Sunday, 30 May 2010 (MMX), 5:24 a.m.
[“M” is my wife. “Blerg” is a Tina Fey word from 30 Rock.]
There’s no reason to be up this early, except to give the mosquitoes a crack at our flesh. They are numerous and determined this morning. It’s time to wear pants, I guess. I killed several just on the walk down the drive this morning.
That was just a couple minutes ago, but the way I wrote that sentence, it could have been any time in history.
I was super-annoyed by these mosquitoes. It’s too bad we don’t have screened-in porches around here and central air — both would make summer more livable, enjoyable.
Anyway, mosquitoes — there are many of them, but you don’t have to overreact and not want to go outside at all. Damn, I’ve got a bump, a scratchy, well, itchy, bump behind my left ear.
Anyway, we went out yesterday late morning. M dropped off dry cleaning.
5:44. I’m back after second Sammy walk. I thought maybe he had to poop, and he did poop, and a few mosquitoes swarmed him as he pooped, and I wore my sweatshirt jacket with hood pulled tight around my face, which helped.
M. dropped off dry cleaning and picked up prescription and got cash at bank and ate breakfast at diner, and while there, we looked through a real estate guide, and saw a church and parsonage on sale for $160,000-something. I don’t have the money, of course, but I liked the idea of having a church for performances. But it freaked M out a little — church guilt, ideas of what should and shouldn’t happen there.
And later we drove past 721 Kristi in Rose Meadows (south of Mill Road) in Byron and 301 South 2nd in Oregon. Why did we go to Oregon? Oh, M wanted to drop off jewelry at jewelers at Conover Square, and I went for groceries, and in the cheese section, I thought, if I don’t want anything, I could be pretty mellow, laid-back. Wanting a particular house makes me less so.
A dream this morning that I went to a house under renovation. My brother Nace was working there (I sorta felt I should be helping Nace, but I didn’t. He was wiring a sound/electronics system, though he admitted an electrician should have done it. There were lots of tools around.). There were also some acquaintances of mine from high school with whom I talked. Somehow it turns out Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, was stepdad to a former student of mine, and this was his house — a barn-to-house conversion on Flagg Road, couple miles west of high school (not modeled on any particular house).
How houses grab my attention now. I thought yesterday how I used to be obsessed about something else — cars, I guess. I used to check out car ads in Rockford Register-Star newspaper, which mostly made me feel bad — I couldn’t afford a nicer one. But then I did get my cars — they have been good and not so expensive. Ah, well. I don’t want an older house now because of the lead paint and all that other old shit — old wires, pipes, insulation, all that necessary stuff.
Thursday, we saw a local lawyer hauling trash bags near the high school and railroad — Byron Community Revitalization (or some group-title indicated by “BCR”) clean-up day. An old dude on a little motorized seat — Ron Millard, M said later — saw me with Sam and asked if I take a bag with when I walk him.
And so yesterday, we came home after Oregon, hung up underwear, put socks in washer. Then I slept in TV room from 2:30 or 3 till 6 — woof. Then I hung up socks and we went to Dos Amigos in Byron, Family Video, and Sam’s for ice cream, and then we ate it over at that Byron park on Mill Road. There were some old dudes there and a few teens, boys and girls, horsing around — they probably live nearby. Rose Meadows is south and Fawn Ridge is east of park.
Skeeters weren’t so bad during the day yesterday. They’re worse at 5 a.m., apparently. Today is the first day in several that I have done journals before watching TV. My friend Dave’s play is today — I wouldn’t mind seeing him do an Italian-American accent (in “Italian-American Reconciliation.” M said she, with her Italian background, might be offended — partly a joke).
Well, here I am. I slept (napped) for 3 hours yesterday, and I am starting to feel more rested, less mentally exhausted. My low back has been tense and dully painful the last two evenings. I took Advil at bedtime and that was okay. Yesterday afternoon I felt it threatening to tense up.
Anyway, yes, here we are. I’m starting to get tired now. We did watch Secretary on IFC — it’s a story of dom/sub relationship — and then some of SNL before bed at 11. That movie was a little odd, so dark, a bit foreboding. It made me a tad anxious, but not a big deal. I remind myself sometimes that it’s okay to be anxious now. It’s no big deal. I sometimes tell M: it’s okay to feel bad. You (and I) don’t have to fight these feelings.
We argued — mildly — over “What a Fool Believes” by Doobie Brothers after hearing it on radio as we drove down Cox Road and up the driveway. M says the line “What a fool believes he can see, a wise man has the power to reason away” means that the man reasoned — overthought — away his desire to go after the woman who, we are told, is leaving. I was sticking to my earlier interpretation that the guy is a fool for believing something false about the woman that prevents him from going after her — maybe he believes he has seen her be unfaithful or something. But then I got sick of arguing it.
See, we really do just think a lot.
And I’m tired of pretending to like camping — not that I never did, but Dad and I even stayed in hotels half of our trip out west. How I smoked in front of dad, my buying into that mythology, that image of the West. How dad had intended Nace to go instead of me.
No, I’m just not too excited to go camping. And I’m comfortable with the fact that I would prefer sleeping indoors, on a good bed, to camping (lumberjacks would burn the straw from their mattresses and refill them every week, I saw on TV on some show about lumberjacking and Paul Bunyan. 1880 to 1890 was the height of lumberjacking in Wisconsin, said some guy from Eau Claire museum of lumberjacking (is that the verb form?).
So, yeah, I don’t need to go camping. I mean, left to myself, I just don’t.
Something about the lime smell in my Negra Modelo yesterday (which went better with my Combination C than soda does) reminded me of Terranea vacation — something about that smell — and M’s pina colada — and we reminisced, though thinking of going to ocean still made me think/prompted worries of what I’d do to hide the hotel room key while we swam. And how funny, too, that I also had a thought of Denver vacation, and the thought that came first was: should we really get another dog? We had reserved Sam but hadn’t picked him up — and of course I’m glad we have him — but that’s what I worried about on that August ‘08 trip.
I do think a lot, not always original things. In fact, as I go through my daily life, many thoughts aren’t original at all. I’m not saying all my thoughts are interesting, but I do have a lot of them.
Take a pic of that green house on Route 2 near Supervalu in Oregon, and that tall house in Kings — collect pictures of houses you like.
No, what did I want to say about all my thoughts — not all of them — but when they occur?
My clothes dried quickly on the line yesterday, and I brought one basketful up, but the other I left at bottom of inside stairs — and just now (okay, a couple moments ago, before this paragraph, as I was advance-numbering the next few pages), I realized that basket is why the dog couldn’t sleep down there last night, as he often will, especially when he’s hot. I saw him coming back up from down there.
The psycho-sexual stuff in Secretary, how tedious that seems. Maybe that’s why I’m not a sadist. It seems to weigh on Spader, too, though there’s also guilt there.
But, yeah, the thoughts come when they will. When I’m examining pre-cooked bacon with thoughts of it as a dog treat, or heading to get string cheese — that’s when I thought yesterday (actually, after bacon, before string cheese) that I could be more laid-back if I had less desire. If I didn’t care, I could be a cool hippie.
Eh, this still isn’t catching my attention. I mean, I don’t think it’s remarkable or interesting in itself that I had that thought then. Reminds me now of something I read a while back, that in a literary novel, a character may learn a little insight — or maybe not — over the whole novel, which is in contrast to those movies or TV episodes where a lesson is learned (or maybe nothing is learned — that “Family Matters” episode I saw recently where Carl and his son were dealing with the son’s dealings with a racist cop. No lesson was solved there, but it still didn’t quite work dramatically).
Blerg, see, spitting stuff out of my head — that’s what these journals are for. It’s 20 till 7 now — I wonder if mosquitoes are less bad.
I nearly constipated myself by having ideas I didn’t want to write down — none were great, but now they’re dispersed. Maybe they lead to something else? Maybe there was a thought that I had quite said anything interesting about all the thoughts I have, or how I didn’t seem to have much to say, or how I don’t really need to watch the houses on TV real-estate shows this morning, or how I could pick out a topic from pocket pages but I’m about getting too tired to write just now. It is 6:45, and I have been writing for more than an hour.
But I think/feel there was more to say, something new to say, about the ideas — the insights. I have more insights than I have experiences — in Hollywood movies, there’s more of a one-to-one correspondence of experience to insights.
Narrative: why does so much have to be narrative? Jeez, I even saw a movie labeled “National Geographic Entertainment” yesterday — why not a documentary? At least Linklater doesn’t seem so devoted to narrative — Waking Life, Slacker. Movies, huh? We rented 5, including Being There and My Man Godfrey* and Bamboozled and The TV Set, and Avatar* (*These movies were M’s choice; other three were mine). Some of these we rented because we had heard they were good movies. But no movie really solves anything, does it? It is it really possible for a movie to even change/influence one’s life? Maybe books have more power that way.
Blerg. I’m done for now.
MonkeyMoonMachine 