Mom and I have been getting most of our news on the road from conversations that we overhear in gas stations. I like it that way, because we hear what we need to know without any of the extra scary stuff that you can’t do anything about. A long time ago in Nowhere, Utah, Mom went into the gas station to buy me a Lunchable. While I was waiting, I sat in the driving chair listening to the people in the next car talk about a woman from Colorado that was stuck in Utah because she couldn’t go home. In the Ho Foods in Arizona, Mom heard a man tell his phone that Colorado was “on lockdown.” And when she had the guts to check, The Witch told Mom that Denver and the ski towns were “very bad.” The problem was that Colorado was standing between us and the last states of our trip: Wyoming and South Dakota (which, The Witch assured us, were in the top 3 best places to be to avoid the boogeyvirus). We knew we had to cross Colorado, so we planned to dash across as fast as we could.
Mom kept stopping me to pose for pictures, and then screwing up her face and standing back up again. “Pooh. No good,” she would say. “How can they not be good?!” I asked. “I’m so handsome today. Colorado looks great reflected in my fur.” “But the thing that I wanted to show behind you is too small in the picture,” Mom explained. “Well why don’t you tell The Witch to make it bigger then?” I asked. “It doesn’t work that way,” Mom explained. “When we look at something, our focus works like a magnifying glass for the most important thing, and our brains move everything else out of the way to act as decoration. But the camera doesn’t know what I’m looking at, so it shows all the things exactly as they are. That means that things that are far away look teeny tiny, and things that are too close drown out what you were looking at.” I always knew The Witch didn’t know how to recognize greatness. “So if The Witch doesn’t see anything as special, then how do you get the love into my picture?” I asked. “And also the scenery and stuff?” “You have to arrange things yourself so that they tell the story you see in your head,” Mom said. “You have to position your subject…” “You’re not the boss of me!” I said. “True. Fine. So I have to stand in such a way that the world outside my head looks the way I want to see it.” “Oh, I get it,” I said. “So like if there’s something scary, like a big ol’ devil’s skeleton coming up out of the earth, you can stand so that it takes up the whole world around me, or it can be just a tiny detail in the background.” “Exactly,” Mom said. “Or like how Colorado looks really scary when we’re too far away for details, but when we came close enough to see people one at a time, they all have smiles and friendly words.” “Yeah, I guess. The point is that you see what you want to see, and if you capture it right then other people will see it too.” Mom may have been talking about pictures, but it seemed like one of those things that was true about other stuff as well.
Oscar the 💩ch
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