|
|
. |
 The day, she is so ripe and lush and thrilling, no? And I am speaking like a Spanish debaucher, why? Ho ho! Some things are best not mentioned.
Sorry, I’m babbling. Nothing to say at present, because it's an utterly ordinary day - aside from the fact that there was a front page story in my paper about the MAO/MPL issue, with quote from your humble narrator. Nothing opens the eyes over the morning sausage like seeing your name in the paper under someone else's byline, let me tell you. Other than that, though: standard issue. I’ve spent the day just doing the stuff you do as a parent. Making breakfast, for example. Is there any good reason we can’t have waffles every day? Is there any reason every meal cannot consist entirely of waffles? And by “good” I mean a reason a 4 3/4-yr old will accept. Having laid down a law about sugary syrup platforms for weekends, based primarily on A) my own childhood recollections about the hierarchy of breakfasts, B) my desire to keep breakfast from being composed entirely of high fructose corn syrup, I now have to defend this law. “How come you get to make the rules about breakfast?” Because I buy the food. Here, have a Toaster Strudel, whose sugar content is indistinguishable from waffles, yet lets me preserve my law without looking weak under pressure. ‘Kay?
Mmmm! Toaster Strudels! You made a dollar sign with the frosting.
Did I now.
Then, morning work on the column, followed by one of those mornings were I cannot match mood, temperature, shirt and tie. I finally got the right combination, only to dump jelly down it while making Gnat’s lunch. Hell with it: white long-sleeve T. Whatever. In the car and off to school. Only a few more weeks of this trip, even though it seems like we just started a month ago. If only the mind was not so adept at forgetting; life would seem so long we would beg to be done with it by the time our three score and ten rolled around, lest the weight of such wonderful recollections make the promise of a new day an unbearable addition to the glittering storehouse in our head. Oh, crap: missed the exit. Okay, drive around.
Drop her off, back to work, finish the column. Upstairs, do the bills. Why, look at this: I’m out of stamps. Which means when I finish here I will go down to the credit union, but I know – with cruel, pitiless certainty – that I will stop at the snack machine and get a bag of peanuts. They won’t taste very good with the Coke I just drank, at first. Eventually, the peanuts will assert themselves. Then back to my desk to power down; off to pick up Gnat; the post office curbside drop off, the grocery store, outside for the 5 PM cheroot while she plays; then I make the coffee – same grinder, same pot, the coffee and filters in the same location – and do the Hewitt show. Afterwards it’s dinner, a dogwalk, 30 minutes of Doom, then the Newhouse column, then the Strib column.
I could have predicted every single second of this day yesterday. I suppose there’s some comfort in that. But times like this make me think of the days as railroad ties, evenly spaced, indistinguishable, and I’m putting them down on the bed, one after the other. But where the hell are the rails headed?
Later: the day elapsed precisely as I thought it would, to paraphrase Emperor Palpatine. Newhouse column is mostly done, thanks to the Senatorial compromise; that one wrote itself. Now the Backfence. But to compensate for this dullness here, I give you a Diner. Notes: I don’t script these things; they’re done on the fly, but I take a few days to tweak the audio levels. Since I’m doing this in iMovie, it’s very kludgy and irritating. Apologies for any sudden blaring leaps in volume. Two: the last third of the piece will be inexplicable to anyone who hasn’t seen this episode of Star Trek, my very favorite:
That "famous" episode concerned the discovery of a banged up starship that got its clock cleaned by the Doomsday Machine. I have no idea what made me do a parody; I had used an alert sound to indicate that the Diner (which is in space now, you know) was on a trajectory to collide with something. Whatever that might be I had no idea, but I thought I’d figure it out eventually. Turns out I encountered another Diner in space, disabled by the you-know-what. Much nonsense results, including an interview with the captain of the other Diner. If you’re not into this sort of thing, skip the last third. The rest concerns 1920s collegiate pop music and self-plagiarism by Kay Kyser, and I suppose it’s equally dispensable. Gnat makes a cameo again.
And now back to work. See you tomorrow. (New Fence, if you’re interested.) I thank you for your patronage.
-------
Perm link: here.
|
|
