Mop Up of the Odd Item or Two
Boosted with Moderna Monday. I spent Tuesday in bed. I dragged myself out to pay my respects to Dusty Baker who now manages the Astros. Once upon a time he was the skipper for the San Francisco Giants, he had played for the Dodgers, I like him because he’s so old. I know him most by what I’ve read in the Sporting Green of the San Francisco Chronicle and then when I’d go out to Candlestick Park to watch a baseball game.
Our 2003 BMW isn’t particularly old unless you try to keep one alive. Paying the repair bills is very old, and German part prices are eyewatering high. I could fix my Chevy’s water pump for less than $50, the same repair on the BMW feels like it is at least $1500, and when you don’t have that kind of money laying around it feels like the world is trying to tell you something. The advice is priceless.
We’ve pushed the German sedan along until we can’t. Today a delivery company because of the pandemic delivered a Tesla to our door at a price and in a color, we thought we could live with. A test drive later the Model 3 was purchased, paperwork was finished in the driveway.
Sunday’s atmospheric river that hit here in Northern California was a force of nature. It rained hard, it was windy, the streets flooded. Once upon a time a Californian could figure on receiving rain in dribs and drabs, not too little and not too much. In this new razzle dazzle century, everything has become an event, what we got was a sharp slap in the kisser. Most of us don’t like how things are turning out between wildfires and atmospheric rivers whatever you used to be able to count on no longer adds up.
This past spring we’d had a crew install a french drain along our property line. Worked as advertised. Instead of being soggy and flooded water drained off and sank into gravel where perforated pipe sent it off away from our building. Recent rain chain installation worked too. I have a few tweaks to do to the gutters, but who knows when I’ll get around to fixing things like gutters, rain has been so rare here and motivation has been at an ebb to near vanished altogether.
In our backyard we’ve been fashioning a place where one or the other of us might retreat to work. Writers are drawn to working in solitary confinement. Notifications will break the stream of consciousness. Ideas go lost in distraction. There are more things I imagined I would never forget that have been forgotten than I could have ever believed possible. More than once, perhaps a few tens of thousands of times I’ve improvised a funny line I’ve never been able to say a second time for a laugh.
A small wooden desk will go into the writing studio. A wall will be dedicated to our books. We will build shelves for each size. To be useful books must be at your fingertips, you must be able to refer to what you can’t remember, time is of the essence, any friction will only spoil the moment. I’ve known a few minds that recall every single word they’ve ever read and can recite chapter and verse every single sentence. I can’t even remember where I put my car keys.
The grace of a good yard is here to help. Grapevines, oak trees and blueberry bushes are planted here. Quarried stones have been set by talented workers. I’m charged to build gates and arbors, these come natural to me, and I may take extra effort to craft each to our preference.
Somewhere in the last two decades I’ve come to see little difference between words and wood. Each can be hewn by hand and mind closer to what is intended by what sight the imagination has cast in the mind.
The devil is in the details, the angels hover near the generalities. This is how most of us trip up and get all twisted about in a binary world, even though everyone knows we live here in the infinite.
I miss improvising in front of an audience. While popping off in an extemporaneous manner, as the mood or lack of impulse control strikes, I find these blurting outs can be less comical and more triggering. I know my peers in show business understand. Show people know an audience, we are less familiar with the sole point of view of the singular, we can roam at large and bound across the landscape, where often the precious few want to call into question each and every detail of the comic lark we have taken off on.
Everything and everyone is suffering from the incurable condition of being misinformed and prone to making regrettable comments. Just about the time I’d finally got the knack for speaking without taint of judgement about my homosexual friends I’ve now got a whole new challenge of figuring how to speak about my transexual grand kid. More than a few circuit breakers have popped in the thoughts and words of the family, not due to any judgements, we just are having a bit of difficulty performing the gender jujitsu of the thing. Give it a little more time I figure we’ll all be error free experts.
Hypersonic rockets are all the latest fashion. Russia and China have them and according to what someone from Raytheon has to say on the subject the United States is lagging in the race to build one of these Mach 5 flying machines. Then if you switch it around there are pieces of our world that appear to not move at all. Take our legal system for example. You can get sued, you can be deposed, there might or might not be a conviction, maybe an appeal, if that doesn’t work you might try taking your problem to another court, all this can go on and on for years and years.
In this newfangled digital age sordid unproven facts might whistle on by at near lightspeed velocities with regard to all manner of conduct. Before the FBI can investigate, before an indictment can be handed down, there are another whole boatload of violations, by the end of the week a good soul is hard pressed to know if anything can be done to bring one iota of justice to the gallery of rogues grifting across the headlines.
Liz Taylor hopping into the sack with Richard Burton seems as I recall having been a topic of watercooler gossip for most of a whole decade. There are simply no comparable celebrity tryst grabbing headlines in this post Guys and Dolls age of everyone knows everything about everyone.
I have some recollection in the fog of memory that certain legislatures in particular states had made even consensual sodomy illegal. As a practical matter I was always a little confused about how that law could ever be enforced. Most of these kinds of behaviors are happening behind closed doors with the lights turned off. Must have had private detectives mount infrared cameras or sound recording equipment that when played back experts in such matters could discern a guilty kind of cry of ecstasy from an altogether more innocent kind of crying.
Between fighting off the demon Covid-19 virus with a booster shot, drying out after the lashing we took from this last storm, and now as usual improvising right up to the edge of catastrophe I’m going to land this posting wishing you all inexpensive water pumps and quiet contemplative moments spent in silence listening to your as ever chatty mind-
Originally published at http://danasmith.com on November 1, 2021.
