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epitome of incomprehensibility
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See "Buick" for reference. On the way to my brother's summer camp workplace, we stopped in a small Ontario town called Alexandria at a gas-station patch surrounded by green grass. It wasn't your usual vaguely lonely small-town Ontario truck stop. The restaurant, the car repair shop, the field... all those fit the image. But there were also five small aircraft planted in the fields.
Two were close to me. The other three were some distance away in boggy ground, and it'd rained recently. Cessna was the make of one, and probably of the other next to it. Maybe of all five.
I walked around the two, taking mental notes. One navy blue and white, the other medium blue and white. One with a door missing, the other with a damaged wing. One with vines growing around one side, the other looking as if you could fly off in it and bomb someone in World War 2, only it wasn't for bombing and it wasn't that old. Besides, it had a damaged wing, and its wheels were deliberately sunk deep in the mud. At the back it was tethered to the ground.
Both planes had a four-figure code (C-something on each, I think). And both had a red light at the tip of one wing and a blue light at the tip of the other. I felt pleased with myself for noting a pattern. My mother came by and she took a picture of me crouching beside the wing as if coming out of the cockpit.
My father woke up from his nap. "Dad, Dad," I called, being happily childish, "come look at the biplanes."
He looked at them. He asked, "Where are the biplanes?"
Turns out that biplanes are ones with double wings, not simply planes with two seats inside. Honest mistake.
Just like "bisexual" doesn't mean I have two wings on each side. That would be cool, though. Instead people find me to be a disturbing contradiction in the order of the universe and won't laugh at bad math jokes, queerly defined parameters. Sometimes. Other times they are simply human parents. (I didn't dare ask "Did the good side win?" when they came home from the Conference of Elders of the Irrelevant Church. Nobody decided anything decisive about marriage equality anyway. Maybe it's bad to have equality because you're bisected. Swinging both ways with a slide rule, protracted.)
The good think about Cessna compared to Buick? You can't mispronounce it. Sure, you could say Kessna, but that would be a name like mine. Kessna Byooick, looker-out into the lonely green grass of Alexandria. "It was conquered by Alexander the Great in the 1800s," she says in the car, which is like saying, "Are we there yet?" Hanging on to childishness.
And on the highway we saw a red parachute-glider. Paraglider. And a small dark vulture.
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