Crickets, Spiders, and allergies. Oh, my!

Yes, it's that time of year again. A walk outside gets you a face full of web, the hobo spiders look menacing (because the ARE) in the garage, the crickets twiddle their knees and try to drown out the howl of the freeway, and I'm a prickly pile of sneezes and sniffles. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Truly, fall is a favorite time. I feel recharged...I want to make the most of these last days of sun and warmth. Everything's golden. I just wish I wasn't in school, so that I had time to make use of the physical energy. And that I could breathe.

The season and a video I saw on Running Commentary a few days ago made me think of the Cedar Creek Grist Mill. In this age of high technology, there's something comforting about machinery that I can easily understand. The grist mill is maintained by a non-profit group, kept operational by volunteers and donations. Visit on the weekends, and you'll see the mill in action, grinding wheat and corn into flours, scooped into brown paper bags for visitors to take home. The last Saturday in October, a apple presses are brought out and 4 tons of apples are pressed into cider. Volunteers wanted! I think I might sign up.

It's funny because even though I've been there before, I pictured the mill with the classic wooden water wheel, but at the time the mill was made, the advantages of iron turbines over wooden wheels was well established. So...no water wheel, but still quite impressive, especially as the pulleys and leather belts get going.

Random things seen today:
Hula girl swaying on the dashboard of a convertible Geo Metro.
Young woman with a Holga at a grist mill.

Recent Addictions:
Harbo Gummi Bears*, Twitter, Odwalla Quencher Summertime Lime Limeade!

Must do:
Lop my hair. Call about volunteering for next feral cat clinic. Gather info for research paper topic: relationship of child abuse and animal/pet abuse.

Listening to:
Morphine, Cure for Pain


*Where can one find the gummi bears (Ya?) that were used in Hedwig & the Angry Inch?

Enough Said? But then again...

The old cat is terminal. ($48, office visit + antibiotic to stave off infection, delay the inevitable).

I hit some unidentified metal object on the highway which cracked my bumper, pierced the grill, dented and pushed back the A/C condenser ($500 deductible).

Discovered a flat tire leaving work on my late night (Free @ Les Schwab, remove nail, patch tire).

Fall Semester began ($1924, tuition for 6 credits--Child Abuse & Neglect, Methods in Behavioral Research, textbooks purchased/paid for last month).

The gist? It's been ONE expensive, crappy week. I wanna take my marbles and go home.

=====

It's a late August night and the sounds of Hawaiian music are blowing up from the river. This town, out of the blue, decided it was time to acknowledge its Hawaiian roots...Homework is calling my name. So's e-mail that I promised weeks ago. So's a ukulele melody carried on the breeze. The only call I'll answer, likely, is that of sleep.

Stress has left me a little addled. I had the house to myself (sort of) and thought I might actually COOK, for real. I was whipping up some yogurt tahini sauce, a recipe I hadn't tried...thought, hmmm, it's not bad, but kind of ODD. Didn't dawn on me even then that the Plain Yogurt I thought I'd bought--I always buy--was not plain, but Vanilla. I didn't let it crush me...thought about it, yes, but then put my shoes on, went down to the store, the only one in town, the one that calls itself the shopping center. Little town. And half the town seems to be milling in front of the dairy section. My patience did not pay off...they have yogurt, but no plain yogurt. Isn't plain always an option?

My head feels as though it's been packed in fiberglass insulation.

I visited the ORG this evening specifically to pack up my corner of the pond, paddle off for good, I've no time to play, make no time to do anything more than snapshots, write only research papers and essays for class...but recent modifications meant things to see on the welcome page... Somewhere between some kid spewing cinnamon and lukku cairi's Axl Rose I was laughing out loud and I really, really needed that. And then there's other new toys...

Time's wasting away, though, and I must produce something commensurate with that passage.

An odd meeting with the past

Last night, doing my between-semesters catch-up in cleaning and organizing, I ran across some handwriting that I recognized as mine. Two pages hidden toward the back of a lab book I'd used for a biology class in 1993. The script was familiar, but the words were not--a disconcerting meeting with myself in the past, my current self embarrassed that I didn't recognize me at first:

C: What do you do to prepare for something like that?

G: Emotionally, physically, what do you do...

"It was like a big piece of wood falling on me. It knocked me flat."
Woman sits on the couch in a hotel room. Death creeps from under the bed.

G: So the best thing to do is pick up the pieces. Do what you have to. Do without. Do with this. Anyway, that's the way it is.

===

G: What time is it?

C: 8:30, Saturday night.

G: Okay. I go home tomorrow. Do I take the morning bus?

C: No, I go with you. I have a car--it will only take a half hour.

G: So that's the way it is.

==

"I hope you take warning from this and be very careful when you can't drive. Be prepared."

C: You drove a lot longer than many people. You were fortunate.

G: I was, but he was brutal.

C: Was he...

G: I drove a little way. "Stop." Through and through. Shed a lot of tears and drove the rest of the way to get home. Turned in my car. And I will never forgive. They don't even say sorry. "You can't drive anymore." Just like that. I was too slow, so careful, too slow answering. And I thought I was so well-prepared, that'd I'd sail right through it. It was just facts. Nothing's ever hit me so hard. I'll never get over it.

G: Anyway, I say, be prepared at some time in your life. No matter how good you are, it can slap you right across the face--wham!

G: What's going to happen to Glenn when he can't drive? He's got Kenny, but he's lost his independence.

G: Where do I go from here? That's the rhetoric. No matter where I am, that's the rhetoric.

Mouth constantly trembles. Minear's (sp) syndrome.

G: Well, I let one tear go, so I'll call it a day.

G: Find my way home. I have no idea how I get home.

C: I take you home. And every step of the way, I tell you where we are.

G: I guess that's how it is.


It took a while but I remember now. A February weekend, in a rented cabin at Kalaloch, on the NW Washington coast, about a half hour drive from Forks, my birthplace, childhood home, where all my dearest relatives lived (but no more). My great grandfather had died that year, 93 years old, and his wife survived him, but her mind was going. My mom had the idea of taking her for the weekend at the beach, and it was me, my mom, stepdad, great grandmother Netty. She was probably nearing 90 herself, though she never divulged her age. We thought she'd fail quickly after her husband died--they were very close, spent nearly all of their 63 years of marriage working, traveling, constant companions. She went on to live another 6 years, although by the end, she was not recognizing anyone anymore. She still worried about her son, Glenn, and she outlived him by a few years (He died in '95, age 71).

My chicken scratch notes recorded a conversation between C (my mother) and G (her grandmother). Netty had lost her driver's license a few years before and it had been a huge blow for someone so independent. At the time of this interview, she had moments of clarity, and she recognized what was happening to her mind. It was heartbreaking to see. I think she took some sort of comfort in remembering and railing over the loss of her independence--it was a break between wondering where she was and how she was going to get home, and watching other memories twist and disappear. The driving test and the indignity of it were still very, very clear.

I don't remember writing this down. I remember her eating yogurt. I remember it was gray and stormy at the beach. I remember bald eagles perched in the wind-sculpted trees on the cliffs...

Kubrick Retrospective

This begins tomorrow night and continues through the month. I'm hoping to work my way down there for at least a couple shows. How cool would it be to see Dr Strangelove on the big screen? Twelve films will be be shown, in no particular order, it appears. My choices would be, aside from Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and, perhaps, The Shining, which has always scared the hell out of me but hit theaters when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Red rum...

Light fuse and run away.

Happy 4th of July. For the first 32 years of my life, I would be found on this day in a redneck logging town in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula: Old-Fashioned Parade complete with Beaver Jack, an endless string of log trucks (there's a prize for best load, don't you know), all the princesses from the neighboring towns--Hoquiam, Sekiu, Neah Bay; Demo Derby where some really beautiful paint jobs are destroyed; a rather humble fireworks display, sometimes viewed from behind a windshield with wipers going... Fireworks were always bought on the Res, even if we usually didn't buy the illegal ones, and set off in the field behind the house.

La Push or Mora, the Hoh, Bogie burgers, Lake Crescent, the dirt road connecting my family's houses, the pasture and the creek, my childhood, my roots, I guess you could say. I spent whole summers there, and as an adult I'd go up for a week or two, around the 4th, do some camping on the coast or on Lake Quinault, spend the big day in town doing what everyone did.

I lost that connection in 2002 and am never sure what to do with this day. Of course, there are similar activities here, and a fireworks display much more elaborate than a podunk town could ever hope to afford, but outside of the context of my childhood home it's just...I don't know, what is it? Not worth the bother, really. This year, I'm going to celebrate my indepence by staying away from the throng. But never fear, I've got some low-key plans for the evening--some traditions are mobile afterall. Lite fuse, run away.

50 dates in 50 states

50 dates in 50 states

Wow! Where have I been? It's July already, only two days away from lift off. The best of luck to Bliss & Leary on their noble venture. I myself can count the number of states I've visited (at least, that I can remember) on one hand. How sad! More states, less dates, although I can see the attraction of balance. I guess I do need to visit a few more states...

Keeping the dingle-ball fringe at bay

Currently listening to Blonde Redhead's '23', The Shins 'Wincing the Night Away'. Some days I almost wish my commute was longer so that I could have more down time, just to listen to music and keep myself on the road. Almost, I said.

Things feel as though they are loosening up a bit: there is more time for music, more time for writing, more time for wasting, more time for planning. I looked at my course plan and the end is close enough now that I can list with some certainly exactly which classes I will be taking, which semester, and, right now, December 2008 does not feel so very far away. I know this lightness will probably pass and I'll become mired again in the muck, the worry, the deadlines, but this is the first time in a year that I've caught sight of the surface.

Slavic Soul Party! had to leave the car, for a while anyway. I imagined myself driving the little car erratically through narrow streets, and I saw dingle-ball fringe adorning my headliner. Considering my recent lapses in vehicular judgment, I thought it best to adjust my soundtrack to something more sane, if less exciting.

A coworker told me yesterday that having Balkan ancestry was cool. Well, yeah!

Slavic Soul Party!

Slavic Soul Party!

This is my current soundtrack. It may not help me write my essays for school, but it certainly lifts my mood. The title track will be my funeral/wedding theme. Someday. Or not. Break out the slivovitz! The bottle I have is about 10 years old now.

Along with SSP! came Ethiopiques, v. 4: ethio jazz & musique instrumentale 1969-1974. This will be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Jarmusch's Broken Flowers. Bill Murray's (Don Johnston's) road music.

Music I can study to--no words, for the most part, and a little less winter-y than Sigur Ros. Soundtrack for Summer Semester.

Inertia

I'm experiencing a severe, fatalistic case of procrastination. Library Thing must have sensed this, because it has, yet again, gone down. That should be a sign that I should get to it, write this damn essay so that I can start in on the term paper, a rough draft of which needs to be in on Friday. HELL.

What am I going to do?! Well, I'm going to write the thing, eventually. Probably tonight (better be tonight). I know that all I need to do is to bring NeoOffice back up (actually it's up...in the background, with a paragraph of text...waiting). A mere act of will and responsibility, but can I do it? Yeah, probably...but there's a pile of panic to hurdle over first, or face, or bed down. The latter would be the most sensible thing to do...it's not like it's a monumental task before me. I just don't want to do it. I am not so inclined. There are no words.

It's Father's Day, which is always sort of weird. I should send a note or something to my dad, but I never do. But then I rarely hear from him either, and I fear that acknowledging this holiday would either cause puzzlement or guilt. I purchased a library card for my stepdad, a surprising spark of inspiration on my part, I think. I don't know....the whole day makes me a little uncomfortable.

I think I hear the cave calling. I feel a dull ache coming for my head. I feel inertia setting in. I must try to shake it off.