revenge on autopilot

Today I was sharing a cafe table with two pilots who spent the entire time talking about the missing jet. Their talk was loud and showy and handsomely studded with jargonese. They kept glancing over, and shifting in their seats; I felt that they needed an audience and so I was on their radar. (See? It’s contagious).

One tried to enlist me in his smiling sarcasm when his know-it-all mate discoursed at enormous length with the barista about coffee origins. “Are we drinking coffee?” he asked me, rolling his eyes, “Or wine?” “Well,” I said, mildly, “but it’s nice to enjoy it, right?” It’s so difficult, so impossible, to keep one’s thinking clear of the deeply embedded invisible gateways, like ha-has, imposed by cultural expectation. How obsession with the provenance of soured grapes can be permissible, even compulsory, but an enquiry into how your primary drug is manufactured and grown is dismissed as snobbery.

It was, of course, snobbery: they were performing, uninvited; this is tiresome. The cafe was small and their voices rang. Five staff members ran to and fro; a laneway den down deep in the canyons innercity. I seemed to be reading in the Financial Review how one of Andrew Forrest’s companies made a claim to extract minerals from under the soil of his personal property, his farm; another of his companies, the mining concern, has blocked it with time-wasting “inquiries”. The corrugated rubber, mined from rubber trees, on the wooden sole of my clog suddenly scraped loudly against the foot of our shared table, making an explicit, ripe, farting noise.

By refusing to enact the required Accidental Fart Noise Disclaimer behaviour, I exacted a tiny, petty, and useless revenge on my visiting male experts. You’re supposed to deliberately but as if unconsciously make the same noise a couple times more, to make it clear That Wasn’t What You Think It Was, that was the chair leg. The pilots stared, only for a moment, surprised out of their theories by my apparent demonstration of unabashed personal jet propulsion. Hey, did she cut the cheese? My own flight veered secure in its inexplicable darkness to the right, to the west, out of reach of either the transponder or the secondary radar and reflecting the dim distant starlight on its flanks and back like a turtle travelling inevitably, laboriously, in deep privacy from one tiny unclaimed island to another, by itself.