Jarod Johnson thinks all ideas will inevitably be discovered. Inventuate is what he calls his process of
carefully considering an idea before developing or applying it. It’s a combination of invent and evaluate.
Here is the story of Jarod and his uncle, who are both inventors. They are very different, but there is a bond
between them that is stronger than either shares with any other member of his family. Some of these inventions
might be viable, some not. I’d love to know readers’ opinions about how you think some of these might fare
in the marketplace. The first invention doesn’t appear until the end of Chapter 1.
Chapter .25
How to Prepare for a big Presentation, or not….
I hit the snooze button because falling back asleep felt so great, not because I disliked being awake or found my classes uninteresting. On the contrary, I was often overwhelmed with interests on campus and off. When my head and neck and shoulders fell back against that special spot, carefully molded on my pillow and mattress over the past 6 hours, the warm softness invited me like a dear old friend who was also an expert masseuse, to rejoin the playground of my unconscious. There, Daniel Shore’s precise, octogenarian voice narrated my efforts to please a young Chinese woman I was tailoring a pants suit for in a very clean part of an otherwise dirty factory. Like usual, the radio alarm, intermittently broadcasting NPR as my hand shot out from the covers every 9 minutes to tap snooze, had incorporated into a dream about a woman I might or might not have really met….I slept a good hour and thirty minutes past the time I planned to get up, until the clock stopped trying to wake me and left me alone to the pleasures of dreamy slumber. Chaucer woke me. Not the 14th century bard being read aloud on community radio, but my uncle’s fat gray tabby tom, sitting on the nightstand beside my clock about two feet from my head, looking down at me as he carefully, and noisily, licked the places between each claw on his right paw. Sluuurrrppp, sleewwwppp, sliirrwwp, or something like that. His fastidious cleaning was something he would probably be rather proud of if he possessed that human state of mind. One of the last things I remembered before falling asleep about 2 a.m. was Chaucer licking his inner thigh so thoroughly that I’d considered putting him out and shutting the bedroom door. But now that same licking was my savior, of sorts. Chaucer had kept me from sleeping through my class, although I had now had only 4 minutes to get there.
I didn’t make it on time. I managed to brush my teeth and throw on clothes from the day before in about two minutes, but it took me at least that long to get in the car and drive down the narrow lane to the black topped road to town, ten miles away. Leaving the area around the house is always slow, due to dodging chickens, and the occasional goat, pig or cow. My uncle owns 90 acres and keeps a variety of livestock, which the chickens, and some of the aforementioned others, free to roam as they please. Class was to start at 10:10 and it was 10:20 when I reached the edge of campus. If I wasn’t groggy from lack of sleep, or the unpleasantness of having to rush around, then my intense self derision about oversleeping surely wore me down. There was a Hardee’s on my way and since I was already late I figured I might as well rush in for a cup of coffee before walking into one of my favorite professor’s class’s late again, and this on the day I was due to start the class with a big presentation.
Professor Fullmerston was on the advanced end of middle age, somewhere in his late 50s, around the same age as my uncle. Perhaps that is why I like him so much, or maybe because of his infinite patience with me. Besides an enormous respect for his intellect which had produced many leading research articles in chemistry, this man deserved huge admiration for the bright, positive attitude he maintained in public despite the many drawbacks he faced interacting with society. He had very little hair left on his head, skin so pale he often looked ill, two enormous warts on the end of his fleshy, bulbous nose that seemed to sport more hair per cubic centimeter than his scalp and breath so vile that many fellow students I knew would prefer to risk a letter grade than ask him a question face to face. In most people I would find overlooking such an important act of social courtesy as the simple brushing of teeth as an indication of bad character, that the person did not care enough about others to make his own body more presentable. But in Dr. Fullmerston, I suspected it must be caused by some illness, either gastrointestinal or respiratory, that produced a foul gaseous emission that could only escape through his mouth. His breath was that bad – it smelled like he ate a shit sandwich for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes more than one.
There was only one car in the drive through at Hardee’s, but after I placing my order the vehicle in front of me did not seem to move. Finally, a bag of food passed from the building to the driver’s hand, but no movement, no change in the tail lights in front of me. Still, I refrained from honking. When I saw another bag pass from the building to the car, I thought that I noticed the outstretched arm was fairly big. When the third bag was handed over, I definitely noticed that the arm of the driver, a woman with highly coiffed hair, was big and round, and a sizeable roll of flab hanging off the triceps area. My stress was intensifying tremendously, but I resisted the urge to somehow connect the woman’s gluttonous obesity with my increased lateness – I knew I shouldn’t be late at all, and on top of that I shouldn’t have stopped for coffee once I was late. But I did, and the sour expression of the extra thin, pale young woman behind the glass, soured my mood further. Especially so when she opened what clearly looked like a meth mouth to speak in her southern Missouri, Ozark drawl. Julie, the girl I was dating, or at least I hoped was dating – we really hadn’t discussed our status, had an older sister who was pretty deeply involved with meth, and who was making her family’s life much more difficult. The drive through woman handed me my coffee without thanking me on behalf of her company or even making eye contact. I headed to class wondering if she would ever be able to afford the allegedly miraculous Prometa anti craving treatments I’d heard about on 60 Minutes, but at the same time reminding myself that poor oral hygiene, low self esteem and bad manners had been a part of the northern Ozarks long before the methamphetamine epidemic.
The coffee was so hot I couldn’t even sip it safely before I was parked and ready to walk the short distance across campus to my classroom, to my favorite professor, from whom I needed a recommendation to grad school, and possibly a job doing research. While I didn’t want to arrive late carrying a cup of coffee from Hardee’s, thus broadcasting the fact I could have been less late, I needed some kind of jolt, and walked along with the cup hoping to get some down before reaching class. I had one little sip that left a dry, burning sensation on my tongue for about 30 minutes before I reached the classroom hallway and had to discard the full cup.
