Cicada heard, faintly, at 10:37. Or the tinnitus is back, as I always think. Then I plug my ears and listen - no, it’s the bugs. So faint now, but the tell-tale rise and fall mating call. The bugs as dying slowly, but still sending out calls for mates - amusing? Sad? Predictable? Hey babe, thanks for stopping (coff) you’re looking fine (coff) (wing falls off) don’t mind that, happens all the time, just gotta stick it back in the socket here (coff) (click)
Now it’s crickets, but the chorus is down to a handful. Yes, I am sitting outside at 10:12 PM, in a long-sleeved shirt rolled up, on October the First. The best autumn in memory, with naught to do but write and go to the gym and cook an excellent dinner and
“Are you going to mow the lawn?” My wife asked before she went on her run. Not being an idiot, I knew the answer was “yes,” and so while she ran I did the backyard. Tomorrow the rest. She also asked if I was going to pressure wash the garage, and pressure wash the garbage bins, and I noted that both were on the schedule for tomorrow. It’s interesting how you have nothing to do, hurrah, and then you don’t.
I did go to the Apple Store to cash in a variety of gift cards and coin-machine vouchers for a new set of AirPods, since I know that buying the new ones will make the lost earbud suddenly appear. Or so I thought. It’s been eight hours, and nothing yet. Perhaps I have to break the seal on the box to trigger the reappearance. Or wait until day 15, when the return window slams shut.
Another countertop replacement representative came by. Rough estimate: eleven billion dollars. Or so it might have been. Twenty billion if you included the cost of materials and labor. Well, the search continues. We’re supposed to look at some materials this weekend, and I will be the Man Who Trails Along and Nods Uncommittedly. I also got some more paint chips. Once again, it’s like this:
When I put them on an off-white wool they look like the inside of a coal sack in the middle of a black hole.
You wouldn’t know, you say. No light escapes a black hole. If you tried to use that color to paint a block hole we would only see a stretched-out brush caught for all eternity on the event horizon. True. The idea of painting a black hole is absurd. But is it possible? Can we say, knowing what we know, and knowing what we do not, that it is impossible? I was just thinking today about the maddening limits of human knowledge, and how it's occasionally frustrating to stand here and know that so much more remains to be learned, and I'll miss it. Cosmologically speaking, anyway. Or, we won't actually figure out much more for a long time. We'll just come up with new theories. The universe is not expanding, but folding in on itself sideways into the 6th dimension, whose existence we posit from observations of gamma rays passing through superstrings, not that we have identified any, but if they did exist, then gamma rays would momentarily create a portal to the 6th Dimension, where time is chopped up into small pieces and stacked like bricks.
Ah, you say, but is it stacked decoratively, or structurally? Good question. Yesterday I saw a reddit post about a curious brick wall. All the bricks were lined up in rows. Someone explained that this is a veneer, that the staggered bricks, which form a wall with greater structural integity, are called a running bond.
There. Now you know. It's a running bond. If they're tacked, it's a stack bond, or a grid bond. There are actually 11 types of bonds. Those are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard; there maybe many others but they haven't been discovered.
ANYWAY I do like paint chips, for all the possibilities and subtle gradients, but then you think some more and you absolutely hate them, because of the number of options. PLEASE STOP WITH ALL THE PAINT. I have some paint brochures from previous eras, and they manage to confine themselves to 50 hues or so.
And somehow the world seemed more colorful.
The population, as of the last survey, was forty-six. The big town in the county is Murdo, with 475 people. The total population of the county is 917.
Not much to be had here. I decided to look at some very small South Dakota towns, just to remind ourselves of those little places that never quite got off the ground.
Most of the hallmarks of the big suburban dealerships - the nice sign, the strip of metal that says SERVICE and defines the lot.
No showroom windows, though. But that sign! They must be awfully proud of that.
This was something, until it wasn’t.
Streetview cameras show it was occupied on the last pass, but that was years ago in the blurry era.
The portal.
Standard-issue modern style for the mid-century government embassy.
MGrub can be had:
It’s the Casablanca.
The town seems content not to have the usual two-story brick buildings all pressing up against each other. No one even tried.
It’s the newspaper office.
THE NEWSPAPER OFFICE! They have a paper.
The building on the left seems made for a smaller species of human.
The building on the corner may have been a bank. The arch over the door gives it a sense of importance.
Well, I was wrong about the two-story buildings. They have one!
Painted pressed-tin and an over-scaled Buckaroo overhang.
Civic pride from 19 years ago, perhaps repainted with care every few years:
The bricks make sure it’ll never be known as anything but.
Does this old sign actually say what I think it says?
“I’d love to get the tow truck out to you, Mrs. Johnson, but now, you know it’s been bricked up for years.”
Dang right Dad drives there every morning for coffee.]
You know, they could be rival senior organizations. Every hot summer, a zipgun rumble.
Someone makes sure the bunting is fresh and respectable.
Of course someone does.
Where the bounty of the land ends up, waiting for transport.
When I was a kid I never thought why they were called elevators, even though that word meant the boxes that went up and down in buildings. I never did. It was just an elevator, the tallest thing in town.
That will do for today. Thank you for your patronage! Motels await. My redirect page seems to have been stuck in the past, so you may wish to go back and see if there's anything you missed.
