the round mound of hut.

you’re tall. enough to be irregular and stand out. and people define you that way. before we met i’d heard about you—and your height was always the first or second thing said.

i never worried about that. interesting that you said it that way, ‘first or second thing.’ because the obvious physical attribute is just one thing; and your perception of someone cues on more than one of something. think of, you know, a really fat dude. that’s not enough to make a soundly negative or positive judgment—he has options. there’s fat and enthusiastic—chris farley, santa, charles barkley—fat and enthusiastic is well-liked and gets away with things, because it’s funny, right? sir charles ranting is funny; santa squeezing out of chimneys gives the family a chuckle; chris farley, robed in a luchador outfit and playing the part of el nino, is one of the best three minutes ever (i am el nino. that's spanish for THE NINO). then there’s fat & imperious—most godfathers are cast in this type. and of course there’s fat & disgusting—jabba the hut and his ilk. but you have choices. you are very fat and people will remember this. but you are fat and also you are something else, and the fat part ends up simply amplifying whatever the other part is—you’re santa and people will be simply pleased by you; or they’ll be pleasantly confused if you’re barkley; or confusedly fearful if you’re brando; or morbidly nauseated if you’re jabba. choices. ‘cos you need two features to make a personality: folks say i’m tall, sure, all the time. but they say i’m tall and…dot dot dot. we have some measure of influence in the way your 1^st and 2^nd adjectives get put together. it’s your job not to be boring about it. if you’re fat, under no circumstances should you bore people—if you do, you run the risk of the ‘boring’ amplifying the ‘fat’, instead of the other way around. one of my neighbors as a boy was quiet and fat and super boring. for a long time i thought he was the fattest man i’d ever seen or heard of; but now i think he was probably just a heavy beer drinker, not extraordinarily fat or anything; but his boringness made him more fat, in my mind. people naturally want to pair things up; the reason why, i think, is as simple as you need multiple characteristics of a person to give him edges. i mean, if i get described as ‘tall…and really tall’, or ‘tall…and white’, my shit ain’t workin’. i’ve messed up one of my primary jobs. we don’t want to know just a physical dimension of a person; that’s not our natural impulse. we want to observe; to describe; to be able to predict.