Garrison Keillor, writing as Mr. Blue, espousing a weather/reading philosophy I envy:
It’s been sunny for weeks here in Pig’s Eye and I would give almost anything for a good rainy day, to sweeten the atmosphere and green up our plants and give us one of those elegant black-and-white days instead of these bright Technicolor ones we’ve had too much of, which are like commercials for stuff I don’t want to do (biking, boating, fishing, golfing). I’m a reader, thank you very much. It takes a rainy day to melt the work ethic and give you permission to sit and do something pointless and pleasurable, like rereading Flannery O’Connor.
It is summer; it is hot. My fourth summer in Canada. Seems like Canada should not get this hot. Canada is supposed to be a northern land, shrouded in snow, or ever on the verge of it, perhaps cut with sporadic fits of lake-country coolness, brief hike-friendly light-jacket-weather spells sprinting across the prairies and farmlands and suburban lichen-lawns, with the return to cold and cloud and ghastly elemental severities fast following. But no, here in southern ON it is again respectably hot out, mid-eighties F, high twenties C, trouser-moistening humidity, the streets ashimmer, the days are long, the trees’ habits are lush Crayola greens, Lake Ontario by day is pointillistic with sailboats, hosers repose on front porches, orange-skinned bird-faced skanks in bad bikinis roast upon park grasses and Great Lake beach sands, the nights are bathwater, backyards crackle with grills and beers, like any old stupid summer anywhere, or so I’m assured, maybe this is wrong, maybe my street-beating spooks are feeding me bad intel. In Toronto the garbage collectors are on strike, so it must seem even hotter there. Here in Hamilton the recession-crippled steel factories have temporarily shut down, which is bad news for the city, but at least now our air this summer may be clearer than usual, breathable, life-giving, not heavy with poisonous smokestacky chemical death, and bearing far fewer spectacular smog sunsets.
Thinking of Robin Williams in The Fisher King, singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” to Amanda Plummer in the Chinese restaurant. When her muscles start relaxin’, up the hill comes Michael Jackson …
A counterpart to yesterday’s Deadwood epigraph: Tom Hanks’s knock-knock joke from Catch Me If You Can. (Thanks, Dad.)
“And here’s my counteroffer to your counteroffer: Go fuck yourself.”
Yes, today Laura and I have enjoyed quoting Deadwood’s Al Swearengen’s diplomatic negotiation line (as uttered by Ultimate Badass Ian McShane), to each other anyway, in honor of the fact that this evening we make an offer on a condo. The sellers volley back a counteroffer an hour later, to which we return a counter-counteroffer, trying our best to look all teeth-grittingly reluctant and stormcloudy about it, as if this makes a dust-fleck of difference. The real estate broker-weasel runs back and forth between us and them, meeting and phoning, performing the appropriate bit of theatre to each party. No Swearengenian counteroffers occur. The sellers finally accept our counter-counteroffer, so the place is ours. Cheers. We are now preparing ourselves for the great Mortgage Iron Maiden that we will be sealed inside for most of the rest of our earthly existence. (McShane again, different episode: “If I bleat when I speak, that’s because I just got fuckin’ fleeced.”)
Above: Lock-pleaser; mineral of luck. — Below: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
A rosy, complex light fills my kitchen at the end of these lengthening June days. From an explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago, the light zips through space, particle-wave, strikes the planet, angles on the continent, and filters through a mesh of land dust: clay bits, sod bits, tiny wind-borne insects, bacteria, shreds of wing and leg, gravel dust, grits of carbon, and dried cells of grass, bark, and leaves. Reddened, the light inclines into this valley over the green western mountains; it sifts between pine needles on northern slopes, and through all the mountain black-jack oak and haw, whose leaves are unclenching, one by one, and making an intricate, toothed and lobed haze. The light crosses the valley, threads through the screen on my open kitchen window, and gilds the painted wall. A plank of brightness bends from the wall and extends over the goldfish bowl on the table where I sit. The goldfish’s side catches the light and bats it my way; I’ve an eyeful of fish-scale and star.
Somehow the subject of my baseball cap came up. The cap is from Eddie Bauer and has a dog on it. It’s kind of a fratboy cap, mall-monkey fashion, nothing I’m all that proud of. My brother, perhaps searching for a compliment, said that it made me look like a film director. A few beats passed while this sank in. It was the nicest thing he’d ever said to me. “That is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said.
I’ve only just been catching up with the news that the recent OS X 10.5.7 update has been exterminating MacBooks and iMacs left and right. I’m relieved that I seem to have dodged this bullet, as my Mac mini has been 100% fine with the update. Further cementing my vow to stick with Mac minis and Mac minis only — dirt-cheap to replace (well, if you enjoy $600 dirt) and immune to Apple’s computer-killing improvements. I’m amazed that my mini has lasted as long as it has — almost a whole year and a half without any death whatsoever! How astounding! No way will it survive the upgrade to Snow Leopard in September, so I should probably start saying my goodbyes soon.
Koodo Mobile, the Canadian cellphone company, has been running a widespread ad campaign featuring campy, cartoony, garishly colorful photographs of attractive young people Photoshopped into having enormously enlarged smiling mouths. Smiling at all the money they’re saving, all the fun they’re having, all the talking they’re doing. The ads are horrifying, nightmarish. I see them everywhere, usually on the sides of passing buses. These grotesque faces with their exploded mutant mouths, stretched, mutilated, difficult to look at. The Black Dahlia plus the Mouth of Sauron. Lips from earlobe to earlobe, giant gleaming raviolian teeth, the hint of a hand-sized tongue lurking down in that abyssal well of a mouth somewhere. Must be some dark Freudian stuff at work here. One of the ads’ slogans is “GET A FEE-ECTOMY”, which lends an unfortunate medical-procedure quality to the characters’ freakish mouths. Some form of hideous maxillofacial surgery gone chillingly wrong. You want to forget about the cellphones and pray that those poor malformed-faced yuppies are put out of their misery. Lighten up, I know, but sometimes it is not easy.
(1) Self-portrait with sky-stuff — (2) Map of Montana — (3) Garden rake of the gods — (4) Invisible chopstick — (5) Smurfbergs — (6) Barges of silence.
(1) Mug of mud — (2) Breathe easy — (3) Everybody eats berries — (4) Drink to me only with thine eyes (no photography) — (5) Bird brains — (6) Grape Valhalla.
(1) Sunset from the air over a wing — (2) Castro Theatre ceiling, pre-Up — (3) Laura sleeps the sleep of the euphorically exhausted — (4) ornamental table candlelight, sci-fi ice bucket for Sparkling Grüner Veltliner, shadowy figurants wolfing down quote-unquote “hipster pizza”, subterranean batcave banquet seating — (5) old buildings gone streetlit luminous in the old manner, awash in an echoic choir of city canyon sounds over the deep blue coda of a Northern California twilight, very lulling.
A brief lost-wallet scare tonight, after we get home from dinner and coffee and walking in Westdale. Turns out I left it in the coffeeshop we went to; I drive back and find it hooked in an inverted V over one of the middle rungs on the back of the chair I’d been sitting in. (The college chick now occupying the chair recoils in bored alarm as I dive for the wallet with a gale-force gasp of relief.) So … how did it get there? Did I accidentally drop it right onto the rung with an uncanny precision, like a blindfolded hayseed at a fairground ring-toss? Did someone just find it on the floor or the table and decide to leave it on the chair rather than bring it up to the cashier? Or did that chair pick my pocket? Academic questions merely, of course …
(The really embarrassing part: I wouldn’t’ve even noticed the thing was missing until tomorrow if I hadn’t upgraded to Flickr Pro tonight. Went for a credit card, found absence of wallet, cue immediate search-and-rescue. Thank you, Web 2.0.)
