Recently I opened
a credit card account in order to get the handy time-travel device offered gratis
to new members. On a whim I sent myself a hundred years into the future and
somehow (the device was a little imprecise) ended up in Texas. I'd been living
on plastic in late twenty-first century Texas for a month or so and was about
ready to return, when I sat down in a little café to collect my thoughts
in a notebook.
"My not unkind and incontrovertibly estimable
and wholly unregrettable, prospective yet not presumed, and profoundly cherished
customer, or friend, or mere fellow filament in the tasty and timeless tapestry
of this earthly or otherly life" began the waiter.
As he had a carafe poised over my cup, I gathered
that he was offering me coffee, but I knew he that he would be a long time saying
as much; so I continued to write as he stood there with the carafe.
"The use of extremely florid and circumlocutory
language," I wrote, "has become peculiar to Texan culture in the generations
since a law passed here allowing anyone to carry and conceal any sort of weapon
at all. Texans presume in any social encounter that the other person may be
lethally armed, and so they have developed this evasive and overpolite way of
addressing each other in order to avoid arousing the sudden hostilities to which
blunt speech may give rise. These polite formulas have gradually lengthened
and elaborated and become so protracted and fantastic that occasionally a Texan,
often a service worker such as a gas station attendant or hotel clerk, will
be shot dead by a visitor from out of state, where people have not acquired
the patience and discernment needed to get through even the simplest conversation
in Texas.
"Texans have become so unfamiliar with the plainer
forms of English that movies have to be dubbed in modern Texan, and so when
John Wayne says 'Howdy!' the film actually has to be stopped so that the translation
does not run into the next scene. Awkward as this is, Texans prefer it to subtitles,
which obscure too much of the screen and are a dangerous temptation to brevity
on the part of the translators. Another method used in the overdubbed films
is to run the film at rather slower than normal speed, which eliminates or shortens
some of the necessary pauses. This can create other problems of a more purely
aesthetic kind, however, as when John Wayne's famously slow, lumbering gait
is exaggerated until it becomes a hulking, trudging, labored thing that is almost
pitiful to behold, and then when this apparently deeply infirm and barely conscious
hero opens his mouth, the incongruously deft and delicate verbal tracery that
emerges is sometimes fatal to even the most hydraulic suspension of disbelief.
"Legislation is now pending to allow the showing
of movies that do not feature John Wayne, but passage is doubtful, for the debate
on so sensitive an issue has had to be carried on in such unusually refractory
and opaque terms that no one can be sure how it is going. Even so, three state
senators have fallen to bullets or grenades while discoursing on this subject,
as far as anyone could tell."
"crown of Araby, jewel of Java, bracing brew of
brown and beneficent bean" continued the waiter.
"No thanks, it's probably cold by now anyway,
" I interrupted absently, instantly regretting this shocking breach of civilized
speech. A flash and a deafening percussion told me that the waiter had adroitly
punctured me with the stylishly understated derringer that had magically appeared
in his left hand, while he still held the coffee in his right. Clearly he was
to the trigger born. I reached weakly for the time-travel gizmo and presently
found myself standing in the middle of Houston--Street, that is--where a swerving
cabby loudly invited me to go fuck myself, and I knew I was back among the brashly
unarmed.
My health is fine, for my fatal injury lies far
in the future where I intend to leave it; but let my tale be a caution to anyone
contemplating time travel, what with current legislative trends being what they
are.
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