Free The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell Page A

a disagreeable moment? If you are asked to name the best rock ’n’ roll band of all time, do you name it, say it depends, or say you don’t know? If you were told you would spend the day in the field hoeing and were offered a short hoe or a long hoe, which would you take? Do you know the name of the condition that protrudes the eyeballs? Have you ever taken a girl to batting cages and there had her foul a ball into her own lip and had to buy her ice cream to stop her from crying? Have you ever lost a shoe and thrown away the second shoe and thenfound the first shoe? Have you ever known anyone proficient on a unicycle who struck you as a normal person—whose character, apart from the unicycling, did not strike you as deficient somehow or otherwise suspicious? Did you play marbles as a child? Is there a country or culture on earth that strikes you as better than all, or most, others? What to your mind is the most heinous crime? If you could, would you elect to have had more or better education than you received, and would you elect to have been brighter than you were?
    Do you realize that when I asked you about what I called a “bifurcated tunnel,” one side under the sign HOPE and the other NO HOPE , I was describing what I have since learned is called a gauntlet, this splitting of the route, but now that I think about it I see we do not really want either bifurcated tunnel or gauntlet because in my mind one is not yet in a tunnel that splits, one is merely approaching two tunnels so close together that they share a common entry wall, and what I want to know is this: if you found yourself on the left, which is where I envision the Hope tunnel, being swept by the heavy crowd into the Hope tunnel if you go with the flow, would you resist this default entry into Hopeand maneuver over to the right to get into the No Hope tunnel, which you can see has a lot fewer people going into it, and which maneuver you think you can effect by some swim moves and other labors? If one of three planes was destined to crash, killing either the entire football team, the entire marching band, or the entire cheerleading squad, and you had to decide which plane crashed, which plane would you select? Are you very much into spelunking? What is meant by tartan?
    Are you aware that there are accounts of dogs—rat terriers one might presume, or dogs that became the foundation for the breed—that have killed more than a thousand rats in a pit in an hour? Have you witnessed the sport called punkin chunkin? Do you know what is meant by defibrillation? Do you know if those large chrome-rimmed gill-like holes on the sides of I believe late-fifties Buicks were functional or merely stylistic? Did you scream when Vincent Price instructed you to in The Tingler ? If you could have anyone on earth come over to your place for some sexual relations right now, or in an hour or two if you wanted to get ready, or even later tonight or tomorrow night or next week if you wanted major preparations, or, hell, like in six months or a year if you perhapshave some weight to lose, who would it be? Will you shoot a game animal and will you shoot a person? Are you weaker in trigonometry, algebra, or calculus? Are you a little bothered, as I am, that you don’t know the classic patterns of plaid? Would you rather have written “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” or “It comes with the territory” or “Like, whatever”?
    Have you ever been bitten by a cat? Do you know the mechanism of a calliope? Have you ever purchased a rubber from a machine, and do you know when that term (“rubber”) disappeared, and if you could, would you replace the term “condom” with it? In swing dancing, there is two-step and three-step, but isn’t there also one-step? Have you ever drunk from pastel-colored aluminum tumblers? Would you say that you are pro peanut brittle, anti peanut brittle, or would you say “I do not have a dog