A note from the Webmaster ... Depending on how you got here, you may be looking for the IBAB Museum of Mighty Fine Art's gallery of Blown-up Outdoor Sculpture. Don't worry, you are at the right place. The following narrative is provided merely to give some context so that you may enjoy the Art more fully. |
Bud chuckled quietly as he glanced across the kitchen table at his young wife, Amy. She was the picture of concentration ... totally absorbed in a heap of articles, notes and calculations that overflowed from the table into her lap, onto a couple of nearby chairs, and from there, eventually, to the floor. As she chewed intently on the soggy remains of what was thirty minutes earlier an intact, dry, wooden pencil, she occasionally tapped some number or other into an old computer that was losing its own campaign for space against the advancing flood of paper.
Suddenly, she looked up and rejoined her environment. "Honey, I've got it!", she said as she clicked her mouse one last time, then folded her arms across her gratuitously-referenced bazoombae. Bud had heard that click before ... not frequently, but he knew its sound. It was definitely not the tentative click of a timid writer invoking his spell-checker one last time before submitting the Final Manuscript. Nor was it the pathetic, mournful click of some desperate, lonely soul longing for email, any email, even spam; spam from someone, anyone, even AOL. No, Bud knew this click. It was a click of certainty, of closure. It resonated with such triumph that he had no doubt she was done. Finished. Amy had her answer at last.
Bud smiled. "What, you found the gene that controls navel lint?"
"No, silly. You know I was just trying to figure out what kind of car I want. Look! I entered all the manufacturers' specifications, independently-measured performance data, and crash test results for every make and model over the last five years into a nineteen-axis, multi-cycloid convolution with two-phase Paperman-Frenzian regression. And bingo ... this is the one!"
Her grin was as wide as the Hummer recommended by her analysis. She was so obviously delighted with herself that Bud didn't know how to start. "Oh, my darling, naive Amy," he said tenderly, clasping both her hands tightly in his own, "this isn't how you choose a car."
"Oh, Bud ... it's not?" She felt lost and hurt. Bud had always been so sweet. What made him suddenly become a mean, ugly ogre like this? Was it something she'd done, something she'd said? She tried to fight back the tears by biting her lip, a method she had read about years ago in some trashy novel and stashed away in a secure corner of her brain, anticipating this very moment. But she found the maneuver difficult in practice, primarily because a good portion of her mouth was still occupied by the half-eaten pencil. With both hands still clasped tightly in Bud's, she was helpless to deal with it except by spitting, which would hardly have been ladylike, or swallowing, which seemed equally ill-advised. So she bit down on the pencil, bullet-style, testing whether a minor deviation from the documented technique might still prove effective against her welling tide o' tears. Amazingly, it worked. With dry-eyed courage that would have done John Wayne proud, she continued, though not with perfect diction, "How should I pick out a car?"
Bud felt relief as he sensed (incorrectly) that he was not in big trouble. "Oh, it's easy!" he said. "You don't have to do all that math. You just drive up and down the street to the place that has the best big inflatable character and you buy your car there."
"Wha...??? Oh, Bud, you're such a kidder. Nobody would base their big-ticket buying decisions on some silly giant blow-up doll in the parking lot."
"Oh really?" said Bud. "Tell it to 4 x 4 pickup."Contact IBAB | IBAB Home |