The intellectual's daily defenses: DIS-EASE, credit cards, food jabs, pedantry, and the God-puzzles

texture · ~4-14 Nov YDAU

• When: ~4-14 Nov YDAU (Day's Ennet residency)
• What: Day's cleverness runs continuously as armor. He "points tirelessly out to his counselors" that rewriting DISEASE as DIS-EASE only "reduces a definition and explanation down to a simple description of a feeling, and rather a whiny insipid one at that." He and Ewell compare credit cards on a bunk (Day's AmEx Gold to Ewell's Platinum) and Day asks rhetorically what became of good old MOM-or-anchor tattoos. He splits hairs over whether a car is "portable" and lectures that "potable means drinkable" (with the eye-girl and a facial-tic resident, the group-intake evening of 14 Nov — named in-scene: "I'll buy that, Day"). That same evening it is Day, per the archive's identification, who receives the veiled "Henri the Swiss's" recited intake line with a hand clapped to his soft cheek — the Jack Benny gesture of event 1 — and "How extraordinarily nice for you," sarcasm the disguised Marathe duly detects: Day face-to-face, unknowing, with the survivor of the cult his own essay describes (cf. event 3). He dryly praises Gately's cooking for "what a refreshing change it is to leave a dinner table not feeling bloated." And with Nell Gunther he roams the living room torturing every new resident with the omnipotence paradox — whether their Higher Power is "omni-potent enough to make a suitcase that's too heavy for him to lift" — reducing the skittery newcomer Tingley to smoke-eared paralysis in a linen closet.