|
|
That was the sky on the way to the Fred, where I made the briefest of stops. Dropped off the last of the books from the house. Knocked down some boxes, including one from Crate & Barrel. And I would like to say: please leave me alone, brand
O, r you could go out of business? That would help. Obviously you don't want me to reduce, since the purpose of the store is to acquire. Reuse? I have no use for cardboard excelsior you packed around the item. I could recycle it, although I'm sure it's the most degraded sort of previously recycled cardboard.
All these are standard statements of the catechism, I know. It's the last one that made me tired. RETHINK EVERYTHING EVERY DAY.
Are they mad?
First of all, it's a recipe for paralysis. Second, it's sounds brave and profound, the sort of thing an enlightened person would think, but of course no one would do it. They'd just buy a coffee mug that said it. Third, and most important: if everyone does it, there is no consensus, no center, no agreed-u[on ideals, no culture, no progress, only chaos and regression.
Why are the lights out? Because every maintenance worker for the utility rethought everything, and some decided to repair transformers with wet fish, and others didn't fix them all but chopped down the poles. Normall you wouldn't chop down perfectly good power poles, but hey, you gotta rethink things, all the things, all the time.
Doesn't really help the message, does it? Reduce, reuse, recycle, start each day with an assumed name and drive on the wrong side of the street.
Now I am watching a zonked dog so he doesn’t put his nose in the bed and suffocate.
He broke a nail, and had to be sedated for its removal. This is not cheap. This on top of the plumber this morning who quoted eleventy hundred to stop the leak on a 25-year-old faucet. I am a member of their home-protection Platinum Service Tier that waives everything except gas for transit, or so you kinda believe the guy, and this outfit has a sterling rep. The plumber earned my trust when, especially since I showed him another job first - a purely cosmetic repair so the new people don’t look at it and say “oh, that has a crack.” He said nah, bro, you can do that, here’s the part, here’s what you can do. Called it up on the Menards site and said it'll be twenty bucks.
I felt stupid, and had to explain: I'd gone to Home Depot, got a universal shower handle replacement, went back, discovered it was not actually universal at all, but what is, really, when you think about it, what with the infinite variability of the human experience, then I sent picture to Grok, was informed it was a Shur-Temp Moen or a Moan-Sure TemPlus or something like that, replacement cost was high, and sometime after that the matter floated out of my head, as things are apt to do these days. Well, they always did, but more so now. For reasons. For reasons of absolute and total indifference to everything.
BUT THINGS NEED TO BE DONE AND THINGS AREN’T BEING DONE AT THIS MOMENT. Fine. Shoot me.
Okay I didn't tell the plumber all of that.
Anyway, dog's still snoozing and I’m on the sofa, and will be for seven minutes until I have to do a radio show.
LATER Fun radio show. It was on the latest inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, about which I knew nothing. One of those “here’s a band name, GO” improv quizzes, and since I know more about these things than the host, the host thinks I’m amazing. But c’mon, if you’re my age and you can’t do a minute on Joy Division / New Order, you should . . .
. . . I don’t know, show all the important things you accomplished in life because you weren’t stuffing pop culture into your brain? I can’t talk about the Republic album, I was pulling all-nighters in law school, and that’s why I am very successful and never saw my kids in the evening! I heard a cut from Republic while driving to Zork Storage a few weeks ago, and it filled me with all manner of emotions. Including regret? No, I don’t spend a lot of time on regret. Things were what they were.
But now these lyrics, which felt in my thirties like they were describing my twenties, seem relevant:
I would like a place I could call my own
Have a conversation on the telephone
Wake up every day that would be a start
I would not complain of my wounded heart
Had to smile when the refrain came up, but I can never square that with the next half of the refrain:
I was upset you see
Almost all the time
You used to be a stranger
Now you are mine
So WHAT’S THE PROBLEM, PAL
I was off by a year when I read the release date, but I’m allowed.
Sade was another inductee, and I had to withhold the wince, because I was on camera. Key album when dating ETBF. Didn’t have much to say about Oasis. I could’ve, but figured it would be amusing to be prolix about other bands then just “eh, fine” with Oasis.
LATER Dog still out of it, “it” being the state of being in the world, and being aware of the world. But some things throb deep beneath out conscious understanding, and one of them is the need to urinate. So. He got up, totteringly, and walked around the room, stopping to lift his right back leg slightly - at the time I thought “you have 50% limb dimunition due to the operation and the catheter, you shouldn’t stake everything on the back leg pulling all the duty,” but now I think it was instinct saying “I should lift my leg in order to release the pressure, but something says it is wrong here, because this is a hard floor, not the good Stickley rug in the other room.”
I got him down the back steps, and ETBF followed, and we stood outside while the situation worked its way through the fog. Eventually he moved. It took about seven minutes of walking around to interrogate all his familiar pee places, and then he did his work in a spot he never uses. Good boy! That’s a good boy! Absolute blank look on his face. I’ve never seen a dog this lobotomized.
At the vet I got some dog tranks for the trips to the Fred. I hope he’ll be used to the cone by then, because there’s not a lot of room to maneuver. On the way back from the vet, stoned out of his little mind, and unaware of the cone, he kept scraping it on the side of the tunnel. Staggering and snagging like a drunk you’re trying to help to bed. It would be amusing if they could bark in a slur, though. Rowrsh rowrsh guggle SNORT rowrsh
Very expensive day. But the afternoon is warm and there are flowers on the yard, the blue ones that are the first announcement of some stuff that’s a weed when you don’t want it and ground cover when you do. Another sign of Spring I always loved to see.. Always took pictures, the theater of seasons at Jasperwood.
They’ll be gone soon. The first unphotographed crop in 25 years. This is a fact of which the universe is profoundly indifferent.
It’s 1957.
Stop the presses, we’re remaking page one
Sorry, no money, no mail.
The story explains that Congress didn’t appropriate enough money for the Postal Service, so Saturday’s out. Sorry. May change. May not.
It’s not hard to find what happened to the little boys, but the girls usually get subsumed by marriage and are harder to track - unless there’s an obit. I tracked down the middle kid, still alive in a nearby small town. The first one is head cook at the local senior center.
Most of the people in this paper are LDS, and seem to have stayed close to home all their lives, except for missions that took them far far away. There’s a story on this page that describes someone’s mission, which is not the sort of thing a paper would do today.
| |
|
|
 |
|
A guest editorial from the Police Chief: he’s a bit annoyed by the parking habits. Let’s not do this, friends. |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
The Jolly Neighbors! I’ll bet this was something from Benjamin, or Sherwin-Williams. I wish I could find it. It has to be somewhere, filed away, forgotten. Or no one thought it had any value, and tossed it away.
How wrong they were. |
|
|
|
That will do. More Seventies at the Wish Book update, and a Substack leftovers around 11. See you around.
Tomorrow: The Bed.
|
