The Interrogative Mood Read Online Free PDF

an alteration shop prohibitive? What about repairs at a shoe shop? If two people would turn the rope for you nice and slow, or at whatever speed you instructed, how long do you think you could jump rope?
    How often do you ask yourself, “What am I forgetting?” How often when you ask yourself what are you forgetting does it prove you are forgetting something? How often, when you ask yourself what are you forgetting, and it proves you are forgetting something, does asking the question prompt you to remember what you are forgetting?
    Do you have relatives to whom you wish you were not related? Have you ever dug up anything valuable? Have I carried on before you yet about how I miss the days of home milk delivery and drinking milk from those scoured heavy-lipped cold bottles, and how this want puts me in an even further more laughable panting for when a man would have brought ice to your door in a wagon, carrying a giant diamond-colored block of it to you in a big scissorlike pair of iron tongs,and setting it in your box, or in your cellar, and shoveling sawdust on it if you used sawdust for your insulation, or covering it with your heavy wet canvas if you used that, tucking it in as if it were a very cold and very dear infant?
    Do you believe that I can still have any interest in asking you questions? Do you believe it is correct to call the cry of crows “raucous”? Do you believe in lions and tigers and bears or do you believe in the lord Jesus? Have you heard the phrase “to drink the Kool-Aid”? Do you have a steady hand for bomb making? Have you ever carpeted a room with carpet samples? Would you call yourself a good file clerk with respect to your memory or a bad file clerk? What is your favorite cake? Would you prefer to have sexual relations with a tall blond German or a tall blond Swede? Do you enjoy assembling manufactured items that are sold unassembled? Have you ever set any part of yourself on fire? If civil war or an invasion or other circumstances somehow effected martial law and the need to take up arms and fight, and your father was put in local command by virtue of his having been a combat veteran, would you serve under him happily or with reservations or not at all? Do you thinkhe would have difficulty sending you into the Valley of Death as it were? Can you see him wringing his hands over you or do you see him snapping out your orders and getting the job done? Are these questions meant to distinguish how he would treat you, a son or daughter, as opposed to how he would treat nonrelatives under his command? Why have I bogged down so in this area?
    Do you know of a likely candidate to replace me as the asker of these questions? Could you rush him to the fore? Do you know the story of the dog fighter Maurice Carver getting an injection for his impotence from Indian Sonny, the shot given him through the side vent in his overalls in Maurice’s big Cadillac right after they picked up Indian Sonny at the airport in San Antonio, and Maurice thinking he feels a stirring in his loins and saying, “Rush me home”? Have you decided yet what historical moment you would most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears? Do you periodically walk around and check to see that “the area is secure,” or do you make fun of people who periodically check to see that the area is secure?
    Should children be taught poker? Would you liketo have a small pistol in a good wooden box lined with red velvet? And maybe one big pearl beside the pistol, secure in a dimple of velvet? Would you need any more than a pistol and a pearl on red velvet to hold you content all night until you could go the following morning to a breakfast joint and eat large quantities of simple food and celebrate being just barely alive?
    We all know that pine trees do not lose all their needles at one time, unless they are dying, but do we all know that pine trees lose more of their needles at certain times than at others—that is to say…oh