[Writing] Existential Questions to Inanimate Objects

[Oddball]

EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS TO INANIMATE OBJECTS
“The human language is inadequate. In the same vein as talking to reflective surfaces, speaking with other people was never on my list. My best partner in life was a plastic spork I received at a fast food restaurant when I was four. His name was Ralph. Until then I hadn’t spoken to anything but the objects in my room, or the books my parents were trying to get me to read.

“My family thought I was such a smart baby, y’know. I spoke my first word when I was barely one. ‘Spoon.’ My parents were ecstatic and disappointed at the same time. I hadn’t said ‘mommy’, I hadn't made my papa proud with a ‘daddy’ either. But at least I said something.

“If you’re curious about Ralph the spork, he was lost to a conversation with the garbage disposal when I was fourteen.

“Anyways, by the time I was old enough to be interacting with other children, or even my parents, that’s when they knew something was wrong. I learned to talk quickly, I picked up on the words that my parents said. But I never talked to them, I would sit and talk to my toys. When I was three, my parents took me to see a doctor, pediatrician. They were worried I was mentally retarded.

“Of course you know about the circuit of talk shows when I was about five or six. ‘My Kid Talks to Objects!’ I was the freak on the daytime talk shows, and people really ate it up. I guess interest died down after I hit all of the main talk shows, because I couldn’t really be interviewed. It was the same story from my mother each time, while my dad nodded and agreed. Then the camera would watch me talk to the things in the room, making me an easy enough guest, while the crowd gasped and covered their mouths, leaning in to one another to whisper.

“Recently of course, I’ve been hitting the talk shows again. The old reels of the old shows are being played each time I go on, and then I talk about this. Though, I don’t know which episode would be more boring to watch. I don’t really finish talking now until I’m done telling my part of the story, then we wave at the camera and the lights above go out as uninteresting elevator music comes from speakers hidden behind us.

“But you want to know my life, and why I’m here talking now. I’m looking at you, not at the chair you’re sitting in, the desk behind you or anything like that. I’m looking at your face, communicating with your ears, and then I will wait for the response from your mouth. For most people, that’s a given. But for me, that's still something new.

“I’m sixteen years old now. I was home schooled the best my parents could do for me. I had tutors, but I ignored them and wrote the answers to my work while talking to the problems on the paper. I didn’t have friends, I don’t know why people ask me that. I didn’t talk to people, why would I have people who hung out around me? But I had friends in the objects around me.

“My parents bought me dolls and stuffed animals, hoping I would pick up the idea of faces and stuff. So one day I would talk to people, y’know? I ignored them, and instead pulled out individual parts. A string, a piece of stuffing, a cloth, those kinds of things. I would ask them how they were, what they were doing, what their purpose was.

“To answer the other common question, yes, I had conversations. The things talked back. The difference being that I spoke in English, and they did their talking in silence. Items are so neat and orderly. They tell you only what matters, they don’t bother you with whining or extra thoughts. If I want to know what your pen does during its day, I'll ask. And it will tell me it rests in your hands and spits out ink. Some days it gets left alone in a dark space, completely isolated. Some days it feels so worked it bends and bows in your hand but it doesn’t expect any more from a human.

“Sometimes I still miss it, only talking to things I wanted to hear back from. Now I am aware of the conversations of everyone around me, whether they are talking to me or not. If someone is just within earshot, y’know, you hear what they have to say. You can try to drown them out, but it just doesn’t work. Not since I began talking to people.

“You must be thinking, ‘But he learned English by listening to people!’. It’s true, I learned this language just like any other sponge-brained baby. I soaked up the knowledge from my environment, and my learning continued into my early teenage years. I just don’t remember any of it. I didn’t hear my dad ever say ‘Good job!’, but I still began using it one day when he was near me and said it out loud. He said it to me after I completed a tower out of building blocks. I said it to the building blocks for so perfectly supporting one another.

“You want to know now what my secret was to success, how I defeated my little problem. Let’s just take a moment, and talk about what people are figuring out now. We’ve got all kinds of crazy machines now that do things with our brains. So after I was ‘fixed’, we went and got one of those brain scans done. Cool stuff, really.
“It came back perfectly normal, though the scientists thought it might not be abnormal because I had already overcome my ‘disability’.

“And can we take a minute to cover that? That word, ‘disability’? I hate it. All through my early life, my parents suffered because people told them their son was acting weird. They told them that I would never be normal, they told them that I would never have friends, find love, or have a family. I could not make personal relationships with other people if I never talked to them. Simple facts. My parents would have to keep me under their care all of my natural life, and when they died, they would have to have some sort of care set up for me.

“The first thing people asked me when I talked to them was if I was excited or blown away by this ‘other world’. As if I should be excited to finally interface with these other organic beings. Some people joked that I should enjoy the complexity of people, over the simplicity of objects.

“They all thought I would be ecstatic to make friends for the first time. I have always said, and always will, that it is not the first time to me. I have friends, I’ve always had friends. They're all around me, and they don’t get bored of me or leave. I'm interested in them, and they're interested in me.

“I’m sorry, I’m getting too defensive here. The cure, you want to talk about that right? What finally fixed my problem. My mom and I were at a department store. My parents figured out ways to get me to wander to the car with them, and then with them through stores. So my mom and I were at a store, some clothing place, when I was walking by a mannequin. We stopped near it, so I began to talk to it. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t the first time I’d been near a mannequin. Sometimes I would talk to the clothes on it, sometimes to the floor tiles, etc. Never, at least, had my mom seen me talking to one, though I do remember talking to a mannequin named Margaret once.

“Regardless, there I was, talking to this mannequin; I think his name was Steve. My mother saw this, realized what she thought was the greatest thought ever to cross her mind, and she cried ‘Eureka!’ out right there in the store. I would say that people stared at us, but from what I hear it’s no different than what normally happened when my parents took me places.

“My parents bought mannequins to put in the house, in hopes I guess, to wean me off from talking to things, and more to people. Yeah, okay. Here I am now, right? I’m talking to people, so it must have worked? To me, it was the same as the dolls they bought me. I didn’t talk to them anymore than I did the individual parts of the whole.
“So here I am, now on your show, looking out at the bleachers. Sitting in this firm, warm chair. And you’re wondering, I can tell, why I don’t agree with the cure. Why am I here, talking to an audience, proving my mother’s method worked, then saying that I don’t agree that it worked at all? A fair question.

“Why did I go from only talking to these unmoving, inanimate objects to complex, synapse-firing human beings? The first thing I asked of someone was a ‘What’s your purpose?’ That was my first great line, and I guess that's been beaten to death already. I was at a bus stop with my mother, sitting on the bench when I looked to my left at the timid old man in his tweed suit. Then I shocked my mom by opening my mouth and asking him my question. But you just want to know how it happened, when did I start talking to people, why did I do it?

“To be entirely honest, there was just a point where I stopped seeing the difference.”

---

Figured I'd test the waters with a poem and story, see if people read these threads anymore than they used to.
Also, hopefully anyone who read my older stuff might see the huge changes, or maybe they'll hate it more.
Who's to say? : )

[Gorsalami]

I read through it and it was enjoyable, but the text was too big. Break it up in paragraphs instead of one huge block of text.

also I thought your comment at the end and your sig were part of the text lol

[Oddball]

Sorry, indents and spaces between paragraphs don't transfer off word onto forums and facebook and stuff.
It's very annoying. : x

[Song Bird]

This was wonderful. You've made me wanna start writing again Oddy. Thank you.

[Oddball]

I've got a lot of stuff I've written in the past year or two, but I don't know what to post.
I hope you do write, the world needs more good writers. : >