I’ve had a long week. Am expecting another one. In context they are just normal weeks, sort of, I just do so very little that any mark on my schedule gets attention, a measurement in time or distance. I spent most of last week up north in St. Ignace. I came home, my daughter, husband to be and grandson had been taking the house apart; they’d scheduled such almost a year ago. Then they had a cook out potluck. The GF came and helped me pick up my mom from hotel she’d been staying in while the house wrecking was going on. It was the first time she had met my daughter and grandson, oh, and the intended but that’s not unusual.
My older sister and her demented husband came too. My older sister and the GF are fond of one another. It wasn’t until the cook out that I sort of guessed why, if they were the same age they would have been classmate buddies, studying the same advance placement language and classical music.
Saturday mom returned home, daughter left for Detroit. Today I made my first call to the courthouse. I am on-call for jury duty all next week. I might have mentioned this, but my thoughts on it were that I should probably save everyone time and get excused because no attorney in their right mind should want me on the jury. One way would be a doctors note. The DMV makes the list for jurors. I don’t want the DMV to think I am unfit to serve; call me paranoid but driving should call for more alertness than jury. The other thing is I think I’d be a great juror, I think my judgment is sound (doesn’t everyone?) and I am the most fair and impartial person I know. On paper, though, I worked with the prosecution for 12 years and I’m just left of Karl Marx. Reason enough for either side to dismiss me.
The house looks good. The GF looks good, meeting the family, or bits of it, is a milestone. Not that we’ve been putting it off. We were classmates but at an awkward age where she took the straight and narrow and I was writing my name in wet cement on the good to hell (good intentions are shitty paving material, always falling apart. There’s a lot of maintenance on that road).
Ok, below are desktop orphans; a flash and something that was just lurking;
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“You meet your girlfriends child for the first time …”
“Did I know about the child?”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Yes, then, yes, you know she had a child.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Boy. Are you done?”
“Yes.”
You meet your girlfriends boy for the first time. He takes your hand in his. His hand is hot and sticky. He looks you in the eye with purpose and says ‘My moomy says you were in the war. Did you kill anybody?’ What do you say.”
“I tell the boy I believe in a just god.”
“Do you?”
“No, all evidence is contrary to a just god. It’s what I tell anybody who asks if I killed anyone.”
“Ok. Next. You are walking along a lakeshore …”
“Sand or pebbles?”
“Which do you prefer?”
“Pebbles.”
“You are walking along a pebbly lakeshore. The sun is setting. In the red and golden reflection you see something in the lake near the horizon …”
“Big lake.”
“Yes. It looks like a person or an animal. “
“Is that a question?”
“What do you do?”
“Oh. Is it close enough to hit with a pebble?”
“You throw a pebble at a person or animal who might be drowning?”
“I might throw a pebble at a log to see if it yells for help or moo’s.”
“No. It’s too far.”
“I draw an arrow in the sand pointing towards the object while watching it. If it doesn’t move I walk on.”
“An arrow?”
“I like arrows, but it’s just to kill time.”
“Funny.”
“You think?”
“The expression, killing time. It’s the other way around, time kills us. It certainly kills the guy in the lake.”
“So it is a guy.”
“No, I don’t know. I just read the questions.”
“You said there are no wrong answers”
“Yes, I did, there aren’t.”
“You seem to have an opinion.”
“I just read the questions.”
“Am I a skinjob?”
“Beg pardon?”
“A joke. Sorry.”
“There are three blackbirds on the shoulder of the road …”
“And?”
“I thought you’d ask what kind of road or raven or crow or something.”
“Am I supposed to?”
“Just assuming a pattern.”
“Oh.”
“The birds are tearing at a dead possum with their talons …”
“Which talons, right or left?”
“Right.”
“Ridiculous, the right talon is for salad.”
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I was gone but now I’m not. I’m gone and not gone in a different way than I was. I’ve been out of town, out of this town, now I’m back, in this town. I don’t know what I’m going to do and so I am still gone. Nothing needs to be done, I mean there’s no pressing need to do one thing or the other, and yet one thing or the other gets done all the time, if only by attrition or accident, two of the leading causes of done doing.
The rain followed me down, not all the way. Down from up north; the rain and I are down mostly by gravity, a clusterfuck of spinning in space and magnetism and a protective ozone that kills but the absence kills too. Global warming deniers might accept accident or attrition. It really doesn’t matter it gets done either way. Denying things like global warming or the holocaust is a lot like yelling at the image of a quarterback on the TV. He can’t hear you or the eighty thousand live people yelling at him and he doesn’t care and there’s a game yet to play. Wait, no, that’s more like being angry at god. Denying global warming or the holocaust is like yelling at the image of the football on TV.
It’s just an observation. I don’t believe yelling about the holocaust or global warming helps much either. The football and the quarterback, if I were to have a point, are actually actively in the game. They are also actively replaceable; they will be replaced. See what I mean about being gone? I’m back. It’s not even worth noting. I’ve been back before. Lots. If I kept a journal of things only worth noting ….
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