Unheimlich

There has been Some Kind of an Incident on an escalator at Union Station -- a suddenly speeding up escalator, pile up of people at the bottom, nine people with mashed up necks etc.

Another example of the "estranged familiar," the category of uncanny that is related to Freud's unheimlich, the opposition to the cosy and homey that can frighten... and yet lead us back to the comfortable. Of course, Freud thought the MOST unheimlich was female genitalia, "this unheimlich place that is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning."

I'm not so put off by the Mythic Vajayjay. Escalators have always made me suspicious, though -- I must have internalized flattened cartoon characters sucked through the mechanism flapping helplessly against the hard metal. The horrible story of people helplessly carried to their blazing deaths via escalator in the London tube fire a few years ago didn't help. I always pause just a moment stepping onto a down escalator, and find myself grimly looking up to escape the vertigo of the loooooooooong crevasse ones like the ones in the DC Metro.

My own appliances continue to create just the tiniest undercurrent of estrangement, though. I haven't quite made friends with the Miss Vev -- her sprouts are still a little too harsh. After two years, I still haven't really figured out how to plug in my Shuffle and get it to charge without the endlessly blinking orange light. My toilet continues to erupt into occasional unearthly grinding howling moans when I flush it at night. What the hell IS that? low water pressure? the need for some new flapper thing? All I know is that I have learned to whip off the back of the tank and hold up the floater ball thingy until the tank refills, as any poor guest who had the misfortune to be the flusher of the thing huddles against the wall, gasping for breath and unlikely to relax in that bathroom again.

I guess I could call a plumber, read the ipod help pages, talk to someone about water and coffee ratios. But there's a tiny thrill of this intersection of the homey and the frightening, some primal heartbeat of awakeness.

Or not. Sometimes a blinking ipod is just a blinking ipod.