July 12, 2010. Monday.
Situation: I have to work this afternoon and have no work in the evening, so I decide, whatever Moi does in the morning, just to take Mway for an afternoon walk. When I get home about 4, it is storming. Water is coursing from the driveway down the sidewalk and down the slate walk. Moi is not home. The pool is running, so I turn it off and unplug it. The chickens are stranded on the porch. My computer is still on, but by the time I check it, it seems to me that the storm is passing over, so I leave it plugged in. Moi arrives home, and by 5:15, it has stopped raining, and Mway and I venture out.
State of the Path: The weeds are bent over in the path, dripping with rain. My socks and pants immediately start to get soaked. Briars catch on my shirt. I twist around drooping sumac saplings, brush back goldenrod stems, duck under rain drenched honeysuckle and maple branches. Among the more common weeds, what looks like a new mullein juts up along the path, full of promising buds. Under the maples, the soil is dark brown with moisture. Brown leaves have been displaced along the ground, grasses flattened. I stop for a moment to try to identify a slightly putrid odor, something that smells like burnt insects. The red grass in bug land is again beat down and thatched together. I can only guess where the path is, and it seems all my guesses are wrong. The weeds become less thick along the creek, at least under the trees, but they become a nuisance again at the swale from bug land, through the red willows, and on the other side of the ridge. My footstep finally finds the safe haven of the anthill, where I see a bunch of purple half-inch-long blackberries hanging. The first one tastes sweet, but the half a dozen or so more I eat afterwards could have stood longer ripening. Both sleeves of my workshirt are soaked, my pants are hanging low, pulled down by the water in the drenched trouser legs.
State of the Creek: The first puddle has now expanded beyond the trunk of the maple tree, upward toward the multiflora shrub that blocks access to the creek, and downward I can’t tell how far. There’s a puddle again, maybe two, under the black walnut tree, a larger puddle at the log jam, a puddle again under the big locusts, and two big puddles beyond the bend, and it seems some of these puddles are trying to leak through the rocks, reconnect to become a stream again. There’s water again in the feed channel, all the way back to the skating pond. The sweetflag leaves lie bedraggled on top of it.
The Fetch: After a few tosses of the stick, Mway coaxes me to play “Put it down” four, maybe five, times. I want to get out of my wet clothes as soon as I can. In the back yard, Moi has put Cornish hens on the grill. Mway jumps to cool off in the little baby pool Moi has bought for her this weekend. As soon as I learn that Moi is going to watch the grill, I take off my clothes and jump into the bigger pool.
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I’m nervous today because this Thursday I’m planning on visiting the Boy in NYC. I’m planning on taking a bus one-way and getting a ride back with him the next day. I’m nervous about taking the bus because I haven’t ridden one in a long time. It leaves at 7 in the morning, and I’m afraid I’ll miss it. Tonight I asked Bev to activate the Track-Phone (Trak-Phone? Trac-Phone? TraK-Phone?) that someone got me five years ago, so I’ll have a phone to call the Boy when I get on the streets of New York. Bev’s going to help me buy minutes and show me how to use the thing, but I’m anxious about that too. I’m not too worried about packing clothes, because I’m only staying overnight. I guess I’ll try to sleep on the bus during the 5 plus hour trip, but I have no idea where I’ll put my contacts in once I get to New York. I’ll have to pack some cigarettes because they’re way too expensive there. I don’t even know if you can smoke on the streets there anymore. Other than see the Boy and his new apartment and the place where he works, I don’t know what I’ll do in New York City. The kinds of things I’d like to see are no longer there. Or maybe it’s just that there’s so much to do I can never pick one thing out. Even when I lived there, more than 30 years ago, I didn’t know what to do most of the time, except walk around a lot.
I don’t like the idea that you are going. Will you leave the computer on so I can work on my essay? Do you realize that, yesterday, after you took a shower, you turned the computer off and pulled the plug on it? I was able to post my essay title while you were in the bathroom, but after that I couldn’t do any writing. M.
Yesterday, it looked like it was going to thunderstorm, so I unplugged the computer before I went to work. I won’t be leaving the computer on while I’m gone, but that will be only for two days. I probably shouldn’t go anywhere, because I should practice for a couple special gigs I have coming up. One will be on the Saturday after I get back. Also, I won’t be around on Thursday and Friday to post my journal entries. I guess I’ll have to put Thursday and Friday together in with my Wednesday post tomorrow. I don’t like this, but I don’t know what else to do.
Since I posted my last entry of this blog on December 24 of last year, I’ve been re-reading through it, perhaps because I miss the daily ritual of dealing with it, and have been making minor revisions in the entries (nothing more than correcting spelling and grammatical errors, for example, changing “larva” to “larvae”). Unfortunately, as Mway and I have already discovered, I cannot make any corrections to my comments, as blogger.com does not permit this to be done. It comes as a shock to me to see in my comment above that I call Moi Bev. Clearly I meant to write “Moi.” I don’t know why I wrote “Bev” instead – perhaps it was in my anxiety over going to NYC. This is something that Mway did not notice apparently.
See my comment posted May 4, 2012, of August 21, 2011, What to Make of All These Vines. An explanation could be that this is cognitive incoherence between parallel universes. Not serious enough, however, to cause sudden multiverse collapse.
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