SOS Gab & Eti 1.28

“He was able to walk back to the bed. He reeled, and he had to catch
himself on the bedpost, but he had not had to crawl. His mind was
clearing. Another half-hour, maybe. Then he would be able to move about.
He would be able to think. But he didn’t have a half-hour. “ The Loo
Sanction, Trevanian

Annalee Wintergreen attended architecture at Cornell at a time when the
musty professor’s cocktail chat identified their effeminate students as
searching for wealthy husbands in the most convenient circus their
parent’s could procure. Or worse, if in pursuit of any vocation -- for
the young ladies to quickly be enslaved to the confines of interior
decoration -- anything as feasible close to repetitive diaper
maintenance. The wizened professors were somewhat perplexed that the HS
football jocks had not intercepted the maidens a few years earlier and
lamented their present burden to the appropriate dimwits not having
rendered a proper and early enlightenment. But Annalee knew to avoid bad
knees and mostly confined herself to the library, feigning illness
whenever courted and hanging out with prom queens whenever not.

Annalee was most greatly faulted for her talents in precise rendering.
Here the ephemeral gas of fog pattern was the predominate goal of
intellect as nobody could figure out what it was worth and therefore the
academy, as any good American business, could charge more for less. Thus
was the grueling chauvinist time of architectural design in the midst of
a flirtation with postmodern sensibility. Institutional whorehousing
resembling overgrown brick shithouses, replete with grand strokes of
line and obscene angles of otherwise blank walls on a grand scale were
their considerable issue. Though of all with no biological issue, the
most gifted issue to leave their heirs would be of no majestic intellect
left stagnant and erectly protruding in the glassy mist such not to be
avoided by any means necessary to bulldoze. But this was not the case
and feared of nuclear annihilation the self-consumed designers stuck
themselves upon a strategy of grand camouflage and went rampant building
many, way too many disposable structures worthy of our destruction;
certainly not worthy of our maintenance. The idea was to crowd the earth
up with a built environment of crap so that when everything was blown up
it would only be ugly crap, and ourselves, lost to eternity. The
alternate motif, on a more positive front, a building that looked like a
reptilian version of a puffball, a mushroom with lines of spines in a
mathematical synergy. For all of this there was a need to provide
toilets and a noticeable lack of them into and beyond the millenium were
being provided for the needs of women.

Annalee, a childhood product of Skinnerian boxing, survived the training
in spirit, despite three attempts at suicide, once by slitting her
wrists, once by an OD of heroin, and lastly by gorging out, a bridge
rendered feast predating bung-G but without the umbilical. Eventually
she recovered her degree and after a freebie summer of design-build
pizza parlors for a worker-managed company in which her co-managers
ingested large quantities of hashish she moved with resume intact to the
Bowery.

For the first fifteen years of her professional career she was a
straight-line pusher. Her high style culminated in an endless series of
color-coordinated cubicles and a commission to redesign fast food
packaging as in environmentally friendly hamburger wrappers made out of
recycled lettuce pulp. On a sick-leave cruise from Manhattan to Nova
Scotia one late August she had an epiphany while observing the sway of a
Greek sailor’s buns. Whereupon returning to Manhattan she promptly, and
with very little proper notice from a dockside telephone, resigned from
S. O. M. to spend the greater portion of the next four years hitching
the Americas on rural roads. Her Fulbright had something to do with
vernacular architecture and Paul Bunyan. At one point she was reported
disappeared in the vicinity of Peru, but resurfaced three months later
in Vancouver with a clinker brick tattooed on the upside of her left
breast. These were tumultuous times for Annalee. They remained quite
unsettling, and would be unsettling for any of us if we had followed
her. She then, much to the deeds and acclaim of divine salvation,
reached Bullamanka. Here in our peaceful and prosperous community she
promptly fell in love with and purchased a commodious Victorian built by
a tagua nut button magnate that had been meant to be the home of his
child bride, who unfortunately died three days after her moving into the
house. Thus leaving him with no issue, no breakfast and no resort than
to promptly expire.

Armed with a reputedly haunted house and seventy acres of burdock,
thistle and brambles Annalee is locally known in the county for her
woodchuck and persimmon stew. As an experienced architect Annalee takes
an avowed interest in leaning walls, tilted floors, heaved stone
sidewalks, and dysfunctional plumbing. Annalee first met Gab when he
came to inspect her attic and she is almost all he talks about since.
--
][<en Follett
SOS Gab & Eti -- http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/5836