Inconsequentialities: October 2005

The Devil's Claw

My 67th birthday yesterday. Went hiking in the desert with a friend and did a meditation in awesome silence. No wind, trees water or airplanes to make a sound. My dog, recovering from a pit bull attack the day before, hunted jack rabbits. I found a red jasper arrowhead and also spied these Devil's Claws. Before they dry out they look like green chilies, and my friend was horrified to hear that I had eaten them. They tasted good in a veg soup. Just a tang of bitterness that I liked. I looked them up and found they were eaten and even cultivated by Tohomo O'Odom people and used for weaving and as a headache medicine. I think they are weirdly beautiful. I have a chain of them hanging in my doorway. Lit a fire tonight. The whole house smells of smoke, but my it was cosy!

Reflections

The picture is a reflection of one city building in the glass wall of another in Portland Oregon. Why does it look so warped??
The first blog I put up had a picture of an old adobe going down. It was published in the local paper and has produced what you might call a storm in a coffee cup...... Oh, well. There's no law against taking photos in the public street is there?
Today I was researching the word Catimor which is listed as an ingredient in the coffee I drink. I now know Catimor is an inferior, but rust resistent type of coffee plant. Tastes good to me. Doesn't seem to have that floor sweeping taste that is endemic in the places where you wait for your oil to be changed. While I was Googling I felt something on my wrist. I slapped at it and dealt a death blow to what I hope was the last mosquito of the season. It exploded with a great splat of my precious blood. As a medical technologist I know it was not more than 5o lambda, but it looked like more. Then I went out and saw bees mobbing my rosemary bush. Both insect types were very sensibly preparing for the long cold winter. I'm not. I'm not getting the vents switched for the gas heater instead of the swamp cooler until I see my breath in the house.

What I Found on the Road

This is a very simple if not inconsequential photo. Grass and sky. If we didn't have grass where would we be? If we didn't have sky.................
Today my roadside finds include a green Holiday Inn pen, a teddy bear's eye, a dime, a penny, an aluminum arrow that had 'Gamefinder' written on it, a very large and worn out beige lace bra, another pen, kind of beat up but still works, and a motorcycle registration valid through December 2006 which I will take to the DMV if I remember.

Miscommunications

Ball game to-night! Was it homecoming or something? It's amazing how the kids can accelerate through intersections in their 1978 Honda's and superannuated pick-ups.
My fifth weekend without a car as the misunderstandings and errors compound themselves. Today a parts manager in a distant city groveled more or less at my feet though of course he was on the phone. He said he would fire the person who had supposedly been handling the order. Oh no please don't do that I say, not because I am kind, but because he'd get unemployment and then find a better job. Let him suffer where he is.
Went to an artist's reception as moral support for my itinerant Sufi piano tuner friend, who was providing background music for a Small Consideration. I picked up a real estate flyer and saw my house listed as for sale. My house is not for sale. In high indignation I called the realtor who assured me the photo was of a house she was trying to sell. I went to investigate the house. Turns out it doesn't look like mine at all. The photo was cunningly taken of one corner which did look like my house. It is an old and rather neglected adobe among a lovely proliferation of trees. It sits by the river which is dry except in a rare flash flood. It has water rights and looks across the desert to the mountains. $79,000 and needs work. I couldn't look inside. Now I'm in love with it even though it has an abandoned trailer house as a neighbor and retired trucks parked across the 'river'.... I hope the Old Adobe Flattener won't buy it.

The Ways of Children

Fast truck, slow moon.

Today my very old friend told me some stories her grandmother told her. I guess that would take us back to the mid nineteenth century. The grandmother said that when she was a child they lived in a cabin on the plains and the kids would be left alone for days when mom and pop went to town for supplies. Once, the two older kids were playing outside. When they came in the cabin they saw a rattlesnake curled up on the bed at their baby sisters feet. They managed to pull the baby away from the rattlesnake without disturbing it, then they hacked it to death with a hoe. Then they got mad at the cat for scraping holes in the sod roof, so they dug a hole, stuck the live cat in it, then covered the hole and cat with rocks, intending to bury it. That night the cat was back on the roof scratching more holes. Makes me wonder why they didn't just hack it to death with the hoe like they did the snake.......

The Earth is Flat Too and so are We

A warm night with a big moon and dry lightening. Went to the dentist in Juarez today. Didn't take long to get a temporary cap, but a long drive. Opposite the dental clinic was a doctor's office. Outside the door a man in a clown/doctor outfit capered about to very loud music and wagged his butt and waved and beckoned in an attempt to get people to come in for a medical evaluation - 'gratis, $20.00' whatever that means. Hard to imagine this scene in the U.S.
When I got home there was the Scientific American telling me that we might all be living in two dimensions in a sort of hologram. Somehow time and gravity were dispatched as well. I'm too tired to read the article with full attention. Then I found out that my lofty words about life on Earth being some billions year old chemical accident must be wrong because some scientists think it quite likely that life rode in on a meteorite. The Scientific American used to be much more sober. Much more documentation and valid research before they published stuff. Now they are more into provocative theories. More interesting, but confusing for us dumb people.

Arachnids

This spider lives in my back doorway. It is large, but not as big as the tarantula we met on the road this morning. My dog flung it about with her nose for a while and then decided that discretion was the better part of valor. I don't mind the spider, but I do have a mouse. Of course if I have one mouse I must have a mouse extended family. I just looked over at the stove and a mousy little head popped out of the burner. Being a Buddhist and having boundless respect for all sentient beings, I did not hesitate to turn on the burner and help the mouse on its way to another incarnation. The mouse was much quicker than me. Something must be done. I wouldn't mind if they stayed on the floor, but I see their little droppings on my counter and stove top. My neighbor says I should mix plaster of Paris and corn meal and put it out for the sweet little things to snack on. I might try this. They are awfully cute, but they carry Hantavirus and maybe plague. I don't want their droppings in my tea. They'd blend right in.

The Deep Mediocrity of So Many of us Poets

This man is writing with water on the warm Beijing pavement. I don't know if he is a poet. I don't know if he is a good poet. Perhaps he is just a calligrapher. One thing is certain. Whatever he was writing disappeared before he finished it. A fine idea for us bad poets. We pour our hearts into what we fondly imagine to be either soaring beauty or harrowing ugliness, then we either stand up and read it at a gathering of poets or we e-mail it to people who have learned to delete it without even opening it. It would be better if we went down to the mall parking lot and wrote with water. We could convince ourselves and perhaps others, that what we wrote was either too beautiful or too subversive to last more than a fleeting moment.

Dr Ross Dog Food is Doggone Good

Is it busyblogger time? I tried twice to upload an image and they both appeared to disappear. Not so much as a taunting little message.
This morning at three a.m., fueled by frustration and Vietnamese coffee, I was grappling with Final Cut Express. I knew Final Cut had won when the Dr Ross Dog food ditty from a lifetime ago popped into my raging brain. This little piece of advertising must have found a secure resting spot, with easy access to my conscious mind. Perhaps it cloned itself and is scattered at strategic points instead of resting undisturbed in the limboland of forgotten memories. I was a teen age GI bride alone in Texas when I first heard it. There was a TV program called, I think, the Smoot Report. Dan Smoot was a thin, haggard ex FBI agent and member of the John Birch Society whose ultra right wing point of view astonished me, having been raised in an entirely different world. At the end of his fifteen minutes of darkness, the jolly little jingle came on. I think it lodged itself permanently between my ears because of the contrast. Often accompanying Dr Ross in my mind is another jingle....."We're doing our Christmas shopping at Robert Hall this year"............... I think this one emanated from Southern California a few years later. I have no idea why I burst forth with it from time to time, frightening young children and even full grown people............

Jolly Ranchers

This is a watermelon Jolly Rancher. Slightly out of focus. Apple and watermelon flavored Jolly Ranchers are one of my small pleasures. They don't actually have an authentic, natural flavor. Their flavors are more intense, as though some chemist isolated one molecule to remanufacture when the natural flavor is a much more complex combination. That's why I like them. Like art, they intensify a commonplace experience. When re-reading my lame attempts at blogging, I realized that I didn't seem to be able to drag myself away from the consequential situations reported by the media. Hard to ignore those disasters, and I don't want to. I just don't want to write about them. From now on I will make a serious attempt to stick to the small inconsequencies of every day life........ but wait a minute..... is ANYTHING inconsequential??? Yes yes yes. We'd go madder than we all ready are if we took everything as being of infinite importance. I awoke late today. My dog, who had been watching me carefully, gave up in despair when she saw me turn on the computer. She is out on the portale, bitterly watching the world go by. Her daily squirrel hunt is over due.

Planet Earth

We can blame ourselves for the mud slides in Chiapas and Guatemala. Deforestation and global warming, right? And the Gulf flood on destruction of wetlands and substandard construction of the levies and building cities below sea level.... Oh yea and global warming, right? But the earthquake in Pakistan and Afghanistan and India slams us into what we hate to acknowledge.... our total helplessness. The Earth is a ball of elements in constant turmoil. We living things are no more than accidental parasites, a by-product of random chemical events in the last few billion years. We found a niche for a while, but the Earth could do away with that in a matter of minutes. So hey, why worry. Well, 20,000 miracles of delicate and infinite complexity stopped being in a couple of heart beats. We will start to mend and await the next disaster.

Saw the Wallace and Gromet movie today. I am so grateful for clever absurdity!

The cream in my Coffee

Could I possibly drink this? Yes, I did, then I slept soundly.

This morning my neighbor assured me that the quake in Pakistan was a giant explosion deep in a honey combed mountain engineered by persons interested in ridding the world of certain people. She probably thinks Katrina was aimed at New Orleans by strategic placement of nuclear devices in the atmosphere for a similar reason. What I find interesting about the people who believe such things is the fact that they think there are persons of such god like power that they could pull off such complexities. When I was in Russia I was told that it never rains on their parades because 'they' seed any nearby rain clouds with chemicals so they drop their load at a more convenient time. I might believe this........................

Decline of the Smiley Blue Bag

OK the photo is from either Moscow or Irkutsk.
My dog didn't use her poop bag on our walk this morning so I filled it with road side trash. Diet Pepsi cans predominated, followed by plastic Coke bottles and Dr Pepper cans. If this was a deposit state I could have made at least a buck. No grocery store brands because there aren't any big grocery stores. There were a lot of water bottles. These are a real nuisance when they still have water in them because the screw top is often still sealed because the drinker used the little baby bottle nipple to drink. They are hard to unscrew. I have to open them or I can't stomp them flat. There were also those foil pouches that they put pre cooked burgers etc in at convenience stores, and the boxes they use for mini pizzas. Virginia Slim cigarette packs, and American Spirit. Budweiser led the beers, with Coors close behind. Not as many beers as soft drinks, and the road isn't even a high school escape route.
One thing that is now notably absent is the blue Walmart bag. Gone are the days when the rather beautiful blue with the smiling yellow face could be seen on every barb wire and sagebrush, and blown by the thousand against chain link fences. They made the country look like Mongolia, where people tie sky blue scarves around trees, posts, rocks etc etc for personal and religious reasons. I think Walmart must have been embarrassed by their predominance. It must have been more than a year ago when the white bags began to gradually appear. I miss the blue bags.

The Pink Tree Toilets of Interstate 70

Interstate 70 in Utah is a beautiful freeway. It really hurts me to say this because I am a dedicated freeway shunner. It especially hurts me because I-70 tramples over US50, my favorite road. US50 goes from Ocean City Maryland to Sacramento California in a straight run across the country East-West. Most of it is still two lane, though of course this is changing. But I cannot evade the truth. The lovely curves of the freeway enhance the spectacular beauty of the brilliant, broken land. Remnants of old 50 sometimes appear inconsequentially alongside.
The things that puzzle me though, are the pink tree trunk like toilets at some of the rest stops. I think they are all out of use now. I am intrigued. I hope they will be retained as historic objects,but I suppose they won't be. Who designed them and why? There are very few trees of any girth on that stretch of road, so they weren't intended to match the environment.

Yesterday I was sweating in a sun dress, desperately searching for shade as I waited for my van to be fixed (It didn't happen). Today I am COLD dammit. Couldn't we just have a few temperate days?

Wet Sheetrock

I keep hearing stories about people returning to their flooded homes. I don't have TV so I just hear them say again and again 'See that's the water line right there....... (sob sob)'. Not that I'm not sympathetic. I had a house collapse on me in the Columbus Day storm and it just isn't nice at all. I can't believe that sheetrock will ever dry out entirely or the mold will ever disappear. Now I come to think about it sheetrock just doesn't make sense. Isn't there something better?

I was reading about the Somme today because it appears in an inconsequential novel I'm writing. The Somme was not inconsequential in 1916. More than a million dead. It is inconsequential now, because the orphans of the Somme are over ninety. They'd have to be ninety five to remember their daddies. Over the top to oblivion.......
Now the Spanish 'flu isn't inconsequential because we are afraid the bird 'flu is going to mow us down like grass dammit, just like in 1919....it's a similar virus isn't it?? Hey where are those godless scientists when we need them? They better come up with an attenuated virus and look sharp!