Anything transmitted by blood, anything “generational” makes you feel accursed or a queen, depending. If it is in the water, so as in mother’s milk and the cow’s milk and the calf’s. It is in airport souvenirs at Da Nang, in the soil, in the worms, in the brown glass of a Tiger beer bottle, which everyone on Facebook keeps reminiscing about but I say, it’s only a symbol, strip off the label and it tastes like everything else.
I am afraid of enough things, I don’t need to think about what’s in my own blood, how I took one sip of a sugarcane drink full of ice even though they said – child, that ice is contaminated. When I got home, I forgot about a single malaria pill shaking around in its container like a sad maraca. I should collage it but don’t know how it would stick.
If by the 3rd generation, there is still a toxin that defoliates, our pine needles dropping like tiny palms dusted with burnt incense.
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R and I have another heated discussion in which he pretends to be the jerk in my thesis defense who asks to many questions. This jerk is a scientist. How is it transmitted? He asks me. Person to person? How does it work generationally? Really?
It’s not really a disease. Not really. It’s more like the mole in your lawn. You really don’t know it’s there until the tunnels start to appear. Unless you have a ridiculous amount of moles, the earth will never collapse underneath you. My parents have a neighbor who manicures his lawn beyond what is natural. He sets these traps in mole tunnels that are meant to stab the mole through the head, like it’s a cow on a conveyer belt. Only that guy never eats mole steak for dinner. And does he believe that the stabbing mechanism acts as a deterrent in mole society?
It’s not really a disease, and I realize that’s hard to grasp for some people. You can’t avoid it. You can’t cure it. So the trick is to live with the moles. Don’t have a lawn, for instance. Or, if you have a lawn, find a good way to barbeque moles.
