brother came up with the idea of becoming a solo artist who played songs on his acoustic guitar in small air conditioned rooms while people drank alcohol. That night when my brother got home from work he was too tired to turn on the air conditioner so he could practice. Instead, he watched a video online of a patient child that didn’t have enough face stamina to maintain constant eye contact with the digital video camera he was talking to.

I wanted to ask the guy with the medium-sized, oscillating fan why he was holding a medium-sized, oscillating fan, but instead I called my father and told him I was at McDonalds and was going to eat something that would make him ashamed of me. My father gave me some comforting advice which made me feel better. He asked if I was still working on a novel about the time I touched some corroded meat sandwiches in third grade which sort of made me mathematically dyslexic. I told him I had decided to write a series of memoirs about every raindrop that had ever existed since I had been born. I said, “Each raindrop will get its own individual book in the series.” My father asked how many books I was expecting to be in the series. I told him that I was prepared to write one billion memoirs. My father suggested I write a memoir called, “I went to Cornell and became a dentist because everyone at Cornell has teeth.” I told my father that our conversation was developing a bitter frequency in my mouth. He said, “When you were three a man holding a garden hose stood in our front yard for six months and did nothing but rotate from side to side. This man with the garden hose only watered the same nine blades of grass. I remember avoiding the area where he watered because I was afraid to tell the man to leave our lawn. I was also afraid of getting wet. Your mother got tired of my fears and did not spend very much time at home. Most days, she would leave early and go to the mall to see if any of the noodles at Panda Express were on sale.”

A few minutes passed. My father continued to talk. I made notes about what he said and then wrote a poem called, “oscillating grass.” Before my father hung up the phone I read the poem to him. He said he liked it.

When I was alone in McDonalds again I looked at the guy holding the medium-sized, oscillating fan. I was ready to give up on the idea of having conversations with people, but then I opened my mouth and it made a sound I was wasn’t prepared to hear my mouth make. The guy holding the medium-sized, oscillating fan looked at me and said, “I think I am going to give this medium-sized, oscillating fan to my girlfriend for her birthday because it feels like a medium-sized, oscillating fan is more romantic than a handful of flowers.” I asked him if he wanted to buy my poem about oscillating grass and give it to his girlfriend. He said he was thinking about going to Bed, Bath, & Beyond to buy her a pair of grass-woven panties. I told him that I didn’t think grass-woven panties were a retail item at stores that sold dish towels. The guy holding the medium-sized, oscillating fan said, “I once bought a taco at Bed, Bath, & Beyond and it tasted like crunchy toothpaste so when I finished eating it I didn’t brush my teeth for a week.” I asked him what happened next. He said, “I got a job wearing clothes that people who have a lot of money, but not much style will buy from companies that make a lot of money selling expensive clothing that isn’t very stylish. My employer believes that my presence in the global economy has boosted sales a quarter of a half percent last year. I am one of billons of men who believe that they are individually responsible for the wellbeing of the future of our planet. If I was not wearing this shirt right now the world would end tomorrow.”

I didn’t want to talk to the guy holding the medium-sized, oscillating fan anymore, but I wasn’t sure if I had any other friends so I continued to stand next to the guy holding the medium-sized, oscillating fan. The mouth on his face was still set at a frequency I was capable of understanding. He said, “I did something interesting once. Even though I am going to tell you about it now I will probably talk about it again some other time and it is very likely that as our relationship grows I will often ask you if you remember the time when I first told you about the time I did something interesting.” I waited for him to tell me the interesting thing he would tell me. I did not wait very long. The thing he thought was interesting was sort of interesting.

So, anyway, I ended up being a mutual fund portfolio manager in New York for six months. The warm breaths I made in my boss’s air conditioned office probably raised the global temperature of our planet by twelve percent. Once I got a goose bump at work and got embarrassed because everyone could see it. This was also the day when I spilled leftover garlic sauce on one of my client’s retirement portfolios. I unraveled a bit and had to take a long vacation to the birthplace of the first warm breath. When I arrived I felt a little better, but when I plugged myself back into a wall outlet I realized I could no longer oscillate.

Mark Baumer is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. This is his first appearance in these pages. You can find his website here.

Photographs by Par Veez and the author.

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The new album from Jolie Holland, Pint of Blood, was released on June 28th.

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[Kara]

cool