The Principle of Sufficient Irritation
P. Michael Campbell
by which Dick (Philip K. Dick, best damn novelist of the '60s, at least) imagines that, say, a pair of shoes can be brought to life, animated, be made to move, fly, scitter across the carpet, shoe strings aflutter, tongue foaming with hatred and frustration. The Principle of Sufficient Irritation brings me to the desk again with the desire again to describe it for you - for no reason other than that it exists and is in front of me again seemingly in need again of having its various existence(s) verified, accounted for. This trophy from 1976 for editorial writing, that trophy from 1975 for persuasive speaking. This picture of Patrick in his Tae Kwon Do pajamas with leg kicked out perpendicular to the floor and arm tucked in a v-bend behind his head, demonstrating the first term in Tae Kwon Do ("Kick, Punch, Philosophy"). That picture of Patrick and Brittany wearing A's caps and smiling in front of the pecan tree in the front yard of my parents' house, my old house, the house where I grew up, in San Bernardino, in Southern California. The foot-high plaster "Thinker" who wears around his neck - as he has done now for seventeen years - the blue and white tassle from my high school graduation. The stacks of disks and papers and books that seem to follow me everywhere and which I am forever sorting through - like a character in a Jon Carroll column - an Okie turned intellectual, collecting not the assortment of tractor parts, tools, etc., that adorned, that littered, the backyard of my grandparents' house, but the trappings of memory and potential knowledge that I am afraid will somehow escape, that I know will escape and be forgotten, lost in the seeming chaos of day-to-day, week-to-week, ... and no money even to go to a play, say, or buy that car ... who needs those material ... I need those things, expect those things eventually ... am thoroughly trapped by my need to ... for ... to have these things ... material comforts, say, money for the doctor visit I am postponing, that CD player that is now a must since no one even sells albums anymore ... a consequence which ... for which a footnote will be needed ... a sort of silly nostalgia ... see, when I was young, we had these things called records that were round like CD's but bigger and made of vinyl and usually black, which you put on a record player which turned the disk at a certain speed (45, 33 and a third - one can already imagine that number baffling future generations: a stitch in time saves nine sort of thing ... or the nostalgia for someone else's memories: the 78, the old cylinder, the bamboo rather than diamond needle ...) and so on. And so on until one has examined even the wood grain in the desk again and read into it (as one did in one's youthful days of continuous marijuana smoking) various stories and omens, how this swirl signifies the coming apart of the present marriage and the many potential years of desperate loneliness, etc., how this scar recalls the move from the office to the home in Los Angeles or to family student housing in Albany or to Walnut Creek where getting the desk up and down the stairs though separated by seven years of what? life in suburbia, walking up and down said stairs everyday, several times a day, for seven years how the desk was shoved through doorways pronounced at nearly every occasion as unnavigable despite the door being removed from its hinges, despite multiple years of brainpower working to figure the precise angle at which it could be finessed or bullied ... how this particular knot for many years housed a village of Indians and settlers who cross-bred to create precisely the genes of, say, this particular twelve year old, who at ten or eleven posed with his much younger cousin in front of the thick, coarse, rough trunk of said pecan tree in San Bernardino, or more precisely, an unincorporated section of San Bernardino County, wedged between Loma Linda, Redlands, and San Bernardino, the municipalities, an almost inconsequential triangle between the various city limits, between Norton Air Base to the north and the Seventh Day Adventist community of Loma Linda famous for its hospital (remember the baboon heart?) and its line of vegetarian foods, a small section of the county which the locals had called Okieville because of the many Okies who settled there but who are now greatly outnumbered by the Mexicans ... and now even threatened by the barely upper middle class urban sprawl from Los Angeles ... those willing to drive 60 miles or more to work ... in what must be almost impenetrable traffic ... the usual metaphor, say, of brilliant silver salmon clogging streams, their bodies crashing atop one another, writhing and twisting their way upstream, because nature the great irritator has placed precisely the right irritant somewhere almost imperceptibly inside each fleshy machine, the right series of messages hammered into the correct genetic sequence, and so on ... They drive with their cellular phones and tape decks and air conditioning and plush seats and cruise control (except that the traffic is so bad once you get even near the city, before Pasadena even, that cruise control, like the electric windows ... like the electric toothbrush ... seems superfluous, another extra ... would you like a dessert with that, sir? ... another era even ... And the Oxford English Dictionary two-volume Book-of-the-Month-Club special (already out of date) ... and the empty plastic Donald Duck picture frame with Donald in the bottom, right corner, one leg raised as if ... as if to begin an awkward run down the thick yellow stripe at the bottom of the frame ... the stack of Batman cards Patrick left last summer ... when that was his summer's obsessionÑgetting every card, so no part of the story (told on the back of each card) was missing ... I think he came up two or three cards short ... For my part, I traded with him only for the Joker cards, with Jack Nicholson, say, smiling at the camera/viewer/character/performer (whomever), saying, "Wait'll they get a load of me!" ... that kind of reminder of Nicholson's performance which for me was the most memorable (i.e., most worth remembering) part of the movie ... well, that and maybe the set, etc., though John and I disagree ... Though we do agree, I think, that Beetlegeuse was the better movie ... certainly the better performance by Michael Keaton ... Patrick left the other day again for Southern California, Camarillo, actually now Port Hueneme, near Oxnard, where he lives by the beach and swims everyday and is now (I talked to him yesterday on the phone) taking Jr. Lifeguard and must wear the same red (green?) trunks everyday and same t-shirt, so his mother has had to teach him how to use the washer and dryer, etc. ... His mother is married again, is pregnant again. They are moving, he tells me, to a bigger house in Camarillo. He will have his own bedroom he has been stoically (but nonetheless reluctantly) sharing a room with his younger sister - his half-sister from his mother's second already defunct marriage to this guy who seemed somewhat distant but not as bad as some of the guys she went out with after she just up and left ... But that is a different story. It is after 2 a.m. and I am tired ... There is still so much left to tell. Hugs and kisses, etc. ... All my best