ellipses yard sale

4:00 - 2005-12-03
have nots

Last week found me high atop the hills in Bel Air surveying, Zeus-like, the holiday scramblings of the ruck below. But unlike Zeus (whose beard would have made it uncomfortable), I was wearing a respirator. Also I was on a ladder operating a grinder in exchange for mortal coin; which Zeus would only do on a lark...probably in an attempt to impregnate somebody. Anyway, I'm up on this ladder and there's this little plastic platform thingy mounted on it, about a foot down from the top, inscripted with the following:

NOT A STEP
Patent Pending

Though my current hale countenance belies it, I was a spindly and sensitive youth. Too frail to qualify for the football squad, I eschewed the athletic role models of my peers for the historic luminaries of American invention. In my bedchamber, between the requisite bikini-posters of Cheryls Ladd and Tiegs hung portraits of A. Graham Bell and Eli Whitney. Autobiographies of Ben Franklin and Nikolai Tesla shared priority shelf-space with The Monster Manual, Monster Manual II, and other popular works of the day...thus did I mature w/a healthy appreciation of the US patent office. So upon reading:

NOT A STEP
Patent Pending

I couldn't help but think, "Genius. Defining the commercial and intellectual singularity of an object on the basis of a function it cannot perform...this concept could usher in a post-modern inventor's renaissance!" Sure, you can't reinvent the wheel; but how many NOT A WHEELs might one invent? A stick of margarine melting in a bell-jar, a bedsheet stapled fast to an orange crate, two cinderblocks hastily bolted to an axlerod...all could make strong claims denying their inherent wheel-ness. Grinder running, I imagined how NOT A STEP's patent application might read:

Dear sirs, we feel confident that the following data proves NOT A STEP's capacity to fail, without fail, every step-like function to which one might subject it. (Note: the x-rays enclosed with the projected step-failure curve are of my assistant's fractured ankle, an injury incurred during one of NOT A STEP's numerous, successful, collapses.)

As if someone suddenly switched on a black-light bulb in my skull, I saw the following 4 inventions glowing like neon dollar signs in my head:

1. "NOT AN EXIT" A wooden panel, 80"h x 36"w, w/a brass knob mounted at approximately hand height. Ships w/a box of 5 lag screws and instructions for surface-mounting on solid brick or concrete.

2. "NOT A TOY" A dry-cleaning bag printed w/a circus pony motif, filled with bite-sized mylar shrapnel and poison Smarties.

3. "CLAIMS NOT VERIFIED BY FDA" Conceived as an entire line of pharmaceuticals. Prospective products include tiny lard pills stamped "VITAMIN C" and childproof packets of candy sprinkles labeled "AIDS-B-GONE".

4. "NOT A TIME MACHINE" An empty cardboard refrigerator box, covered in tin foil, housing two broken microwaves. One microwave window features a blue-sharpie rendering of a triceratops; to the other has been pasted a poster of Jane Fonda, as Barberella.

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