Bill was a Human Being

Bill was a human being.

He had brown hair like a lot of us do, and wore it medium short.  His face was vaguely Russian in that it was white and his eyes and nose weren’t very big.  Some women found him attractive, and Bill was not horrible at figuring out which.  He did wonder many times what type of men were attractive in general.  He was a bad judge of it and women’s comments on how dreamy one or another man was usually surprised him.

His social graces were all there – people felt comfortable around him usually.  He could navigate a dinner party and remember names, but never could predict what people would remember about him.  Wouldn’t that be a useful sort of clairvoyance?  You could really build a persona, planting pieces of you in a stranger to be remembered by him or her and referenced later. 

One thing about Bill – he liked to leave his mark on things.  Most times the mark was something only he knew about.  Think about that sign post for a while – marked.  Stand under a stranger’s tree for several minutes – marked.  Move a rock or pull a leaf off a bush – marked.  Crumple up the leaf and put it in an empty planter – marked with a marker.  Nice.  Effective marks were things he would not normally do, which became harder to come by as the single acts of claiming built up.

The purpose behind the marking was a personal growth of some sort.  Bill’s thoughts were organized on some subjects, but not for the overwhelming majority that is everything else.  The disorganized attempt at categorizing experiences with marks reflects that feature of Bill pretty well.  Human beings have to deal with a staggering lack of control over the things they are aware of, after all.  And the things that they are aware they are not aware of.  Perhaps the marks were more about what Bill was thinking of when he made them than the actual marks themselves.  It is a known fact that a bush missing a leaf doesn’t matter very much, and a sign post doesn’t know whether or not it got thought about.

One could say Bill was collecting the story of his thoughts.  It's easy to remember things you do but much harder to recall the thoughts running through your head at a given moment, especially if that moment has passed.  Having not much more than his thoughts, Bill was constantly losing most of what he had.  In marking, he was bailing water out of a boat made of notions.  Patching up the holes with bits of crumpled leaf.  

He lived in the small apartment of the single and unrich.  White walls not to be painted, drippy cement stairs outside, that kind of thing.  Some paintings up by Bill, some of which were marks but none of which were really good.  He didn't paint, and he didn't kid himself, but he put up the things he painted because they definitely did happen, and they took him long enough that denying their occurrence would hurt.  So there they hung like pieces of his face that he couldn't do much about.  Most people that visited knew him beyond paying too much attention to his face anyway.  And anyway, the real home of Bill existed inside his head - a great growing up, falling apart tree of patched up notions.