Category: general

Saturday in California the weather went downright Springy.

70° and a few high wisps of cloud.  Sharaun had all-day (and most-of-the-night) plans with girlfriends so I was playing daycare (it’s actually kind of dumb to say that, like it’s not half my job anyway… but I find men do make jokes about it so I guess I’m part of the herd).  Around 2:30pm I decided it was too night to say inside, even if to listen to some fine music and read The Hobbit with Keaton.  Since the trees, both ornamental and fruit, needed pruning I decided it would be a good hour of sunshine and fresh air.

Put the new Dead Road Trips (’88 April Fools Day show) on the outdoor speakers and pulled out the ladder and went to work. I chopped and trimmed and shaped and formed, not really knowing if I’m doing ill or good, not really caring (OK, kinda caring if I’m forever ruining the fruit trees, but I did do some internet research – three minutes looking at “good pruning” vs. “bad pruning” pictures – beforehand) if I was doing it totally right or not.  In the end I think I did OK, although standing back and looking at the Japanese maple I think I could’ve been even more heavy-handed, guess we’ll see when the canopy begins coming in for true-Spring.  Afterward I gathered up my cut branches and put them into a pile (the green waste thing is full of winter clippings).

Know what though?  I didn’t want to write about pruning or the weather or how great it was being outside doing something.  Nope.

I wanted to write about the small blister on my right ringfinger.

It was maybe an hour.  Maybe.

How soft have I become?  Apparently that soft.  So soft that an hour, if even that, of what would be classed somewhere below “light” work leads to a blister.  Egad!  The humanity!  This life of computers and cubicles and elevators instead of stairs and supermarkets and horseless carriages and insoles has torn me down.

On YouTube this weekend I saw a video of a native dude in some dense jungle scaling a tree that must’ve been a hundred feet tall with nothing but a vine and rough-made axe.  Once at the top he walked bravely out on a spindly limb, high above the ground, not tethered to anything, and proceeded to chop a hole in the limb to reveal a massive hive of jungle-bees.  He then blew smoke from a smoldering bundle of leaves – which he’d hauled behind him tied to his waist – into the hole, getting stung the entire time.  As the angry bees swarmed, he reached bare-handed (and bare-feeted, for that matter) into the hive to break off and steal honeycomb. After hepping that honeycomb down to the jungle floor he and his family feasted on the raw comb, hungrily plunging comb and bees and all into their grateful mouths.

This is from whence we all came.

The guy who got a blister from pruning his Japanese maple… blood and mettle so thinned by time and trade.

I run from a bee.  A bee.

Goodnight.

No re-read; streaming direct; how bad is it?

My family and I were living in a condo by the beach, maybe the sixth or seventh story, high enough that we were afforded a view.  On the south side of the living room there was a large two-panel sliding glass door through which, to the north, you could see the beach, the waves themselves.  Directly outside and below was that kind of pre-beach landscape, dunes and clumps of tall windblown grasses and those kind of ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand.

One afternoon we all sat together, watching something on television.  Sitting nearest the glass doors, I noticed a small Jeep making its way through the dunes and grasses and ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand, bound for the surf.  I thought it strange, but not too strange.  In the back of the truck I could see what appeared to be several lengths of large-diameter PVC pipe.  I hmmmph’d and turned back to the TV, but only until I saw the smoke.

Now parked on the beach, I could see two figures outside the Jeep.  What I thought was pieces of PVC were now lined up in a row on the sand, the men moving from one to the next.  Suddenly, one of the pieces of PVC belched fire and smoke at the sand-end, and shot upward into the sky at high speed.  That’s when I realized: the things were some kind of rockets.  At first I was amused, thinking maybe these two guys were launching some high-grade fireworks on the sly, hiding out below the dunes to lay low from the law.  But once I saw one zoom higher and got a look at it from eye-level before it disappeared in a point far above my head, I realized they weren’t toys.  That’s when I got scared.

I turned to tell my folks, who were by now also looking outside with interest, when one of the rockets already in-flight seemed to lose power a few hundred feet above our level.  I watched as the metallic nosecone dipped towards the earth and the thing began to fall.  Before it could turn completely nose-down, however, the thruster re-engaged and began propelling the thing nearly horizontally.  I tried to say it out loud, “It’s coming right at us!,” but the thing was just too fast.  It was simply too quick to react, it was smashing through the window.

Directly across from me, I assumed my dad would be a direct hit.  Instead the thing, which I could see now was about a foot round by five feet long and had separated from the conical silvery top, lay smoking and faintly buzzing just to his left alongside the couch.  For what seemed like one terrifying, and shameful, minute – I simply cowered in a catcher’s position with my hands clamped over my ears, expecting to be consumed in a fiery explosion.  I don’t know why my reaction was inaction, I only thought it strange it after I woke from the dream.

After realizing we were all alive and that the thing which had crashed through our window still lay in two pieces on the other side of the room, I came out of my duck-and-cover position and tried to think fast.  Still very much afraid for my life and wondering if we’d all be blown up, with an edge of desperation in my voice I asked my stunned family, “What should we do?!  Should we call the cops?  Should I throw it out the door?!”  No one answered.  I began to panic.

I grabbed the body of the thing, tossed it out the shattered doors.  I watched as it fell, hit the ground, and bounced unrealistically high, near on-level again with our condo on the sixth or seventh floor.  Rockets shouldn’t bounce, I thought.  The thing dropped again, bounced again, lower this time.  Again and again until it settled in the tall grass and sand and those kind of ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand, seemingly now malignant and much less threatening out of the room.  Tearing myself away from watching it, I similarly tossed the metal nosecone.  Same thing; bounce-a bounce-a bounce-a and an anticlimactic ending in the dunes.

I love it when I remember dreams this well.  Goodnight.

Two of my friends at work had gasoline siphoned out of their cars while they were in the parking lot; during work.

I wonder what puts one in this circumstance?  Is this person on foot?  With a length of rubber hose coiled and hidden under his sweatshirt and a couple milk jugs tied through his beltloops, maybe?  Or are they driving?  Burning gas to steal gas, likely not even breaking even due to standard fuel economies and the volumetric constraints of such thievery?  It seems such a strange position to find yourself in.  You really need gas that bad?  Wouldn’t it be easier, and less risky, to panhandle on the train for a couple hours?  Hell, if you’re on the train, you don’t need gas anyway – you just got free money!  You’re a green thief.

Do you guys know how to steal gas?  It’s not hard.  Open the fuel door, remove the cap, drop in about three feet of rubber hose, make a loop that touches the ground, and suck hard on the loose end until the gas get to the bottom of your loop.  Holding your loop, drop the free end low to the ground to “pour” out your pilfered gas!  Congratulations, you are now a petty thief.  And, if I may add, I think you’ve chosen a poor field of thieving to focus on.  What’d you get there, maybe five gallons?  I mean, if you got much more you’d have a hard time carting it around, all sloshy and heavy.  So you saved $15 and now you have to carry a five gallon container back to your lair.

Doesn’t seem worth it.  Like those dudes who break into traffic light control boxes to rip out 300 wires for the copper  I bet the copper is a better take.  It’s also a pretty jerk crime.  One of my employees who got siphoned ended up with $600 worth of damage, everyone else just leaves work to find their car on empty.  I guess all crimes are kinda jerk crimes, except maybe jaywalking… that seems pretty innocent.  Illegal u-turns when it’s safe, that sort of thing.  But anyway…

Stealing gas seems to be admitting your stretched pretty thin, nothing better to do, maybe bored or something.  Maybe it’s kids.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  Goodnight.

Man, Sharaun made some yum dinner.

I can still taste the garlic and onions in my mouth.  No, I might not make the best conversation partner but they are certain pungent flavors which linger in the mouth that I absolutely dig, regardless of unappealing they may make my breath.  A good tobacco is one; pipe, cigar (certainly not the wet-ashes aftertaste that is American cigarettes; making the “why” of my sometimes-vice all the murkier).  Garlic is another, as is onion, and somewhat pungent meats, like lamb. A strong cup of coffee; a properly malty beer (be easy with those hops!, meister); chocolate.  I know there are more, but Sharaun looked at me all crazy when I asked her to name some.

But anyway, it was a fancy dinner to be sure – and I even downed a nice glass of red wine alongside it (yet another pleasant mouth-memory, this lingering malaise can be damned).

The salad had red bell pepper and little bits of red onion, the meatloaf was her “Greek turkey” thing… made with spinach, feta cheese and pine nuts and topped with a homemade tzatziki sauce.  As I enjoyed each bite I kept thinking, “Man, this is some fancy junk!  I mean… like restaurant-fancy and whatnot!  No really… who else has got a wife making him this kind of fare?!”  I think the gourmet spread actually helped me make dents in this cold or sickness or whatever.  Such a well-met meal was able to sneak into those chinks and and cracks and pockets, filling them with delicious and displacing fever and weariness.  And, with the help the pine nuts and the feta and the red onion I’m sure tonight will be my eve of conquer – the night I kick this sick.

It’s good, too.  I need to get back to work something awful, and need to shave my head and face (everything from the neck-up, I suppose you could say) even more.  And… if, by some extra God-given grace, I wake feeling 100% – I’d like to spend an hour at the gym before the sawmill.  One can want, right?

Goodnight internet.

I spent all weekend cooking in my own skin.

Last night I woke so cold (that deceptive, you know it’s not real, cold of a fever) that I stumbled into the living room in the dark to grab another blanket to cover with.  As I shivered my way back to sleep I stuck the digital thermometer in my ear for a few seconds.  It beeped and I hit a button on my cellphone to get enough light to read by (why, digital thermometer people, would you not backlight the temperature readout?): 102.1°, it said.

Reluctantly, I arose again to pop another couple Tylenol.  At the same time I swallowed a Sudafed, already knowing it wouldn’t, like the others I’d popped before it hadn’t, do a dang thing to diminish the tight ball of pressure in my head – the stuffy pain that I could will to one side of my face or the other by putting that side into the pillow.  I don’t know why that muck is so hard to get out, when it seems to be beating against my cheekbones and eyes all day to do just that.

I thought maybe be tonight I’d be on the mend.  But no, I’m still fevered.  Not running as high as the previous days, but I’m still dosing with a steady regimen to keep the numbers in check.  It goes in cycles, and every few hours I’ll break out in a warm sweat and feel so much better for about sixty minutes.  Much past that, though, and the heat returns to my skin and I get a bone-tiredness that takes me back to the couch or the bed to wait out another cycle.

I know how I got sick; it was that weirdo lady on the plane.  So strange with her two kids, one of them named Sophia who was two-and-something years old yet wouldn’t stop fondling for her mom’s breast and crying.  “As you can see, I’ve not quite weaned her yet,” she said.  Hey, nothing a whit strange by world standards… I suppose – but that wasn’t what made you so odd.  Anyway, you told me as we were parting ways in the terminal: “I’d shake your hand but I’ve got a nasty cold.”  And then there you and your family were, in 29A, 29B, and 29C.  And us, occupying 28D, 28E, and 28F, we must have been well within the zone of communicability.  Oh I know it was you, weird red-headed lady… but I don’t blame you… you got it from someone too.

Luckily, most of the others in the house seem to have recovered.  It’s just me sticking it out.  I’ve all but decided to call in sick tomorrow, but am stubbornly “playing it by ear” until the alarm bell rings.

Until then, goodnight.