The Interrogative Mood Read Online Free PDF Page B

let’s forget this question and try another: would you say that American rock music and American cars have their classic periods in strange synchronization, and that the two hottest periods were around 1955 and 1969? Is it fair to say that there has not been a good American car since 1969 and that rock ’n’ roll was petering out hard after that?
    How can men at drafting tables in pocket protectors in Detroit and boys in jeans and long hair at synthesizers in Macon, Georgia, have been so in tune? Is there anything you can take for a persistent benign sore on your tongue, by which I mean I do not suspect this is herpes related or anything else more seriousthan a topical wound that just will not go away and is particularly irritated by sour foods like pineapple? If you had a loud 400 hp 1969 GTO with a Hurst three-speed on the floor and the Allman Brothers’ “One Way Out” playing as loud inside the car, would you not be unstoppable not only in all the serious adolescent ways but even now in nearly all of the serious postadolescent pre-senile ways? Can you list the things you are afraid of, or is it easier to list the things you are not afraid of, or are you afraid of nothing, or are you essentially afraid of everything?
    If you yourself are not a coward, do you look upon a coward with sympathy or with disgust? If you yourself are not a murderer, do you look upon a murderer with disgust or sympathy? Why have I altered the position of “sympathy and disgust” and “disgust and sympathy” so? Did you ever try to raise two flying squirrels by getting up every three hours and feeding them cow’s milk and stimulating their genitals with a tissue to get them to pee as your mother instructed you and seeing them die three weeks later of fever and bloat and fecal poisoning because the cow’s milk had so constipated them that they had not, in all that peeing, ever pooped? And did you wonder later how yourmother would know to stimulate them to pee but not that cow’s milk would cement them up like that? And do you wonder now if she did not instruct you to tickle them with that tissue so they would “tinkle”? Do you miss your mother, if she’s dead? Do you want to spend time with her if she is not?
    Do you think there can be finer arms on a man than on a brick mason? If you are feeling low, will going to the barbershop or to the hair salon pick you up? What is your favorite sport to watch? Do you know the difference on sight between a rimfire cartridge and a centerfire? What is your position on yard raking? If you will excuse me for having deliberately bluntly phrased a previous question, and if you will accept that I am here again phrasing it so that reasonable middle-ground possibilities in your answer are excluded, may I ask you again now if, in sexual intercourse, you prefer a thrashing style like the flight of a bat or a subtle style like a worm eating its way through dirt? Will you go out of your way to get a wooden pencil or a wooden baseball bat? Have you had any medical procedures that involve the insertion of fiber-optical or other tubing in you that allows inspection of your innards? How do you stand in relation to the kind of cute crockerypiggy bank that had to be broken once it was filled in order for the child to get the money she had saved? Are you much disturbed by the possibility of someone other than the child doing the breaking? Are you much less disturbed by the child herself doing the breaking? Do you travel in better underwear than you wear on a daily basis? Are you less likely to pay for a manicure or a pedicure? With what frequency do you drink a commercial milk shake?
    Do you miss Tab and do you fully understand its disappearance? If you could have a guaranteed steady supply of an expensive or illicit substance or other commodity much prized and hard to get, what would it be? Are you surprised at the low number of people crazy or the high number of people crazy? Do you know offhand whether a