(thing) by junkpile Sun Jul 16 2000 at 6:00:46

I took Lowell to an office park to try and show him what I meant about beautiful buildings. This wasn't the most stunning office park and I knew that, but it did have a pond with swans and ducks and a blue heron as well as one very impressive building in the middle of all the ordinary ones. A mammoth silver entity, rising up from the earth with skewed angles, like it had been shoved sideways. Its roof must have been a rhombus from the air. The best is when you climb the hill to the foot of the building (note: hill covered in green green perfect grass like fur petted all in one direction), and lie down flat on groomed antless grass, look up into the sky with the triangle corner of the building bearing down on your very little body like the prow of a very enormous ship.

Lowell said All right I can see what you're talking about with this one. This is exceptional. But some of the others are just not that interesting.

I said Lowell you are a fool. No I did not. I tried to make him understand. I even told him about the dream where I could shrink buildings down to the size of christmas tree ornaments, wonderful crystalline artifacts heavy and cool in my hands.   Look at them like that, I said. Pretend they're small enough to hold. Don't you like the way their smooth squares fit together? Look at the lines. Parallel, perpendicular, parallel. Press on their planes, feel the hard corners with your fingers and know you can't break these buildings. Maybe there's nothing architecturally incredible about them, but aren't they nice? And we get to look at them every day. We're surrounded by geometry, for free. Don't you like it?

He lay on a bench and threw sticks into the greasy swanwater. He didn't like it. He didn't say so, but he didn't. I made up my mind right then that when he had his buildings, I wouldn't like them either.
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