The Interrogative Mood Read Online Free PDF Page A

strange? If you could choose between a long stay in the hospital not knowing if you would survive it and a long stay in jail knowingyou would be released, which would you take? Do you belong to a health club? Have you ever baked cookies that tasted like fish? Do you get all the work done that you should in life? Is it important to you that it be done? Is your life and what you are doing with it important? What percentage of people would you say believe their lives important and what percentage admit they are not?
    Are you familiar with Trafalgar Square? Do you have it straight whether one can or cannot smell ozone? Will you readily neuter an animal? Do you find teachers of math dangerously seductive? Does a package wrapped in red ribbon bode better than one in blue? Will you wear polyester? Is it time I go? Are we done here? Have you had as good a time as I? Will you sing with me now: Oh let us be heroes, let us have emotions pure or not pure, be men or not men, let us buzz and rumble the hill and dale of daily insignificance just as confidently, just as threateningly, just as humbly in its cute red velour as does the velvet ant?
     
    IF YOU WERE PART of a couple living in a three-story wooden Victorian house with a bad paint job outside and a shabby interior, to the extent that some of your rooms were lit by bare lightbulbs on swinging cords effecting heavy glare on the beadboard walls, wouldn’t you consider it an appropriate diversion for the two of you to play Norman Bates and his mother at least sometimes? Do you take pleasure in cleaning and repacking wheel bearings? Did you ever wear a pair of Corfam wingtips? Would you be apprehensive about riding and handling a camel vis-à-vis riding and handling a horse? Is a camel related to a horse, and these to an elephant, and some or all of them to a rabbit? Does this sound like a tasty breakfast to you now: Atomic Fireballs, Bar-B-Q Fritos, and Coke?
    If I told you that the single most distinctive taste I ever experienced was hot radishes from the ground beside the Arlington River washed down with heavy sulfur water, would you think this but the bluster of childhood memory? If I said that not even in France forty years later could one taste anything so fine as the crisp heat of those radishes against the cool slake of that caustic funky water, would you think this but the cheer of adult memory? Have you ever seen bluster and cheer ride together this way, like Butch and Sundance? Did you know bluster and cheer are good friends?
    Is it your impression that people who worked in animation in the 1930s did more drugs than people who work in it today? What is the ideal percentage of cocoa in chocolate for you? Would you like to have been at the Alamo? Pearl Harbor? Given a choice between going horseback riding or skydiving, which would you take? What frontier of science about which you are ignorant would you most like to be informed? Who in your opinion was the greatest conqueror, militarily speaking, in history? Have you any skills in the area of weaving or knitting? Are you fond of tents? Do you like to have a wad of cash or a credit card? Have you ever been the target of small arms fire? Do you have a favorite brand of dishwashing soap or will any brand do? Do you prefer your clothes loose or trim? Do you know any knots beyond the overhand? If you found one drumstick (the musical instrument, not the chicken leg) on the ground, would you keep it? Would you rather see a season of bullfighting or take a course in machining metal? Do you remember The Edge of Night and As the World Turns? If you were sitting (say with a fountain drink and a lightly toasted egg-salad sandwich) on a stool at the soda fountain of an old drugstore of the sort nearly extinct, and a robber came inarmed and commenced holding the place up, and you had a nice safe handy shot at the back of his head with a convenient good and heavy blunt instrument, would you take it? Do you find the expense of alterations at