How to Move Small Objects with Your Mind!!
by kalen c. passa
Staring at an object for a good deal of time is a hard thing to accomplish. Some people could only do it if it was a painting, or something that brands a spark of inspiration into the soul. To her it was an ashtray on her dim wooden coffee table, which was perfectly centered in the room. The apartment was more or less hers; she was renting from a man with a nose too large and too leathery for his face. He had large features in general but wasn’t necessarily overweight, and such inconsistencies tortured her. However, his character flaws did not beguile her from seeing the man’s true hospitality.
She had her credit report damaged by some minor kleptomaniac/criminal behavior, but he accepted her on behalf of the fact that she was Jewish, as he was too. He thought her name sounded Jewish and her features too brunette and too beautiful to be anything else. He felt she was someone he could trust like a family member. Spontaneously, she wondered if she was supposed to know the man. She could have sworn the man existed elsewhere in her past. He had something about him that was universal or just far too specific to be the unidentifiable attributes of some random human, something everyone was supposed to have seen before but hasn’t, like the nose off the Sphinx of Giza. She thought all of these thoughts while he gave a detailed description on the life of a landlord. Perhaps also he had superior smelling capabilities.
Though these seem as healthy coincidences proper for overlooking a credit check, the real coincidence lies in the fact that she chose to check out the complex based on a newspaper add she found cut out and floating adrift in local periodical stating:
Your Own, Cheap Place!
She wasn’t even necessarily shopping around for apartments but the middle two words, comma excluded, tickled her to check it out. Both characters were Jewish, felt they knew each other previous to their encounter, and made a covenant (so to speak) that she pays a nominal monthly fee under the table in exchange for her own room to operate it, or to simply stare at an ashtray in.
The ashtray was stolen from a hotel a half a state away on behalf of her impulses. It was clean and transparent and embroidered with a white hotel logo. She was staring at it and uncrossed her legs to pick it up to see if she could scratch off the logo, but it just made her short, bitten fingernails stutter against the tiny engraved edges of the lettering. It was perverted like that forever. Being this the only object on her table, and worsening the situation by not ever becoming a persistent smoker, she continued staring at the ashtray. It was clear. She could see the blur of her coffee table swirling its weak colors into the glass. Maybe the table really is inside the ashtray, she began thinking. And so she was inspired. Perhaps all things are the same. Maybe I am just a bunch of matter, the same matter that a useless ashtray is made out of. Without forgetting things like dissecting eels in school, bloody, burning massacres in foreign lands, and ultimately her landlords mammoth nose, she decided this idea could be true. And so she became nothing more than a meditative heap of particles.
Somewhere in this time period she also decided she would move her ashtray. Without uncrossing her legs, she would move the ashtray. Furthermore, without physically moving at all, she would most certainly move the ashtray. She knew somewhere deep in the unused part of her brain she would outwit evolution and start the telekinesis trend right then and there.
“They’ll love me.” she said out loud. And suddenly her neck sank one quarter of an inch into her own body. She felt embarrassed by her pride and displayed it to nobody but the possessions in her room. Because nobody called her to get coffee or do anything else counter-productive for the evening, she decided she would finalize her thoughts and move her ashtray. At the realization she was calling it her ashtray, guilt suddenly acquired mass and quantitatively sunk her head one half of an inch into the rest of her body.
“I stole you.” She said, squinting at it.
It remained motionless.
“I stole you,” She repeated, and then glanced at the table. “And I traded you for money.”
The table glanced inanimately.
“Everythi-” she said. ng is just… stuff, she thought. And with those two communiqués together, she discovered something brilliant, but before she could decide what it was she also decided that it’s rounded-square shape, it’s clear glass color, and its incriminating embroidery were all just different ways of looking at the same thing. Existence doesn’t need these forms and colors and logos, she thought.
“Existence is just being!” she screamed this to no one but her self, and her selfless nature returned her neck back to its original length, and this made her even more confident that her brain really could move that damned ashtray, thus she continued: and time is just points in which all this existence moves around! So, if I just forget time and forget space all at once, I can move it! I know it! But before she was able to focus and change everything the world has ever known to be true, even before she could become famous, someone knocked on her door and ruined it.
She got up and checked the peak-hole and the repeated imagery of her landlord’s giant snout was occupying the majority of the tiny lens in her door. The quickest sight of it and she was reaching for her locks, and despite her uneasy phobia of his infinitely flaring nostrils, she decided to turn them counter-clockwise and welcome him.
“Hey there! You have a minute to chat?!”
“Sure,” she said “what’s up?”
“Oh, I was bored! Was wondering if you just wanted to chew the fat?” After their original acquaintance, she knew he was one of those people who loved to talk. He was one of those people who were slightly interesting, but always carried some over-enthusiastic and immoderate tone to a degree in which you started to think about other things besides the conversation, such as: why did I even open the door? He was obnoxious. He asked about her parents. He asked about her job, if she was seeing anyone, why she didn’t have a television yet. They were talking about disgustingly practical things and the situation showed no sign of decomposing. She had almost reached some sort of pure enlightenment and here she was, compunctious she didn’t have a television in the room yet.
Her legs were crossed and she realized this is the price she pays for her independence. She felt no guilt for living under these terms with her landlord nor did her body swallow her neck. When he realized she wasn’t really paying much attention, he began to slow down in the production of his words. She stared at the ashtray and looked up at her landlord, he now had a cigarette dangling off his lips and he too was fixed for a brief second on its radiance. And at that moment they both realized that it held some brilliant, heavenly design. He reached over and picked up the ashtray.
“Mind if I smoke one quick?” he asked.
With her eyes still fixed on the ashtray, which was placed on a brand new edge of the table, she realized that he must have misinterpreted her as a smoker; rather she was simply a natural born swindler of material possessions, and he a man made of words and excess skin. And with her lack of ambition to laugh out loud at the entirety of the situation she replied
“You have a beautiful nose.”
Staring at an object for a good deal of time is a hard thing to accomplish. Some people could only do it if it was a painting, or something that brands a spark of inspiration into the soul. To her it was an ashtray on her dim wooden coffee table, which was perfectly centered in the room. The apartment was more or less hers; she was renting from a man with a nose too large and too leathery for his face. He had large features in general but wasn’t necessarily overweight, and such inconsistencies tortured her. However, his character flaws did not beguile her from seeing the man’s true hospitality.
She had her credit report damaged by some minor kleptomaniac/criminal behavior, but he accepted her on behalf of the fact that she was Jewish, as he was too. He thought her name sounded Jewish and her features too brunette and too beautiful to be anything else. He felt she was someone he could trust like a family member. Spontaneously, she wondered if she was supposed to know the man. She could have sworn the man existed elsewhere in her past. He had something about him that was universal or just far too specific to be the unidentifiable attributes of some random human, something everyone was supposed to have seen before but hasn’t, like the nose off the Sphinx of Giza. She thought all of these thoughts while he gave a detailed description on the life of a landlord. Perhaps also he had superior smelling capabilities.
Though these seem as healthy coincidences proper for overlooking a credit check, the real coincidence lies in the fact that she chose to check out the complex based on a newspaper add she found cut out and floating adrift in local periodical stating:
Your Own, Cheap Place!
She wasn’t even necessarily shopping around for apartments but the middle two words, comma excluded, tickled her to check it out. Both characters were Jewish, felt they knew each other previous to their encounter, and made a covenant (so to speak) that she pays a nominal monthly fee under the table in exchange for her own room to operate it, or to simply stare at an ashtray in.
The ashtray was stolen from a hotel a half a state away on behalf of her impulses. It was clean and transparent and embroidered with a white hotel logo. She was staring at it and uncrossed her legs to pick it up to see if she could scratch off the logo, but it just made her short, bitten fingernails stutter against the tiny engraved edges of the lettering. It was perverted like that forever. Being this the only object on her table, and worsening the situation by not ever becoming a persistent smoker, she continued staring at the ashtray. It was clear. She could see the blur of her coffee table swirling its weak colors into the glass. Maybe the table really is inside the ashtray, she began thinking. And so she was inspired. Perhaps all things are the same. Maybe I am just a bunch of matter, the same matter that a useless ashtray is made out of. Without forgetting things like dissecting eels in school, bloody, burning massacres in foreign lands, and ultimately her landlords mammoth nose, she decided this idea could be true. And so she became nothing more than a meditative heap of particles.
Somewhere in this time period she also decided she would move her ashtray. Without uncrossing her legs, she would move the ashtray. Furthermore, without physically moving at all, she would most certainly move the ashtray. She knew somewhere deep in the unused part of her brain she would outwit evolution and start the telekinesis trend right then and there.
“They’ll love me.” she said out loud. And suddenly her neck sank one quarter of an inch into her own body. She felt embarrassed by her pride and displayed it to nobody but the possessions in her room. Because nobody called her to get coffee or do anything else counter-productive for the evening, she decided she would finalize her thoughts and move her ashtray. At the realization she was calling it her ashtray, guilt suddenly acquired mass and quantitatively sunk her head one half of an inch into the rest of her body.
“I stole you.” She said, squinting at it.
It remained motionless.
“I stole you,” She repeated, and then glanced at the table. “And I traded you for money.”
The table glanced inanimately.
“Everythi-” she said. ng is just… stuff, she thought. And with those two communiqués together, she discovered something brilliant, but before she could decide what it was she also decided that it’s rounded-square shape, it’s clear glass color, and its incriminating embroidery were all just different ways of looking at the same thing. Existence doesn’t need these forms and colors and logos, she thought.
“Existence is just being!” she screamed this to no one but her self, and her selfless nature returned her neck back to its original length, and this made her even more confident that her brain really could move that damned ashtray, thus she continued: and time is just points in which all this existence moves around! So, if I just forget time and forget space all at once, I can move it! I know it! But before she was able to focus and change everything the world has ever known to be true, even before she could become famous, someone knocked on her door and ruined it.
She got up and checked the peak-hole and the repeated imagery of her landlord’s giant snout was occupying the majority of the tiny lens in her door. The quickest sight of it and she was reaching for her locks, and despite her uneasy phobia of his infinitely flaring nostrils, she decided to turn them counter-clockwise and welcome him.
“Hey there! You have a minute to chat?!”
“Sure,” she said “what’s up?”
“Oh, I was bored! Was wondering if you just wanted to chew the fat?” After their original acquaintance, she knew he was one of those people who loved to talk. He was one of those people who were slightly interesting, but always carried some over-enthusiastic and immoderate tone to a degree in which you started to think about other things besides the conversation, such as: why did I even open the door? He was obnoxious. He asked about her parents. He asked about her job, if she was seeing anyone, why she didn’t have a television yet. They were talking about disgustingly practical things and the situation showed no sign of decomposing. She had almost reached some sort of pure enlightenment and here she was, compunctious she didn’t have a television in the room yet.
Her legs were crossed and she realized this is the price she pays for her independence. She felt no guilt for living under these terms with her landlord nor did her body swallow her neck. When he realized she wasn’t really paying much attention, he began to slow down in the production of his words. She stared at the ashtray and looked up at her landlord, he now had a cigarette dangling off his lips and he too was fixed for a brief second on its radiance. And at that moment they both realized that it held some brilliant, heavenly design. He reached over and picked up the ashtray.
“Mind if I smoke one quick?” he asked.
With her eyes still fixed on the ashtray, which was placed on a brand new edge of the table, she realized that he must have misinterpreted her as a smoker; rather she was simply a natural born swindler of material possessions, and he a man made of words and excess skin. And with her lack of ambition to laugh out loud at the entirety of the situation she replied
“You have a beautiful nose.”