Training Max: Chapter 7
She
remembered when her mother had died, and the resultant buffoonery his father
made of his eulogy, ultimately making it about himself and his obviously
megalomaniac desires, rendering everything flat and beheading everyone.
Her sister,
on the other hand, cried throughout her prepared eulogy, in the same way that
she cried when she found their mother's corpse in the morning, in the same way that she demanded of Chris,
when she then joined her: “Cry. Goddamnit, you cry.” After four years, she has yet to grieve.
She
remembered her own eulogy for losing the stoic and cold mother that she had had:
in it she told the story of her favorite time with her, when she was about
seven years old. Proving that her writing is indeed fast becoming full of white
blood cells, she published part of the eulogy in her blog:
As a child, the fondest memory I have
of my mother was when I was about eight or nine years old. She took me to her
workplace one day, and we passed by a tree that was overgrown with bougainvillea
vines in full bloom along Teacher’s Camp road. We were poor, poorer than we are
now, and hence were able to spot the tree, because we had walked the four
kilometers from our house to her workplace.
That day, the wind picked up, and the flowers of the vine were carried by the
wind, and they started to dance around the air before falling to the ground. I
stopped, mesmerized, and looked up at the sky. She let me watch the flowers
fall, and I looked at her, standing tall (or perhaps it was me who was small) amidst
all the flowers dancing through the air. After a few moments, she held her hand
out and we continued to walk, careful not to step on the flowers that are now
on the ground.
It was the
softest she ever saw her mother, apart from the time when she asked, “We’re
alright, aren’t we, just the three of us?” when her father had left them for
yet another woman. Who he took home to their house. Who then proceeded to terrorize
her sister and her mother with claims that he is now indeed hers.
She forgot
the incident and focused instead on days when she saw the sight of falling
leaves, or flowers being blown by the wind from shedding trees. She can never
capture the still majesty of them on her phone, however, deciding instead to
blink her eyes as shutters of a camera, desperate to hammer the memory to her
brain. Her favorite flower was the moon dandelion, her favorite thing to see on
long bus rides the rippling of the wind across fields of rice or white reeds.
She always was fascinated with ephemera.
Telling the
story of her father’s eulogy to Max one day, Chris laughed at the whole thing.
“Bastard,” she pronounced judgment.
“Man, you
can’t buy trauma like that anywhere,” he replied, appreciating her father more
and more, to her disdain.
Her mind,
though, was somewhere else, some simile parallel to the time of the flowers.
She remembered one scene in the movie American
Beauty (easily one of her top three favorite movies of all time) and how the
main male character had managed to capture a video of a plastic bag dancing in
the wind, ever rising in circles. “This was when I knew that everything will be
alright, witnessing the careful and awful grace of God.”
“I love Rambo and Terminator,” he replied to her probing query as to what movies he liked. “I hate Saw, every last bit of it. Its gore is too unsophisticated, reasons for vengeance on their victims ultimately pointless.”
He was happy
she hated the Neil deGrasse Tyson also. There was this primal hatred informing this
final judgment of this sort of soft men: Andrew Tate, therefore, was anathema,
and Neil deGrasse Tyson more so.
He added, “That
is not strength; that is the ultimate weakness.” He remembered with distaste a
certain Matt, who was still texting Chris after six years, constantly
complaining: “Lack of Chris. Always time for her harem. Always making me
jealous. I don’t know what to do. PS. When are we sleeping together?” In less
than thirty words Matt has reduced himself to nothing. He remembered Justin,
the Andrew Tate fan, and how he had responded to her question as to his height:
“Over nine thousand.” And, if weren’t clear enough, he added, “Oh, absolutely,”
to Chris’ proclamation, “You’re one vain piece of shit,"
Max was, in
many ways, as Chris has long come to recognize, the antithesis to Justin. Justin’s
masculinity is guided by the most misguided fool of a Romanian who dared
antagonize the darling of the Swedish masses and the whole world over, Greta Thunberg.
It was through a tweet thirty-five words long, which she demolished with a
reply half that length. Max was amused. These men do not understand their own
reasons for things. It’s almost as if his exes combined grew a penis.
As such, these
men were disgusting to him. Not to mention Protestants and pretend scientists
who do nothing but popularize science, next to Canadian psychologists who
declare both that masculinity is natural, and that the brain is nothing but a
geometric pattern. He hated with a different though no less passion, however,
transgenders who, with no wills of their own, succumb to gender narratives most
of all, buffeted by pressure outside themselves to conform to what turns out to
be the moral imperative of those narratives.
Not wanting
to be boring and define himself by what he hates, he finished off the list: He
hated feminist men, who would dare even enumerate the conceptual differences between
its four waves. His masculinity, after all, is of the absolutely medieval kind.
He applied this to Chris as well: proclaiming that in those times she would be
sainted or burned at the stake, no in between.
All these men pretending to be men
and ending up like willing sissies only for sex at the end of the day. At least
Foucault was himself until he died, he thought, though, after careful consideration and his own
eternal delight, said to Chris as advice:
"Have fun, but never go full Foucault, baby."
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