August 13, 2010. Friday.
Situation: I have to work tonight and probably should work a little also this afternoon, so I might as well take Mway for a walk this morning. Moi has already taken her out to throw stick. She tells me that the path is wet, since it’s been raining, I guess, all night – but a wet path is, of course, no obstacle to me. I’ll go barefooted in my boots again. It’s 9:41.
State of the Path: My walking clothes are damp when I put them on. Mway is relaxing on the porch after throwing stick with Moi, and looks up at me bug-eyed, surprised to see me. But she’s soon smiling as she runs and circles the yard, heading to meet me at the path. I admit I feel a little uncomfortable in my damp clothes, and when I reach the path beyond the walled garden, the idea of walking through wet weeds seems unpleasant to me, so I start whacking at the goldenrod, briars, and giant ragweed with the “pro-quality” stick. It’s a half-assed job, but it makes me feel like I might stay a little drier than I otherwise would. Down at the grasses in bug land, I can feel my bare feet sloshing around in my boots. As I approach the creek, I think I hear a bullfrog, but after a few steps, I realize it’s my feet making a burping sound against the wet rubber of my boots. I think I hear the whine of another mosquito. Along the creek, I look at the plant that’s winding around the jewelweed and see that it’s also winding around some goldenrod that I’ve started whacking at. I wonder if the plant’s some kind of bindweed. Its little white flowers, or maybe they’re just white buds, grow all along its stringy, winding stem – and they look almost like fungus or coral.
State of the Creek: Beneath the tree stand, Mway ventures into the creek bed – I hear the clacking of rocks. Whatever rain we had last night must be soaking into the ground; it hasn’t raised the level of the creek much. The creek is still a series of disconnected pools, with muddy opaque water in them. The pool at the narrows has crept closer to the vinyl siding. I walk over to the feed channel to the skating pond and see there’s no water in it. Mway meets up with me as I’m stepping through the poison ivy beneath the “chokeberries.”
The Fetch: She runs ahead of me and is there to greet me at the clearing. I suspect she will only make one fetch, but it’s hard to tell: she prances about and looks up at me with an eager smile. I toss the stick – will she bring it back and drop it at my feet? No, she goes running toward the path along the sumacs and heads back to the house, having to adjust the stick in her mouth once or twice after it gets knocked cock-eyed by the weeds along the path.
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I would just like to say, and for no particular reason, or to anyone in particular, that Camus discusses certain styles of life in connection with the absurd attitude, in which discussion he highlights the lover, the actor, and the adventurer but mentions in passing that a less glamorous vocation, such as that of a civil servant, can also be effectively carried out in a universe without hope, and we can easily imagine far humbler professions to include with that. To this, I might add that even a job that one has a passion for can sometimes become a frustration as, say, when a musician, who works hard to learn the possibilities of the art, must mostly merely placate an audience for monetary reasons and furthermore perform in the shadow of celebrity of a fellow musician who is smugly satisfied with that situation (say, a drummer who formerly played on the soundtrack of certain TV cartoons and in the side band of a member of a famous 60’s San Francisco rock jam band among others, whose constant “schmoozing,” effusive old-hippie hugs, habitual overtipping, and idle optimism, underpinned by a dependency on “pain medicine,” though undercut by a natural nervousness and a sliding into behind-the-back gossip and back-biting criticism of others, while instrumental in securing work, seem to be hypocritical for these very reasons and seem to go hand in hand with a tendency toward overstatement in his playing) – but I don’t want to get into all this (having said too much, yet not enough).
Overstatement -- and glibness, I meant to say, which the audience eats up and I then feel compelled either to capitulate to or react against. All of which is complicated by the fact that I owe Wade for my livelihood and for the opportunity to learn more about music and for some of the things he taught me and by the fact that he often genuinely wants to explore things himself, although I have to sometimes prod him on this, and by the fact that I’m grateful for the small and devoted audience we have, who cannot be simply characterized, some of whom genuinely like to learn things themselves, and others more set in their ways from whom I’ve nevertheless learned so much by the requests they’ve made, though some of them seem to want to hear the same tunes over and over again, which is not necessarily a bad thing because it allows one to learn those tunes better, although this can sometimes be taxing upon one, though what does it matter if one’s jointly creating a joyous community, and maybe this is the more important thing to do, for maybe I’m kidding myself that I’m doing any real exploring and that there’s even something more new under the sun anyway, though often I do think – and here I’m saying too much yet not enough again and besides this is not relevant to the point I originally wanted to make.
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