October 11, 2010. Monday.
Situation: I have no work today. Had the piano tuned today. Since I had to remove all the knick-knacks Moi piles on top of it, gave me a reason to vacuum and dust around it. I wish she’d stop allowing Mway to drag sticks into the music room – brings a lot of dirt in. Moi spent the day painting the remodeled front porch. Among the old lumber, there’s a couple planks I figure I could put over the feed channel to the crest of the skating pond. I’ll have to remove some nails from them, if I can find a crowbar. I guess I had all day to drag them down to the ditch, but by the time I get around to it, about 3:15, Mway’s ready for her walk, and I have to do that first. Thought maybe afterwards I could drag it down, but now I’m back and writing this up, hear continuous rumbles of thunder.
State of the Path: A rumble of thunder as soon as I step out the door. In the fallen leaves by the garden pond, bare spots where chickens have been digging for bugs. The other day Moi asked me if I’ve seen any new wildflowers. I told her I didn’t think I’d be seeing any new ones, but now I can see birds again. A cardinal among the sumacs, some brown birds in the old orchard – wings black with white stripes. If I look in Audubon, will I find dozens of birds that fit this description? (Could be least flycatchers or eastern phoebes again.) Beyond the honeysuckles, spot what I think is a golf ball. Turns out to be a mushroom. Moi had told me to look out for puffballs; she spotted one above the walled garden, but it was pretty well pecked at by the chickens. Don’t generally see puffballs on the path. I poke the mushroom with my walking stick; it rolls around like a golf ball. The leaves of the maples down by the wigwams are still green, but in bug land a maple sapling (which I never really noticed before) has turned scarlet. Since I’m thinking about planks, I note that we already have two planks along the path: one near the wigwams, which doesn’t serve any function that I can see, and one over the swale. I take a look at the feed channel and the lay of the ground around it and worry that the planks I want to put there might not be very safe; looks to me like they will form a long span and rest about a yard above the ditch. Near the break in the ridge, poison ivy turning yellow. See more on the way to the clearing.
State of the Creek: Mway goes in the water at the tree stand. I hear both splashing and the clack of rocks. In the pools the water is at a standstill. Beneath the big locusts, fallen leaves look frozen in the water, and there’s scum over the water in the sunlight. Water still moving over rocks. I can’t hear it moving, although I might be able to if there wasn’t a lawn mower growling in the distance. At the narrows, about five frogs plop in the water.
The Fetch: Toss the birch branch in the tall goldenrod, continue trampling the goldernrod down in the clearing. Mway makes up for what she didn’t fetch yesterday. A couple times she starts running before I throw the stick, and I worry the stick might land on her head, but she and the stick manage not to collide. After a while I get tired of throwing the stick and anxious because the thunder is starting to become continuous. When Mway finally comes back with the stick without dropping it, I don’t play “Put it down” but tell her “that’s enough.”
4 comments:
These protests – are they more than a “wan gesture”? Because if Harrisburg’s within walking distance, I might consider going there myself. MM.
I don’t know. The protesters certainly have a reason to act. On my bookshelves you’ll find a book written by Edward S. Greenberg called Serving the Few: Corporate Capitalism and the Bias of Government Policy – and that was written back in 1974. Back then, though, the fact that governments in the U.S. redistribute incomes for the benefit of the wealthy was not so obvious. When I lived in New York City in the late ‘70’s, barely able to afford to pay my rent and hard-pressed to find a job, my friend Marion used to tell me that our generation would be the first not to be as well off as our parents. Though that might have turned out true for me, that didn’t happen to most. Babyboomers needed a lot of places to live, and with two incomes in more and more households, they could afford increasingly more expensive housing. Also, Jobs and Wozniak reinvented the computer as a consumer commodity, and that sustained many livelihoods for a while. But now housing prices have soared way beyond what many people can afford, and everyone already has a computer, so those industries are shot. Plus many manufacturing, and even some service, jobs have been outsourced to cheap labor pools in other countries. Things have gotten a lot worse since the ‘70’s, and glaringly so. Kids coming out of college can’t find jobs that provide a “living wage.” My son is fortunate to have a job, but he lives in NYC where so many people are out to soak him, plus like every other college graduate he’s saddled with outrageous student loan debt, created to help make someone like Edward S. Greenberg fairly well-to-do. And Jazz has just lost her job, in an industry that’s currently retrenching to make sure its top executives preserve their wealth. If you walked at 2 miles an hour for about 6 hours a day, I’d say you could reach Harrisburg comfortably in 4 and 1/2 days. But I don’t know if Moi is interested in the protests anymore – yesterday I had to listen all day to her idea for inventing a new app.
Why only go back to Greenberg? someone should comment here. The better reference might be to C. Wright Mills, who made similar observations in his book The Power Elite way back in 1956. (I’ve been reminded recently of Mills by someone who participates frequently at my Sunday gig (for no pay, I might add), a guitarist who is a (probably underpaid) adjunct instructor at a local technical college. The only reason I didn’t mention Mills is that I don’t have any of his books on my shelves.) To cite wikipedia: Mills’ book draws attention to the “interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements” of our society and “suggests that the ordinary citizen is a relatively powerless subject of manipulation” by them.
Why stop at Mills? See references to “the state” in my copy of The Portable Marx, which I’ve been reading lately and setting down on the floor next to my bed.
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