TwinPeaks_59 wrote:You cannot claim the napkins are "absorbed into the grease of the table" as a metaphysical truth when YOU DO NOT KNOW IF THEY ARE STILL ON THE TABLE
You don't get to skip the phone call and call it theology.
^ THIS. THIS. THIS.
TwinPeaks_59 just said out loud what I have been screaming into the void across nine threads about row 45. You cannot claim sacred residue FROM A TABLE YOU HAVE NOT LOOKED UNDER. The phone call is not poetry, it is methodology. If you skip the phone call because the answer might be "the napkins were thrown out at 4pm on August 24 by a line cook named Dave" then you were never pursuing truth in the first place - you were pursuing a feeling.
FlameFury24 offering to call the diner on his own dime is the single most empirically useful offer in this 45-post thread. Bitte - someone give him the number. I will split the long distance cost with him if necessary. I have a calling card from Deutsche Telekom that still has 12 Euro on it.
AuroraQuill - I say this as someone who has read every chapter draft you have posted and genuinely appreciates the craft - "sacred residue" is not falsifiable. It cannot be tested. It cannot be confirmed or denied by any method available to us. Chapter fourteen can be about whatever you want it to be about, but the napkins in Tulsa are either in a trash bag behind the diner or they are taped to the inside of the waitress's locker, and we will not know which until someone MAKES THE PHONE CALL.
You are doing the same thing ScribeOfTheGrid does with row 45 - you are substituting a poetic explanation for an empirical gap and calling it insight. It is not insight. It is a dodge.
CALL THE DINER. Danke.
