you are in a hidden directory. This folder does not come up in ls and it is
not in the menu on purpose. Nothing in here is illegal and nothing in here is anybody's business,
and those are two separate reasons why it is hidden.
Tungi
Bean-shaped. Married. Bothered by nothing that has ever happened to him. Six years of watching, and three words back, once, on a boat in 2012.
visitors since 2011
all of them are me
This is the only page on this machine I would actually mind somebody seeing, and I have thought about why that is, and I am aware of what the answer says about me.
What Tungi Is
Tungi is bean-shaped. That is not an insult and it is not a description I arrived at casually. He is a bean. He is wider in the middle than at either end and he moves like something that has been set down rather than something that arrived.
Nothing lands on him. That is the thing about him. Things happen at Tungi constantly and not one of them sticks. I have watched him be shouted at, soaked, nearly hit by a reversing van, and asked to leave a premises, and his face did not do anything on any of those occasions. Not stoic. Stoic is holding something back. There is nothing behind it to hold.
He does not appear to want anything. I have thought about that more than I have thought about almost anything else in my life. I want things constantly. I want things all day, in a queue, and every one of them is somebody else's, and this bean-shaped man out there wants nothing at all and consequently cannot be got at.
Zany Zooma
He is married to Zany Zooma, which is the name they go by and which I have heard used out loud in a parking lot, so it is not something I made up.
They are the opposite of him in every measurable way. Loud, fast, permanently mid-idea. They are the reason anything happens. Tungi does not start any of it; Tungi is carried into it, and then he is standing in the middle of it not minding.
They have rings. I have seen the rings. Whatever that is between them, it works, and it has been working the entire six years I have been keeping this folder.
Selected Antics
Not a complete list. These are the ones I saw with my own eyes, from across a lot or through the pass window, and wrote down the same night.
| 2011-09 | Shopping cart into the fountain by the municipal building. Both of them got in it afterwards. Zooma was cheering. Tungi sat in the water like a man waiting for a bus. |
|---|---|
| 2012-06 | Zooma pulled the laundromat fire alarm on purpose to prove a point about the door. Everybody went outside. Tungi did not go outside. |
| 2012-07 | Harbour dinner cruise. Zooma went in the water on purpose and did lengths of the hull. Tungi did not get off the bench. I asked him for help and got three words. See below. |
| 2013-02 | Took Gary's sandwich board off the sidewalk. Returned it three days later, repainted, better than it was. Gary put it back out and never said a word. |
| 2013-11 | Ladder against the CIDY BURGER sign at two in the morning. I was inside. I watched the whole thing through the glass with a mop in my hand and did not go out. |
| 2014-04 | Banned from the hardware store. Back in the hardware store the following day. Nobody stopped them. |
| 2014-08 | Zooma ran the whole parade route backwards, against the parade. Tungi walked the correct way at normal speed and they met in the middle. |
| 2016-01 | Ate something on a dare outside the pharmacy. Whatever it was, he did not react to it, and the man who dared him looked disappointed and then worried. |
The Footage
Everything I have got of the pair of them. None of this is on the media page and none of it is ever going on the media page. Most of it was taken from a long way off and it shows.
0 files · click to play
2012, The Boat
If there is one reason for this folder, it is a twelve-dollar harbour dinner cruise in July 2012.
Something went wrong with the boat. Every single person on it decided at the same moment to become a worse version of themselves, and I was comfortably the worst one, and I have written up my part of it elsewhere and I am not going to do it twice in one machine.
He was four feet from me, on a bench, with his back against the rail. He was extremely high. I do not say that to be unkind about him. I say it because it is the only explanation available and because he was not making the smallest secret of it.
I asked him for help with the chain. Twice. The second time I pointed at it.
No, thank you.
— Tungi, July 2012
Three words. That is the complete spoken record between us across six years. Three words, and they were the wrong three words for a sinking boat, and he was right.
Because the boat was fine. It was a fuel smell. He sat on that bench through the entire thing and did not get up, did not get wet, did not get into a lifeboat, and did not push a stroller out of an aisle in front of forty people. At the end of it he walked off that pier in exactly the condition he walked on to it.
I came down that pier as a different thing than the one that got on. He came down it the same. That is the whole of it. That is what this folder is.
Zooma, for the record, was in the water for most of it by choice, doing lengths around the hull and shouting up at the deck. They were the only one on that boat enjoying themselves and they were in the most danger, if there had been any danger, which there was not.
What I Want Out Of This
I want to be got at less. That is the whole of it, written plainly, once.
Everything gets at me. Harry gets at me, the net gets at me, a man in a truck asking for sauce gets at me, a wave through a window from a hardware store gets at me for two years. I carry every single one of them home and I put them in this machine and I date them.
Tungi has a whole life happening on top of him at all times and he has never once needed to write any of it down.
Why I Have Not Said Anything
Six years. Forty-one sightings logged properly. One exchange, in 2012, if you are generous about what an exchange is. I have been within about nine feet of the pair of them on four separate occasions since the boat and I have not got a word out on any of them.
- March 2013. Rehearsed a line in the car mirror, back when there was a car. Got out. Walked toward them. Turned into the hardware store instead and had to buy something to explain being in there. I bought a hinge. I do not own anything that takes a hinge. It is still in the drawer.
- July 2014. Zooma actually looked over at me and I did the thing where you look at your own watch, which I know does not work, and which I did anyway, and I do not own a watch.
- October 2014. Stood behind them in a queue for eleven minutes. Left without buying the thing I was queuing for.
- February 2016. Nearly. Genuinely nearly. Then Tungi looked at me, not unkindly, not anything, and I discovered that being looked at by a man who wants nothing from you is the most exposed I have ever been in my life.
The problem is not that they would be unpleasant about it. I have never once seen either of them be unpleasant to anybody, including the man from the pharmacy, including Gary.
The problem is that at the moment they are two people I watch from across a lot, and if I speak to them then they become two people who know exactly what I am, and I have run that forward and I do not like where it lands.
Nobody has signed the guestbook. The guestbook has been open since 2011. I check it.