Rainbow in Winter

Going out in the winter woods found more birds than one sees in the warmer weather, perhaps because then they are cloaked by summer leaves and now are more visible through the bare branches. Pulling into the parking area of the preserve, there was an immense lot of turkeys that wobbled and bent like old grandpas, over seeds scattered from a bird feeder.  Their winter colors were bright and diverse in patchworks of spotted tan, blacks, reds and blues.  They seemed huge and unafraid, pecking a here and a there for corn and millet on a neighborhood lawn.

The snowy path was bordered by browned, tall growth, stalks of brambles and wild grasses left by passing summer, alive with movement caused by knots of feathers, landing.  The stems would vibrate as  tiny clawed feet plucked strings of the field's grass harp, pizzicato verse in an otherwise still world filled with quivering foxtail, wild rye, fescue, bluestem.  Yellows and browns.  Evergreen pine.

Through the stalks of brambles, a diligent worker by a rotted log poked a flash of blue marbled with white and black daubs of contouring color; a brilliant blue with a crested head and black beak digging through the crumbling cellulose of fallen tree for hidden grubs or insects.  In hibernation they wouldn't know what hit them, a Bluejay who was methodically grabbing dinner in twenty degree weather.  Blue.

Two steps further, there was the unusual: a flock of robins. Robins leave by October for Florida; when living in St. Pete, it was noticeable that the birds were fed by the local group of retired folks, eager to share seed and popcorn with the familiar redbreast.  Northerner me was not used to seeing them in January, so this was a happy confirmation of fact, that birds do go south, not just in cartoons.  Here today was a group of twenty, flitting about a bush with small, hard berries.  The preserve does stock a feeder so they will be alright, for the berries remaining were sparse and hard.  Orange, rust red, underneath.

Flashing about were grey and white juncos, grey and black chickadees, both small birds that endure through snow.  An irritated kee-kee-kee came from a tree long stripped of bark and most of its branches; we were being told the business by a brilliantly capped red-bellied woodpecker, one of the larger species found.  Grey, white, black, dappled, red.

Other birds were clamoring in the eternal search for food: crows, Canadian geese, mourning doves, nuthatches, few sparrows, and of course Cardinalis cardinalis, the Northern cardinal who possibly inspires more people to fill bird feeders than any other.  Vivid red, the cardinal will cheerfully whistle even on the coldest of mornings, staunchly remaining a resident after the others have migrated.  There is one who flits around the city neighborhood, often just as a red, straight-arrow blur going from tree to tree.  It cheers one on to make the best of the day.  Red, black, shades of brown.

We trundled onward down the path in search of the champion beech tree, one of this area's treasures, finding it and a bench marked with a forester's name, a man who battled fervently with his whole heart in the name of trees.  A tree becomes a champion when it is designated as the largest of its species, withstanding years of insects, disease, fires, storms and humans; we have one.  I look up at thee and wonder, tall beech, here before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

So it goes, birds and trees, life and forever; be here before me, be here after.  I sleep a little better knowing of this continuity that will go on for centuries till humans have moved on to the next journey.  Snow lightly falls, temperature drops into the tens, birds huddle in pine branches for the night; books and eyes close for a while under the yellow of a horned crescent moon.  Winter skies, glimmering stars, planets holding steady.  Sleep well.

I, Memory

What if your eyes stored visual memory amid the layers of retinal ganglion cells, like your own miniaturized video camera?  It's said that everything we've experienced is filed in the brain, just not retrievable for most of us; could there be another storehouse residing in the neurons of the eye?  Every flash of vision snapshotted, the light aligning in patterns that could be replayed once the key unlocks the optic door of eye memory, making another subconscious realm of nerve endings, along with that of our intestinal and reflexive hand memories.

Why not just rely on the brain's repository of visual knowledge, necessary as it is to forming memory to begin with?  Imagine if the brain has shortcircuited, gone offline, is floating between worlds and that there was a way to access visual stimulation familiar and recognized, like going to the bank to refresh funds.  Could it ignite cerebral memory into response?  Right now there isn't any discovered mechanism in the body of the eye that goes beyond it being a tool for processing vision, but since other areas of our bodies are capable of non-brain memory, why not the sophisticated eye?

Neurons operating on electrical impulses line the retina, shooting off visual information to appropriate entities, but do they store any of it?  How long does it take for a photo flash to dissolve from a stunned retina? What of images of everyday?  Is information stored as if on film, layered on photoreceptors, not necessarily identified but there?  Say from the time you were little, an infant in the crib to now, everything that you have ever seen still existing in exquisite, microscopic pockets?

Perception plays tricks, some things aren't believed to have been seen or we just don't notice them.  How handy it would be to have an organic camera on board, we would be better witnesses for civilization than any traffic stop monitor.  But of course as with anybody's anything, there are always glitches and missing pieces that could still omit recording significant information.  No two people would see the same event exactly, just as fingerprints differ.

I have been reading overmuch lately; by nightfall, my eyes long to shut against the black squiggles on white paper.  They gratefully close in the dark, while the brain continues shuffling the deck of memory until the the cerebral cupboard door battens the hatches even while the cards still lay on the table.  Sleep is peaceful, perhaps the only time when.  Winter nights, early evenings, good, still night.

Butter

Is it coincidence that the word "butt" hides in the underbrush at the beginning of the word, considering that is just what we worry about if a smidge of fat lies upon our toast and don't eat too much of that anyways, carbs, y'know?  When did a piece of toast become contraband?  And honest to cod's swallop, there are times when I Like Plain White Bread Without Any Frickin' Fiber in it.  I get enough fiber through incidental ingestion from all the cat hair around here as it is, and could possibly yak up a hairball myself.

Thick white toast, buttered; thin Italian white with sesame seeds, toasted crisp and buttered; sandwich white bread toasted, allowed to cool and then buttered but the butter stays on top of the surface and therefore the toast is crisper on the outside, fluffy in it's inner core.  Butter it when hot, and it can turn soggy which is okay, too, especially with eggs.  If you want a small, simple treat, this is what you do with toast, whether is is at breakfast or part of an orchestrated sandwich: butter it right to the corners.  That's all.  Take the knife and glide right into each corner making sure you get it in there.  It will make such a difference for whatever else happens that day, you will remember that you took the extra minute to reveal a secret unknown to most of the cooking world, this thorough buttering.  It makes a difference whether sandwich or toast, I promise you will notice it.

I can't tell you the last time I had toast, the guilt at eating bread makes me shudder amid the other errors of the day.  And buttering anything has to have a hard copy signed affidavit of due causa.  Yet my mother fried everything in butter, slathered it on sandwiches before the mayonnaise, and used it as a salve when I burned myself which is genuine useless folklore.  The slab was never refrigerated neither summer nor winter but slept inside a Tupperware rectangle of translucent white plastic on the counter.  We all lived, and the ones who didn't expired not as a result of bacterial poisoning but of other, more medical causes.  I didn't know butter was usually refrigerated until I was married.

The quarters of butter reside in the special butter compartment of the current refrigerator, if softening is required the microwave newfangles it so.  I use it rarely except as an adjunct to the olive oil, for sometimes a buttery waft of creamery essence lifts the sauteed whatever into a song of happy.  When I bake, it is the only fat used: margarine is a Frankesteinian monster composed of oils, hexane, hydrogen gas, and a final bleaching to rid the product of a dank, greyish cast.  I remember that the margarine we got from the dairy truck came with a tablet of bright orangey coloring to be mixed in so it wasn't so scary.  It ranked right next to Starlac, that economical dried milk of the fifties pushed on modern housewives as a stand-in for fresh, wholesome milk.  Any kid will tell you what that stuff tastes like.

A bowl of popcorn tastes as exciting as church without the golden unctuousness of butter.  I use an air popper, dump the popped kernels into a large bowl and pour a melted half stick of butter in a thin drizzle so that I hit as much of it as I can.  Then you add salt, I use Morton's since reading that because of the sea salt craze, iodine deficiencies are showing again.  Now, laugh away, but I eat it with a spoon like you would cereal; since becoming a computer kid, I like fingers to be clean for the keyboard's sake and therefore like being able to switch back and forth between the two, without washing hands every three minutes.  Not having a television, I watch stuff online, so the laptop becomes my entertainment center while I fuel my inner child with popcorn.  I also use chopsticks to eat potato chips for the same reason.

Butter in a pan will give a grilled cheese a lovely crust, or frizzle the edges of small pancakes into a lacy chewiness amplified by the delicate measure of maple syrup on top.  Rich in vitamin A, butter provides zinc, copper, manganese, and more selenium per gram than wheat germ or herring; the fatty acids in butter assist brain function, skin health, and support the immune system.  So butter that bread, it's good for you; your brain, which basically runs on fat and sugar, will thank you.

The moon was spectacularly bright last evening, all shined up in luminous silver.  It hung in the early morning sky during the commute to work, still alert, a cold blaze of radiance in the ever-lightening blue dawn.  I saw oceans underneath pulled into lunar tides, ropes hauled, nets gathered, and centuries of people walking the dirt of earth; they were toiling, hammering metal, beating the odds just as you and I do each day when we wake and resonate, moving through life.  Waves of torsos, from Ichabods to Utnapishtims, rise and fall through the conundrum of time, coming round again in proof of faith towards eternity.  A little butter can't hurt.  Good night, sleep and dream.

The Lizards, The Coal Age and Us

If you have ever owned a reptile or walked through the snake snake house at the zoo, you were probably amazed by how much odor blossoms from a lizard cage.  These things smell worse than the big cat house to me, but maybe that's because I live with five miniature puddings who are forgiven everything, even though at this point everyone is fastidious.  Would a lion use a litter box?  This is another essay at a later date after further research.  But the lizards, yikes.

Now, multiply that little green bean lizard by a few tons, and put it in a heated, steamy environment and you have a dinosaur.  Other than schmancy CGI and the skeletons remaining, we truly have no idea how these things walked, stomped, were colored, barked, behaved, or responded to dinosaur-sized crickets and mealworms.  Or smelled.  How did the world smell, in light of one brachiosaurus being tall as a four-story building and as long as two school buses, plus the whole herd just sauntered through your fern and gingko yard?  This was the Age of Reptiles, lasting for hundreds of millions of years (like my student loan), and even in the open air, you had to notice the aroma like when you go play cards at Aunt Myrna's house.

Now, plant-based digestion smells better than carnivore or omnivore, so maybe to country gal me who grew up surrounded by dairy farms, it wouldn't be like walking into a wall of solid air.  The trouble is, however, you have your T. rex, cousin Allosaurus, the giant flying seagull Pteranodons, and the smaller Deinonychus, all meat eaters.  In droves.  You tell me about the air, including the gas, the methane swamps, and the output of these giant galoots.  It was just a thought, as interesting to me as my hypothesis that maybe some of the dinosaurs could change colors, like chameleons.  I would love to go back there for a day, in an armored helicopter fitted with grenade launchers or at least a taser gun, just in case.

But let's move on from the natural into the beginning auspices of man as he tried to change the environment to support his family.  There were still the immense animals; ground sloths big as elephants, Baluchitherium, the hornless, eighteen foot high precursor to our rhinoceros, and herds of wooly mammoths.  Not so damp or warm, so maybe the aroma was tamed down a bit.  Once we ate everything and started building cities, industry became the progenitor of how things smelled.  Think of it, medieval aromas ranging from leftover food tossed to the castle floor for the dogs to harry, to the walls of the castle (people used to hang their bottoms out of windows for business) leading down into the moat.  People themselves didn't bathe as it was a symptom of debauchery, they instead carried pomanders and perfumed hankies.  Around the time of the French Revolution, the fashionable white skin was achieved through arsenic and mercury-based makeup; the resulting rot took one out of the social circles pretty fast, even in candlelight.  Let's jump up to the Industrial Revolution.

What did they smell like, these cities belching coal-based smoke, chamber pots still dumped out of windows onto streets?  You pretty much wore the same thing everyday until it was able to stand up on its own, and then soap was used, not for washing people, but for clothing.  But what about the shops, now that serfdom was over and a working paycheck was coming in? People had money to spend.  Candleshops, bakeries, confectionaires, shops for roast meats, smithies, grain mills, perfumeries, gardens; more pleasant smells outshone the rank business of disposal.

We live in the most hygienic time ever, at least in this country.  Microbes have been recognized and are held at arm's length, garbage is contained (except don't get me going on what we are doing to the ocean with our disposal techniques), and sewers have city departments.  We shower several times a week if not in a day, and eliminate as much of our natural smell as possible, and I say thank heavens.  There is still pollution, still toxic industry, still a reptile house at the zoo that will knock you over with one whiff, but you can't expect otherwise with animals.

Some of my most favorite smells come from times past, like when I would bury my face in my grandmother's taffeta skirt when I was three.  She smelled cool, like a garden of roses after rain.   The dry paper smell of the library up in my aunt's attic, found in a house built in the century before; the wooden smell of bannisters and stairs polished with wax in her foyer.  Strawberries picked in the sun and strung on stems of foxtail grass, or in winter, the smell of snow enhanced by the wafting aromas of each house making dinner as I would walk down the street to my own house.  Heavier smells such as the creel that held fish caught in the lake, or the grease that hangs in the air at a roadside hamburger joint, fish fry on Friday.  Try out a dog's neck, a cat's fur, a baby's skin.  A box of crayons or lumberyard.  Biscuits coming out of the oven.  My Mom's Chanel No. 22 (which isn't made anymore), the long hall at the science museum, the wooden trunk holding blankets.  Earth. Water. Sky. Fire.

The sun is lowering even now in late afternoon, the winds are still, the buildings around me are catching the last rays of sunlight and will go from this gold to orange to pink and rose and finally deep lavender until all is dark and the lights go on.  A quiet day, a soup for dinner day.  Sleep well, sleep well.  Goodnight.

Shoes and Books

The past two Saturdays, I have found my way to the Central Library in the downtown of this city.  The emptiness of the streets on a weekend sends hollow, haunted messages through the grey cement corridors that once thronged with life: storefront signs that blinkered in sequence, rococo movie theaters, department stores ponderous as a city block, with tony restaurants squeezed into narrow slots between the larger buildings.  All I saw at that time were pants legs or nyloned calves at my five year old height, while gripping Mom's hand so as not to be washed away by the current of human electricity. The sidewalks were packed with people.  No one wore sneakers for going out, everyone had leather shoes which resulted in a flurry of staccato slap slaps of soles and heels on pavement.  Not a sound you hear these days, it was like rain on a roof, an audience applauding.  Slap slap slap.  They were on their way, and in a hurry to arrive.

There is little to do downtown, only a few stores remain, most of the properties have been converted to office space.  What else could be done, for not only has this place lost half of the population to suburbs, but there is now a little used subway line that tore up the middle of Main Street, eliminating cars, storefront access, and pedestrian foot traffic.  Owners of once burgeoning businesses tried to hang on, but the pedantic politicians of the day did nothing to shore up a dying city economy.  Malls took over, and we lost the sounds and visions of urban commerce.  I won't walk to the library, it has become too deserted a journey for safety's sake on a lonely weekend.

However, when the door to the library is pushed open, it seems as if the world has found its refuge for it is packed with life, living and literature.  I hadn't been here for over three years, and found the trend towards modernity thriving at the hundred computer stations filled with students, writers, perusers, street people reading to stay warm, children, and me.  It still smells like a library in spite of the hum of bodies or the newer sound of keyboard clacks.  Changes: people aren't as quiet as they used to be, children are running, and conversations are at street level sound.  Entries into the paper indexed card catalog ended in 1998, everything else is on the computer.  You want to do research, you enter your library card identification and a PIN.  Many of the older books I went to in the last century have been discarded, and the next slew reflects the social novelties of this one.  You can check your own books by scanning them over a UPC reader.  What made me happiest was that the library was busy, packed; I wondered if these people would love to be able to grab a bite, shop, or be entertained here, in the city, downtown.

The book I wanted was located in the closed stacks as it was published in 1924, aging had yellowed and dried out the paper.  The pages creaked in the book's spine in spite of tender handling, and small crumbs of pages fluttered like dollhouse snowflakes from the rough-trimmed signatures.  It was an astonishing book to hold; cloth bound, title and author stamped into the front cover, and comfortably not over large.  The topic was not as interesting as hoped, the author embellished in ooey-gooey proclamation the determination shown by her family, plus other autocratic blather.  I enjoyed the physical experience more than the content; I confess, it was a brief fling hatched by curiosity. You've been there.

Get thee to a library, you'll see people from all stratifications reading books and therefore not one of them remains the person they were a second ago.  None of us do, even sitting, but reading accelerates growth, reflection doubles it, then acting on the results goes somewhere into the tenth power of who you are, rippling in and out of clarity and further giving you something to think about while standing over that sink of dishes.

Oh, a bedtime story.  A book lain under a pillow.  Ink on paper that pulls our hearts and minds elsewhere through investigation of fiction or fact, well, it's my favorite thing to do before shutting out the last light, traveling in rhythmic slide to quieter pools and depths of consciousness.  Nets pull in dream fish, waters ripple through memory.  Sleep well, sleep knowing that the story will all turn out alright.

Squirrelopolis

This year, windows line one wall from top to bottom of my assigned classroom, allowing a view of a paved walk and grass and trees and rose garden beyond.  At the end of the drive is an immense bulwark of an oak, whose acorns feed and fill the bank accounts of the grey squirrels residing in this part the city.  What happens is that the pavement has become a squirrel runway, with busyness of paws running back and forth, gathering food for winter; this high-tailed operation goes right past my third grade.

You couldn't tell, and I still can't, if there were six squirrels or only one industrious agitation toodling along the windowed way in that curious undulation that makes them look less like rats.  They could care less about being watched, the audience was subpar by squirrel standards, a nonentity of legs from a gathering nuts point of view which originated at the base of the glassed wall.  That is, until I changed the equation by adding a variable.  Enter the store-bought, English walnut, in shell.

I had purchased a bag of walnuts for an activity, until I realized that most of the gluing could only be accomplished with a hot glue gun meaning that I would be the one putting these walnut-bodied turkeys together myself, and where's the fun in that?  Makes no sense, times twenty-five.  So this bag of nuts stayed in the drawer, supplementing my apple for lunch with one or two, smashed open with the heavier business end of a stapler.  I love nuts of all kinds, but a fresh walnut has history that goes back to the Druids.  I get all Stonehedgey when cracking them, so watch it.  Filberts put me in a Hansel and Gretel European fairy tale, and pecans bring up Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" and I am his elderly cousin, dragging young Truman to the woods to gather papershelled pecans for the annual fruitcake bake off.

I miss the small, Turkish pistachios I grew up with, their flavor far, far superior to the fat, bland bastards  now grown in California.  But any pistachio in a storm, y'know.  You have the dichotomous spectrum of the push-you-towards-insanity cracking necessary to open a black walnut, contrasted with the delicate operation of getting through a hickory nut without pulverizing the nutmeat into a paste imbedded with sharp shards of shell.  A croquet mallet works best, and you get the hang of a just right Wham.

Cashews, brazil nuts, and almonds each have a story; this is my Brazil nut tale: when I was a kid, I was enamored of magic but not dexterous enough for sleight of hand, so I investigated magic tricks dependent upon stage props.  A solitary book existed at the local library, seemingly aimed at boys and dreamed up by a sodden this'll-work-if-you-practice sadist.  The trick?  Take a bite out of a burning candle, amaze your audience.  Whoa, if I accomplished this bit of chicanery, I would be well on my way to becoming a Master of the Occult.  Let's get going!

The directions were to first carve a banana into the shape of a candle; never mind that the thing was slippery as hell, glistened with banana oog, and would turn brown before the end of the trick, thus becoming The Amazing Color-Change Smell You Candle.  Okay, I got that part, I am pretty quick with my hands at doing finicky stuff.  The next instruction, printed on real paper with ink in a real book, said to get a Brazil nut, shave off the brown skin, and carve it into the shape of a wick.  The young student was to insert this piece of disguised nut into one end of the candle banana, and Light The Damn Thing with real fire.  This would work, according to the dipsomaniac author, because a Brazil nut contains enough oil to stay lit just long enough for the poor young sap trying this mess to freaking Bite the Lit End Off and swallow.  I am guessing that the publishing house had this Fun To Do Magic For Boys book edited by a German.

There was a drawing of a boy in a cape and top hat, flourishing the Ha! You Thought This Was a Real Candle in one outstretched hand while the other arm gestured mysteriously, but less so than a real Druid. I lit the Brazil nut.  It went out.  I relit the Brazil nut.  It went out.  Apparently I had a dud nut with little oil left.  I had formed more than one nut wick in case of interruption or singular failure, and replaced the toasted one with a fresh load.  By this time the odor of burnt nut with smoke was swirling downwards from my room into the rest of the house.  I heard my father bark, "Dorothy, whaddaya burnin' out there?" yet I went ahead, it was now or never, the preparation of carving fruit and nuts was not going quietly into the desolate Saturday afternoon.  The second wick flamed, blackened, and died.  The banana flopped over, broken in two from less than magical handling, and the end of the hot nut wick hit my hand.  Yeeowch.  What the hell was I thinking?  I looked at the china plate now holding an unattractive fruit salad, and thought, who the hell would tell a kid to bite a lit banana?  Mom knew me well, I heard her footsteps coming up the stairs.  I told her it was a science experiment, she told me to take the matches outside before the house caught fire.

In all fairness, there was a warning in the book.  Bite the banana quickly, closing the mouth to cut off oxygen to the flame; this must be done correctly or you may burn yourself; this trick has been accomplished many times onstage using the Oriental Breathing Technique (not inhaling while closing your mouth so you don't set your tonsils or esophagus on fire).  There was a cutaway diagram of a boy's mouth, showing position of the tongue and the broken off, extinguished but still smoldering Brazil nut inside.  Amaze your friends with your stupidity, and you will provide them with plenty of story material.  Being brought up by Depression parents, I ate the remains of fruit and burnt nut, and had one of my first revelations that even a book from the sanctified library can be concocted by fools.  But remember, this was the era when a sample of real uranium was included in Geiger counter play sets.  For Boys.  It's a wonder we had any boys left after the fifties.

It was this shared love of nuts which began my leaving a walnut out to see if the squirrel would be interested.  I wanted the audience to appreciate caring for our wild friends.  They thought it was a hoot, and warned me about rabies.  But each day, we now have a squirrel visitor coming up to the window and looking in, paws on sill, nose to glass.  He waits for a walnut, the emblem of squirrel riches.  The group watches the ritual of him turning the nut round and round until the right grip is found to carry it off in its mouth; taking a new interest in squirrels, they wish to name it.  I stress that it is still a wild animal, regardless of cute and little, and would rip their noses off if it thought a pine nut was up in their sinus cavities.  But I like their caring, their curiosity, and their new found interest in this urban science project.  I have to buy walnuts this weekend.

The snowstorm that wasn't has passed by, granting the critters that struggle to live outside a reprieve.  How hard must it be to find enough food to keep a metabolism going that maintains body temperature,  we wouldn't last a whole day outside in our skins.  The animals that stay have their tricks, including semi-hibernation for smaller mammals, or restricting blood flow so that tiny bird legs don't freeze.
They may sleep in bundles during the coldest weather, piles of squirrel entwined in a leaf nest that they won't leave for days, but dispersing once the siege is over.

Sleep squirrel, and remember where you buried your store for the dark days of winter.  I stir my soup, saving some aside for future suppers: squash, mushroom, cauliflower, beef barley, chicken rivel.  It is good knowing there is something put away for a thoughtful, cold day.  Sleep deep, relax into the old rhythms before centuries were ever thought of, dream of life going on, time non-existent.  Good night.

Animal Trickology

I have a pair of clown loaches acquired when the tank was overrun with snails from store-bought waterplants.  A clown loach is a Snail Destructo machine and will scoop the edible part out with the barbs surrounding its mouth, leaving an empty shell behind.  You may have seen them, they are black and yellow striped with red fins and you can also find them on ice in the Asian fish market in much larger, edible sizes. The nature of a clown loach is to play fishy games with each other, chase, bobble, chase, scoot under the other and the game that fools the tank owner, Play Dead.

These fish play dead so convincingly; they lay on their sides on the bottom, unmoving.  Fins up, like a cartoon fish kicking the bucket.  Today one let itself be sucked to the grate of the filter and became stuck there, debris-like and stiff. It was alarming, but I steeled my nerves and waited for the nonchalant thing to remember that fish swim, and therefore continue regular fish life.  This is the Clown loach pledge, that it is not a successful day unless a dose of rigor mortis to unnerve the human has occurred.  If I myself flopped onto the floor in front of the tank feigning expiration, they would not care a dillywag, it's not their nature to be emotionally involved with other species.  The cats would come investigate, however, find that I am still warm, and curl up on top till they thought of dinner.

I can't imagine living without animals in the house, even the Look I'm Dead fish now trailing each other top to bottom in the tank.  There is a nippy angelfish, two cory cats, and the plecostomus who has grown larger than a smallmouth bass with double the temper.  He hates when the tank gets vacuumed, and tries to wham the plastic end of the hose right outta the ballpark.  I let him win, it's good for his psyche.  Other times he will allow rubs on his sides or nose, but mostly he looks at the world through an antediluvian lens, maybe hoping that the annoying loaches would stay permanently dead, not fake dead.  None of my fish like each other, similar to most of the cats who care less for the next cat than a punch in the nose.

None of them sleep together, wash each other or share me very well.  It is a melody of neurotica, and I am the bandleader.  Everyone has their little spot, whatever territories there are have strong boundaries designated right down to the time of day.  I originally got the fish tank so the cats would have something to watch, the tuna channel, but they grew bored very fast.  Who wants to watch fish that aren't moving because they think they are dead?  I could have pasted a picture of a sardine to the wall for the same effect at a better price of upkeep.

The days are warmer than usual for late November, the Christmas lights hang sodden in the rain over wet brown lawns.  I hope the jerk downstairs loses interest in hearing himself, the man has a microphone attached to some sort of electronic abomination which broadcasts his angry f-ing game no way this f-ing game f! at 2 AM.  I wish he'd play dead.  As a person who owns many cats, I am careful about complaining about what to who in this place and so far I manage to get back to sleep.  I can only hope his vocabulary expands beyond single syllables.

It has been nighttime for a while, the sun sets low towards the southeast these beginning winter days, and dark covers all those activities you wouldn't think about doing twice at 8 in the summer.  Time to hit the hay, let the dreams come and wash free the questions of why.  Cats curl or roll paws up, fish settle under the submerged knotted branches, plants close leaves, I lock doors and shut windows.  Sleep, dream, wish, create, do.  With love.

Rust Belt Bookstore

Walk in the door at Rust Belt, and you step into a teetering world of books stacked, shelved, tucked, loaded, and piled high as a cocker spaniel.  The atmosphere is dark and arty, the books are papery and plenty; there is lots to look at and search for.  Wear comfortable clothes, you'll be bending sideways to read titles filling the half-lit walls, in the murkier corners of the castle bulwarks.  Books here climb into your lap or perch on a shoulder, waiting for adoption or at least a nod of recognition.  It is a sort of separate world you enter when visiting.

I found two to come home with me, but even then I was in no hurry to leave and poked at the titles from all over the city, discarded editions favored by people with ideas.  It is a nice little bookstore in the heart of Allentown, with a knowledgeable proprietress, errant lamps for illumination, and artistic commentary that lets you know that this is not the mall.  You will be happily amazed at the number and depth of books, certainly rival to any shiny bookshop that fronts popular text.

A book can be a bandage for disillusion, a place to lose yourself until you look up from the page and remember.  Books took me far and away from the whirligig mechanisms of feckless edicts broadcast night, day, and twice on Sunday.  They still do, they still are the heavy, warm pages of paper and board with stories put forward by authors who want to share what they know with you and me.

No electronic device will ever replace the affectionate relationship we tactile humans have with genuine books.  Picture an image of a child taking an electronic notebook to bed, then compare it with that child taking a real book to read under covers.  I dunno, maybe it's a sentimental idea; I just wonder about the day that the electricity goes off, from say a blizzard, a hurricane, or like that outage which took out the Eastern seaboard grid in 2003, due to aging equipment.

I shall read tonight, after this entry and dishes done.  A soup is on the stove for a light supper, the rest of the cookies were baked, and animals fed.  Tomorrow is to be a busy day, but there will be an arrest of the clock's hands when I open the page to read thoughts of echoes, from people in another age.  Hear, and attend, and listen O Best Beloved.  Good night.

Et Alors, Babelfish

There is a reissue of Buster Keaton's silent feature, The General, that has been redone by a notable French company with an orchestral score composed by Joe Hisaishi.  It was cleaned frame by frame, eliminating the years of damage often overlooked by earlier outfits simply because the technology was not available.  In addition, the popular Hisaishi, who did the work for the Japanese animation, Spirited Away, has created a piece sure to dramatize and burnish Keaton's remarkable achievement in a distinct, complimentary glow.  The edition I now own plays "Teddy Bear's Picnic" during the scene in which Keaton climbs nimbly onto the cowcatcher of the moving train, in order to knock a loose rail off the track by hoisting another and smashing it down in a quick physics lesson of force and fulcrum.  Teddy Bear's Picnic, for heaven's sake.

Well, go to Amazon online, the seller of anything you think you might need.  The dvd is not available in the US, but Amazon UK or Amazon FR carry it, as well as some independent sellers using the Amazon storefront.  Whee!  I sign up and push buttons until a message appears, saying that there is a problem with my address in that neither entity wishes to ship this far out.  Now, I have ordered seashells from small dealers in China and gotten them safely within the month, (You lucky fine, come back, buy more), so what is the problem especially when it is as big a pickle jar as Amazon?  Is this not a global economy?  Mildly frustrated, I rise to the challenge.

The French title is Le Mecano de la General and I find a tidy website that lists a Collector's Edition as well as the usual.  The problem is, I don't speak a lick of French other than food names from cookbooks or Canadian road signs.  How do I convert to Euros, will they send it out over the ocean, do I know anybody in France?  What I do is go to Altavista's Babelfish, a translator of communication from one language to the next, and concoct a short message in simple American, push it through a French strainer, copy and paste it into their email link.  If anything, I learn that I know less about the language than I thought, for consonants get tacked onto the word in front sometimes, or words get mooshed together, letters get unpronounced.  I imagine somewhere in France a media store le clerk is wondering what on earth does this woman think she's going to get?  But, a missive came back this evening.

"He IS USELESS D' Y TO ANSWER, Did you consult our Fair with the questions? The answer s' there surely finds. Consult it while clicking on the following bond.  You know our service "Clara"?"  Well, yes.  Clara is a friendly looking virtual girl, who is available 24 hours a day to answer website questions.  In French.  I may go bother her tomorrow, after I arm myself with prepared phrases from Babelfish since getting this particular dvd has become a Quest, a mosquito bite intensifying the want, lurking just out of reach when all that is needed are the right words that will get a Gallic hand to slip it into a slim cardboard box and toss it in the mail.  My god, we get cheese from France, how can a movie be more problematic?  In addition, my dvd player is region-free, so I can run movies from Tibet if there were any.  

It is now 2 o'clock Saturday morning in France.  Deep in the French dark, a dvd is sitting next to a display of chocolat and stationnaire d'une manière amusante for All Occasions.  This dvd feels a slight pull from the West, a psychic kinesis creating a portal to American terra firma, a hypnotic whisper in a now sleeping employee's ear that sharing genius is important, necessary, and merciful.  Dream of me, Le Mecano de la General, as I dream of trains and bridges, of clarity defined by stringed instruments, of dedicated film preservationists.

Night is here as well as there, we are six hours before whatever is going on in the dark of France, a time traveling force of nature.  We could fly into the next day, and if the speed of light were achievable, into  years past simply as nonparticipating observers.  Travel ahead of the beam that left yesterday to a point in space it has not yet arrived at and fine-tune your telescopes to see it rehappen; get far enough out and theoretically, you could see dinosaurs, Vikings, or who ate the last piece of cake you were saving in the fridge.  A silent film presented by the cosmos, a memory of vision held in light from centuries ago.  I wish you success in your small victories.  Le sommeil profondément, dorment coffre-fort.  Alors.

And How Was Your Day?

After arriving in the parking lot at 7:45 this drizzly morning, I made sure the fan and heater knobs were turned off all the way in the car before getting out, remembering the one car owned by my son whose battery would drain if the heater was left in any position except off.   I do not want this to happen to me, and because cockeyed things do drop from the sky, it's all around better to be safe than sorry.  As I opened the door to the car to disembark, I noticed that the radio stayed on.  Now, with this model car, the radio does stay on until you open the door unless things are frozen up and then sometimes you have to manually turn it off, but only in the most Arctic of weathers.  Ah, just a fritz, especially since yesterday I put in the semi-annual brake fluid, a twice a year ritual that occurs when a sharp temperature change occurs, which did yesterday.  No big deal, and I flick the radio off with a finger.

Go into work, blah blah blah, sit down, leave him alone, synonyms, how is it that your pencil has broken again, line up, dismiss, come back in, correct papers and geez, everyone else has gone, I should too.  3:15 in the afternoon.  Where the hell are my keys?  Neither purse nor pocket confess, so with hope they are probably in the car.  I get the emergency-backup keys out of my purse, go out to the lot and there is a car that looks like mine, but I know it isn't mine because it is running.  Ah, someone with a car starter has their engine going but in this parking lot this neighborhood, not always the best of ideas.  I turn to go to my own car, and it isn't there.  What?  What the hell, someone stole my car goddamit.  I must have really left the keys in there and someone helped themselves to the opportunity.

The parking lot cameras record me scooting around a few cars further down, looking for a car that looks like the car that is running but isn't.  Many cars look like mine, and one or two are often at this lot.  Wow, the day before a holiday when you think of giving thanks, some jerk stole my car.  I need to call the police.

But wait, I know me, this is why I made a set of extra keys for when I lock myself out of things.  I should take a closer look at that car and see if the driver's side door is a different color, before running in to building security.  Well slap my biscuits, it was.  Imagine my surprise when the dawn cracked over the old cerebellum, and ran down in drips of stunned.  It was my car, running.  I left the unholy keys in the ignition that morning, on, and it hummed away merrily for 7 1/2 hours of loitering.  The mileage was really good, for there was a quarter of a tank left, plenty to drive to the gas station in a half-baked state of unbelief.

Because the sun was lower in the sky, the license plate was obscured.  Because I am still amazed that I have a car that looks this new if you don't look at the driver's side black door or the dent, it didn't register as my car immediately.  Besides, my car shouldn't be running.  What the hell.  After self-flagellation, there was a flood of relief that the thing didn't overheat, start on fire, explode, or, get stolen.

In years past, the people who work where I work had a close relationship with the security guards of the attached building, and everyone knew everyone else and their kids.  How did no one notice that there was a car idling for seven and one half hours in a public lot?  Apparently, Al Qaida could move in and set up a meth lab by those standards.

But that is a mild adventure with a happy ending.  What floors me is my lack of recognition of things, the doubt that arises as to what is really mine; I can look straight at something I have owned for forty years, and if it is put into a different context, the brain opens the floodgates of doubt and are you sure this is yours?  Objects become alien, unrecognized, uncertain.  Photographs and people, no problem; but a unsentient thing loses whatever familiarity and conviction that existed in surety just minutes before.  I have had this problem since being a somewhat jumpy child.  I think this has to do with all the yelling my father did, this self-doubt as to if things were the way I perceived them to be.

The car was the model, color, and left in the area of the lot where I park, but it didn't register as mine simply because of the one differential of it running.  Couldn't be, couldn't be going for all day without someone noticing, but then I remember the radio staying on.  Oh.  If I hadn't turned the defroster fan off, that would have signaled that the engine was still engaged and chugging.  Well, tell you what, I'm over it and ready for the next adventure.  Forty dollars more worth of gas over it.

Sleep well, have your rituals and emergency-backup plans in place as a method of keeping some sort of order, of buying safety in packets of self-preservation.  I keep a flashlight near the bed, an extra toothbrush at work, and sundry keys are hidden around parts of this city in case of getting further locked out.  Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus hang in the south of the sky, points of light wheeling through centuries before engines or humans were ever thought of.  Neptune's winds are the fastest in the solar system, estimated at 2,000 miles per hour, determined by watching how quickly cloud formations change in the planet's blue atmosphere.  Clouds come and go, nothing ever stays the same, some things faster than those Neptunian breezes.  Circle the sun, attend the moon.  Sleep, drowsy child.

Damn Toof

I am a cuckoo clock, all that would be necessary is a small wooden bird to inhabit the again crevice, the gap, the cavern of my missing front tooth.  Nuisance is all that can be said; small potatoes in the real world, so many people have no teeth at all, but talking to colleagues is torture at the day job.  They try to avert their eyes from the tiny snaggle of dental stump; due to the root canal besides, there is a bright pink cement something frozen at the remaining point which punctuates the grey, daid tooth.  It looks like hell.  The irritated gum is gruesomely pulled back, and I am a cartoon thufferin' thuccotash, while trying not to hit people with spit as I talk.  Whee.  This does nothing for my looks, unless you go into negative numbers.

The cap felt funny yesterday morning as toothbrush bristles poked around with unfamiliar sensations.  No. No, no, no.  Not again. By nightfall, it was wiggling to and fro like a seesaw in a playground full of kids.  Not wanting to swallow it in the night while sleeping, I helped it the rest of the way and put it in a small plastic bag, tossing it into the purse.  I may try the Recapit again, even though that didn't work the last time.  I should get a box of Chiclets and stick one in there, a door of coated peppermint gum to swing open on the way to the glottis.

What other solutions are there when the dental office is closed on Mondays? I could draw a picture of a tooth and tape it in from the back, duct tape will stick to anything.  On this mockup will be space for advertising, a cheerful proverb, or a "Try Again Later" saying like that of a Magic Eight Ball.  When people, especially children, start mewling about needs and desires, my grin will transmit that exact thought.  Try Again Later.  Not Likely.  Outlook Dismal.  Get Busy.

Ah well, back to the dentist tomorrow, with hope.  This is Thanksgiving week, and relatives will be met Thursday by a full set of choppers so they can see I am doing fine and have most of my marbles.  Cousin  Susie with a missing front tooth will underscore their suspicions that the last immigration of invasive genetics from Europe to the New World are taking over and sprouting branches with monkeys, they were just sort of hidden until now.

Nighttime has come in and sat down in a thump as it does during the end of year.  You look up and all of a sudden it's dark, for heaven's sake, you were just peeling carrots or reading and whomp, hit over the head with midnight at four thirty.  Well it slows you down, which is good.  Jammies go on earlier, cups put away in the cupboard sooner, you're not running around the yard or down the street, maybe a board game is a good idea.  Make something, fold something, tell a story something.  Reach down into memory for a fable of learning or fun and think about when.  Sleep well, take some words with you, spin them as you fall.  Good night.

Mushroom Life

You just have to squirt the thing with spring water two or three times a day, the bulk of the work has been completed by the vendor.  I am referring to the block of popcorn-like cellulose that now resides on a kitchen counter within a vinyl tub impregnated with shiitake mushroom spawn, in existence for the past two weeks.  Growing things to eat is in my genetic code, probably received from my grandfather who grew stuff from pits, bulbs, twigs, spurs, and seeds.  His backyard was inhabited by fruit trees and an arbor for grapes; his basement, a sodden hole under the house with wooden steps, held trays of pine seedlings started from cones.  He loved to show what he could do with nothing.  Me, too, which is why plain pencil and paper are two of my solaces in life.

It was a surprise to see this immense, white, rice-cakey cube about as big as an ambitious loaf of bread within the plastic bag, Lentinus edodes tagged on the outside.  Put it in the fridge for three to five days, said the booklet, then soak in spring water for two hours; drain and wait.  A plastic bag roofed over held in humidity, which needed to be kept at 85%.  Two days later, small brown nodes pushed out and hurrah, I was a mother!  They expanded rather slowly, I thought, for a mushroom, yet grew to edible size in five days.  Fungi that grow on wood go at a more leisurely speed than soil-based fruiting bodies, which can appear and disappear in a day.  My first harvest went to soup, blended with some store bought Agarics for a meal both delightful and faintly proud, considering my success.

The block is now going into a brief dormant stage, but can be revived for 3 to 4 more flushes of mushrooms, and this will be the tricky part if I can get the thing going again.  Really, it is cheaper to go buy fresh shiitake at the grocery, but not half as much fun.  The cats are absolutely not interested, so the mushroomery is safe, unlike many of the houseplants arranged by cat menu desirability.  The ones they don't eat are barriers to the pots containing the ones doomed to fangmarks and missing leaves, punctuated by a short barrel cactus at the front, my security guard against hooligans.

Mushroom research shows that they are exceptionally good for the immune system, and so I try to include them at least once a week in meals.  We didn't eat many growing up, but the mystique was promoted by the Polish-Russian side of the family, who would go and gather Suillus luteus, the Slippery Jacks found under larch trees.  They have a wonderful, woodsy-pine scent about them, unlike any mushroom found at the store.  Peel the slimey caps, string them and hang near the stove to dry.  What else was there?  I went to mycology courses to find out, and now have about ten different species that I feel safe enough about to eat, plus a pantheon of names for the ones you can't.

Please don't mess with wild mushrooms, even to pick up to look at, unless you are scrupulous about washing hands and keeping track of whatever the thing touched, some are that deadly and grow in your yard. Anything pure white with a cap and stem is most likely to kill you in spite of its beautiful nature and flavor; the Death Angel, Amanitas verna and virosa, bisporigera, and phalloides.  

The grocery today was burgeoning with food, shouting prices out of advertising placards as if they were doing you a favor letting you shop these unbelievable savings.  Doing the math, you end up spending more for these alleged deals than if you purchased elsewhere.  Buy one get one bacon, for example, how on earth did bacon ever get up to $6.99 a package to begin with, so are you really saving anything here when the store up the road is saner in offering bacon straightforward at $3.00 a package?  The cost of food is soaring, no wonder people look to raise their own chickens, grow their own vegetables, or order mushroom kits from Oregon.

Sleep inside a story of your heartfelt longings tonight.  Goodnight.

November Ennui

 I cry for the dead, the missing, the lost, and those with illnesses so unbearable I wonder how the person does not end up screaming in horror at walls or in a car with the windows rolled up.  How do we do it, this getting through life?  There has been so much loss these later years, I have witnessed two close friends be eaten alive by bits, and now another and now another.  They fall like pins in a terminal game, mowed down not by time but through erosion of flesh and sense.

Have you lived to old age?  There is no formula or mercy of the divine that allows life as we would like it to be; a slicing shadow cast by some astral gnomon, following a 360° circle of the sundial in a garden of fruit and flowering excess.  It is one day at a time and there is no dispensation; you get the suffering and tragedy with the tiniest bits of happy.  Are you happy all the time, for half a day, for two hours, for five minutes solid?  I would like to meet you.  

So sour, so focused on the negative, but lord god it is overwhelmingly common when compared to what joy rarely pops in.  I can tell you the dates when I was happy in the past year.  There was a period of three weeks that I don’t understand which occurred in the spring.  I was unscared, capable, and energetic.  I was happy on October 9, the day I started taking a beta blocker for high blood pressure: it was unreal to me, the calm, the warmth, the embraceable universe that lasted through to the next day before dissipating as my system regulated itself back into panic attack mode.  Another chemical breakthrough happened the day I first took a half dose of Budeprion, an offshoot of the antidepressant Wellbutrin; it was different than the beta blocker, not so warm fuzzy happy but humorous, playful, involved, speedy, you’re my new friend happy.  That disappeared and is gone, even as the dose was put at what is considered full.  I’m told it doesn’t do anything for panic, and to increase the beta blocker creates risks and very real nightmares, the ones where you are frightened to fall asleep because of the vivid, bloody scenes of walking over slippery mashed faces in mud furrows during war.  That was Paxil.  Yes, I am becoming a medicine cabinet.

Antidepressants are still not mentioned in company, polite or coarse, as if it is more a battleground of will than a chemical imbalance.  Cheer up, get over yourself.  People are more comfortable if you are a drunk.  Would you condemn a diabetic for not producing enough insulin?  Really, this is no different, we depressives drive, go through grocery lines and can button up our shirts neatly if not wistfully.  I had weaned myself off of Prozac two years ago, partially because it wasn’t doing anything but putting weight on me, plus the inner shame of needing a crutch even if it was a prescribed medicine that wasn’t a bottle of whiskey.  I imagine it was why so many family members became alcoholics.

I don’t need an antidepressant for a few months to get me through a period of blah, I need one everyday for the rest of my life, unless knocked unconscious by a passing two by four, and I am ashamed of it.  But in my view, disclosure is strength and you would be stunned to know who takes one in secret morning ritual anyway.   But what if my job finds out?  An angry individual seeking methods of sabotage?  Or the people who sort of like me but may be uneasy to know that I take a tablet that fine tunes dopamine, making me able to stand and breathe and walk out the door?  Gossip has no intent but self-promotion, and there are a few who would love to have this information to pull a Did You Know card out of their pocket.   Get over it, I tell myself, there will always be people who prefer plums to peaches, and more than a few insecure jerks abound.  I don’t mean you.  Smiley face emoticon inserted here.

You see, this goes back to the beginning of this page, the loss of friends and loved ones that I could trust with my life.  I’ve never had that many friends with periods of none to one; making friends has always been fraught with flashes of what do I say next, oh jesus I shouldn’t have said that, good lord panic freeze get me out of here lockjaw.  I write better than I speak, it comes way easier.

But I have been crying, too much.  The news delivered regarding my brother’s health issues two weeks ago broke something inside of me, and so now I have been spilling tears overmuch concerning aging, loved cats; my fricking crown that came off, the fact that I read the Sunday paper in fifteen minutes and it’s over, (I look forward to Prince Valiant in the funny papers), and that I haven’t made any art in months, years, waiting waiting for some inner permission and look, I’m almost sixty.  I could have been a somebody if only if only I wasn’t such a jerk myself.  Life. Is. Hell.

I am the Assistant, if you need help, I am there and will stay to the end.  I will bathe you, lift you to change tubes and pads, administer meds, and wipe you up.  Can I not assist me?  I am good at keeping going, putting one foot in front of the other even if it is robotic or unsure; but it accomplishes nothing great, no deeds, no insights, nothing but a love of the possibility of life, of the hope that there is happiness ahead, that I will someday have another October 9th.

Tears are falling now, for the music playing through the laptop is poignant, a piano rendition of Never Neverland by a gifted Vince Guaraldi who composed the scores for the Charlie Brown cartoons.  He’s dead, a heart attack in his forties, gone.  I have a place where dreams are born and time is never planned.  Cripes.  Wah.

Now this piece has been totally self-indulgent and I realize that, but this is My Journal and didn’t you know you were part of my self-therapy of working things out?  I have to stop crying at dust motes and cake crumbs (no, there isn’t any cake but I wish), and so writing gets it out there for reflection and honesty.  I have hand written journals from twenty, thirty years ago that I revisit for verification of blurry memory or just to read.  No letters of merit, but there sometimes is wonder at the amazing beauty of this world, physical, emotional, or innocent.

Early dark, Kai is at the open window breathing in night air of the cool, damp grass and fallen leaves.   A Sunday, there is a pot of soup on the stove made with We Have to Get Rid of Them Today Mushrooms from the grocery and chicken, enough for a week of meals.   Sleep will come to cleanse with tides and fathoms, waves and currents.  Restore, recharge, replenish.  Good night.

Toof

My "F"'s are thick, and there is now a hatchway for fresh air to enter and escape.  This has happened because the problem child of my upper incisors let go of the expensive crown last night, during night-night tooth brushing. There is now a gap punctuated by a dark grey fang-stump left from the root canal/capping that startles people when I open my mouth to speak.  It's appearance is that of a gruesome extrovert, the guy on the street crumpled against a brick wall at 4 a.m., the one with the personality of an auditor from the 1963 Internal Revenue Service rolled into one dental hooligan.

There is good in this event, as the pain that I thought might be continued infection has disappeared, as well as the cadaverous flavor exuded by whatever got caught inside the little bastard.  Putrescine: we all have it.  Yet however now painless, this open gateway to Tonsil City needed closure; after research online, I found the product touted as the miracle cement for temporary relief and not scaring children.  Recapit, printed out in slanty lettering emphasizing the speed with which remedy would occur.  Yay.  I love stuff that can be fixed myself.

Ate lunch, cleaned the fang, and noodled some of the glue gunk into the top of the cap, the inside of which is some sort of soft metal, and tried to insert the porcelain devil back into place but guess what.  My liberated gum line had advanced, relaxed, ordered a pina colada and resisted being put back into place like grandpa at the Legionnaire's Post hot lunch, thus preventing the errant crown from settling in nicely.  Oh ho no, this thing will go back in, sez I sez I.  Wiggling and pressing, I got it reasonably located with just a little too much overhang, but now, by using continued pressure from clamping down in the ferocious bite of determination, the thing seems to have migrated into domesticity.  Takes an hour for the cement to solidify, then, as the package says, You Can Eat.

I want this to work until I can call the dentist for an allegedly permanent conviction of this villain tooth, so all food will be pulverized, broken into tiny bits to be shoveled delicately into the left side of the cavern.  This artificial mastication eliminates any fancy display, for all the pureed food looks alike, and is deviated only by color, like cat food.  Guess what's red, guess what's brown, guess what this greeny stuff once was.  Meow.  Really, all the fancy crisscross squirts of designer sauce goes to hell when it comes down to the basic mechanics of eating.  Arugula?  Roquette?  Ten dollar a pound Belgian endive?  Put it through the processor and you have undefinable green smoosh sans the foofoo advertisement.  But hey, didn't I can applesauce this past fall? What a smart kid I am, preparing for the toothless days that were ahead.

This pain in the behind situation is small potatoes compared to the larger outlook of life.  I have a butternut squash in the oven, am roasting a knucklebone for making soup, and have a Shiitake mushroom kit to open and rev into production.  Little cat Min is having the problems of old age with hypoglycemia, which creates convulsions in her tiny frame: they are coming closer together after a half-year hiatus, and I know what that means.  Either a slow decline with palliative care, or an end brought quicker when they are too many too often.  She just had supper and so is well for the night.  It's when she forgets to eat that her blood sugar dips into dangerous low levels.  Oh Min, my last stray cat who found a home with us.

Tonight, I will sing a song of tenderness to my newly cemented tooth.  It is cockeyed, but not terribly so, and certainly passes into acceptable company unlike its inner, monstrous Mr. Hyde pointy barb.  Tonight is the evening of the time change backwards, and so tomorrow we luxuriate under covers for one unplanned extra hour that happens in the middle of the night, while our eyes are closed.  Time.  Pushed into 24 neat packets, orderly as a row of white teeth so that we can count birthdays and appointments.  What does it mean, this substratum?  Why 24 and how did an hour become 60?  Days grind, years fly.  Sleep well, tooth, sleep peacefully little cat, hover over us, winged seraphim,  and make us remember where we come from and why we do the things that we do.  Sleep well in innocence, you are.

Chaos

I have been addled for three weeks with a lousy root canal topped by a persistent sinus mess. As a result, I thought it was a good idea to go through the do-it-yourself cash out at the grocery store with a full basket of  items that included 10 for $10 large cans of diced tomatoes that could knock out a pony if swung in a sock.  There was another slew of 10 for 10 New England clam chowders, bulk walnuts, bags of on sale popcorn kernels, and a jumble of stuff that I needed right now with a shrink-wrapped rack of toilet paper on top.

If you have ever tried this, you of rational mind, you understand that there is no room on the talking counter for all of this, even though the female voice repeatedly tells you to "Put the item in the bag. Put the item in the bag. Put...".  I was goofy with sinus pressure, end of week decompression, and the joy of finding that this market still carries Campbell's clam chowder, and didn't want to wait for the too long lines at the too few cashiers event occurring around me.  Independent, I can do this, wait, what?

It became a balancing act.  Because I am not as good a bagger as any newly hired teen,  the checkout machine kept getting mad at me and yelled for the Helpful Cashier who watched over us.  She was very nice, and calmed the register down as my piles of groceries began to run out of room.  What could I do but stack the potatoes atop the cans of tomatoes which slid down crashing to the floor, causing the customers waiting their turn to silently groan.  I felt it, I felt the stares and clenched jawlines of the smart people behind me as they watched the dodo overload the cold steel of the robotic-voiced apparatus.  Helpful Cashier came over and said to just put the groceries in the cart, she could override the machine's mentality.  It ended mostly successfully, but altogether was a mishmosh of chaos culminating with a broken plastic bag of canned goods in the parking lot.

Today I talked to my brother.  His cancer has come back and metastasized, mostly in his pelvis so he cannot walk.  Last year, when the cancer was discovered in his thyroid,  the oncologist recommended radiation while the surgeon said it was unnecessary.  My brother went with the surgeon's advice and landed here.  John is six years younger than me and was the Real Boy that my father wished I had been.  This fall of incidence is a larger version of chaos compared to tumbling cans of goods in a grocery, for it is finite, and will take my brother beyond reach.  I am angry, despondent, and scrabbling for some semblance of order, and for christ's sake, how many have fallen like scuttering leaves over a lost and forlorn landscape?  How can I fit everything into a flimsy plastic bag, categorized by weight and shape?

Three of my close friends have been pulled unwilling from this earth in the past two years while the man who was my rotten, rotten father lived to be 85.  None of the three saw sixty, not one deserved the end that came.  My brother and I are not close, but we tolerate each other some and love each other more.  He is lucky to have a solid marriage, two beautiful girls, and if anything, has been more than a good father to them, considering the tumult of his own early life.

This will be a fitful night, snow has come to areas east of our city, it is snowing in Washington, D.C. where my son lives, melting as it hits the ground.  Let me melt, let me become water, fluid, running, seeking the crick, the stream, the river to ocean.  Let me blend with every living thing in a Mobius strip of infinite being, let me grow into a galactic spiral that spreads across years measured by traveling light, let me be the end of time, the stoppage of every tick of past, present, and future. Let night fall, let sleep come in the window, sandman show your wares.

Vegetables: Orange and White

Well it was a soup of desire, I had made a gastronomic pedestal of orange squash, carrots and coconut milk blended with an onion.  Sunset orange.  The carrots recently available at the farmer's stall this late autumn are the sturdy sort with flavor, not the shaped, bleached desperation that haunts manufactured bags of alleged "baby' carrots.  Feh.  No wonder they are served with dressing to dip, they taste like yesterday's socks.  As a kid, we never imagined dipping carrots in anything, you pulled one out of the ground, wiped off the dirt, and got back to work weeding the row.  I think the only thing I didn't eat out in the field was bugs.  

Mom used carrots to feed us between meals rather than apples, which were more expensive and saved for bag lunches.  You hungry?  Bread and butter with cinnamon sugar was sometimes offered, but more likely it was a slice of raw potato, celery stalk, or a carrot all of which lasted longer than a gussied up slice of bread.  Raw carrots were usually large specimens back then, so when I see what are called "horse carrots" at the market these modern days, I bring home a bunch or two to keep me company.

Right now is the turn for orange vegetables: any of the hard squashes, rutabagas, the newer orange cauliflower, carrots, and varieties of pumpkins.  It's easy to round out a supper with one or two, and they keep handily well in the refrigerator.  Mom would drag home a large blue-green Hubbard squash, storing it in the cellar until a roast of some sort was to happen.   Newspapers would be spread onto the cellar floor, and she'd drop the squash, hoping for a good size crack.  What didn't come apart was broken into pieces with a hammer. The woman could beat a squash till one of them was winded, then haul the chunk upstairs to be baked in the oven.

The other color of vegetable that is showing up is the creamy white of cauliflower, pale cabbage, parsnips, and Chippewa potatoes.  Don't be put off by the lack of color, reports are out that those folks who consume the white vegetables show less of an inclination for stroke.  Back in the last mid-century, housewives were advised to mix colors at mealtime, to jolly up the husband from whatever indignation and worry he faced at the workplace.  Having a meal of Wonder bread and butter, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, and boiled chicken was showing poor form; you could at least sprinkle parsley flakes on something, for heaven's sake.  My mom went through more dried parsley than Betty Crocker herself.  

Coming winter is touted as being a hard one, a few starchy vegetables and a squash put by will be welcome in an oven, for baking on a snowy day of short daylight.   Orange reminds us of the sun, of fire, or of a warm squash lava flow on china plates; a happy color, it is most used in advertising because this is so, just walk down a grocery aisle to see how much orange is out there.  The cool night air falls over the remaining fields of last gardens, vines are tangled and brown, stalks are cut and bundled, the harvest is ending.  Get out your slippers, Papa; your lap blanket, Mama.  Children find your flannels, dogs and cats nest in beds.  Cider, chestnuts, pumpkin pie.  Good night.

Exoskelton

This morning, the weather provided entertainment in the shape of hailstones slicing sideways through cold rain, pelting this earthling with atmospheric buckshot as I trotted to the car.  The precipitation shuddered in the wind, erupting in sudden waves of heavy intensity that soaked me by the time I got inside.  It wasn't raining when I got on the elevator to descend; at the ground floor it was furious with temper that abated just as quickly by the time I arrived at destination north of the city.  What caught my eye on the way was the vision of a bundle walking; couldn't tell if it was a man or woman, but this person owned the largest umbrella in town.  They were wrestling against ribs flipping and cloth flapping willy-nilly in the gusts, and because of the immensity of the umbrella, the person appeared to be a small animal surrounded by a shell.  I thought of a snail pulling in, a mollusk trying to shut a door unsuccessfully, of a crab arranging wee business in a disorderly world.

The umbrella was an exoskeleton, a layer of protection and structure against the empyreal elements blasting; an oyster on the half-shell, a clam casino of human under limpet preservation.  We are so soft, our skin so effortlessly damaged that we need clothing, shelter--amendments to our fragile state.  A little brown rabbit lives outside all winter in frigid temperatures, with nothing but his bunny fur and good luck at finding plant life to nibble.  We wouldn't last three days out there, naked.  Sure, rabbits and squirrels go into a semi-hibernation, but imagining something that weighs ten pounds making it is astounding.  I don't understand how birds, whose body temperature is 105 degrees, keep going even with all the metabolic tricks they have.

We humans are able to construct exoskeletons to serve us: medieval armor, automobiles, helmets, sweaters, and buildings.  Thank goodness, because when you come down to it, all the stuff about the human body being beautiful is nonsense.  Rare the individual, brief the moment, when proportion and lumps are even, hair grows in proper places, and the entire article does not look like it needs starch and ironing.  Really, we are awkward.  No adaptations such as sleekness for speed, spots or stripes for camouflage; we build anything we need, paint on colors when we like.  Find me a beautiful human, and it is likely they are made of marble chiseled by Venetians, or flattened on canvas as an idealized odalisque.  Thank heavens for Toulouse, who began painting people as they really are.

The winds still explore every crevice outside, pushing and pulling at branches and loose papers.  I am glad to close windows, bringing closure to the day and silence to evening hours.  Sleep well, the hours are changing soon, pull into your shell and close the operculum.  Tuck under covers, let sleep come in.





 

Automotive Indulgences

Have you ever patted your car?  Like when you're driving and a can rolls in front of your wheels, but by a small maneuver the tires avoid flattening the thing, so then you pat the center of the steering wheel where the horn is?  Atta car.  There are Thanks for Getting Me Home pats; It's Okay, I'm Not as Young as I Used To Be Either So Don't Worry If Everyone is Passing Us pats; and Oh Good, We Didn't Hit It pats.  This might be part of the belief that if the car likes us, it will keep us safer.

What is really keeping us in one piece are the engineering folks at the car plant, but it's way more fun and immediate to demonstrate affection to the ton and a half of metal that just stopped hurtling through physics and successfully stopped.  Easier done than hugging a guy in a lab coat who isn't present for the grateful appreciation.  So lab guys, feel the love.

I named one car, and that was Tony, a 1998 red Cavalier whose demise came too early in a snowstorm.  A semi had crunched into the back end of a Lincoln, followed by a SUV, followed by another semi that buckled across the highway of ice.  I was the eleventh in a series of 22 cars, and learned how big a semi's tire is when your car slides sideways into it.  We bounced and arced in half a circumference, twisting the car frame and folding one tire underneath.  With all the emergency vehicles that were already arriving, the gathering crowd of people involved wondered why didn't anyone stop traffic from feeding into the Skyway?  I lost Tony, and haven't named another car since.

Where did this affinity come from? Why did I feel as if Tony and I were traveling partners?  I have had cars that evoked a warm connection, and others that were cold metal boxes of combustion and exhaust.  The car after Tony was such, maybe I resented the circumstance.  It was another Cavalier, a 1993 blue that after I was able to get another became a benevolent pizza delivery car, maybe still ghosting around the up side of town, dropping off pizzas and bread sticks to families.  A Fairy Godpizza Car.

My current car is again, a red Cavalier which is now 10 years old.  On the way to work, there are many, many people that cross against a light, some hurrying to get to their own jobs, some sauntering in defiance to traffic rules and the fact that you the driver are sitting on upholstery and listening to music in climate-controlled air.  They are hating on you.  If driving into blinding sunrise, this can get dicey really fast; my solution is to go five miles per hour in the two areas where this pedestrian nonsense happens: across from the MetroRail station, and the intersection at the city college.  However, car folderol happens during the same ride to work.

There is a left turn onto a one-way arterial that turns into a race around the corner for some drivers, only to end a short block at a traffic light that is Timed to be Red.  You are stopping soon anyways, you are winning nothing, and everything will be fine except for the honest walkers that tried to cross with the light and almost got hit by these bullies.  A suitable solution is to cross on the south side of the intersection, as no cars are turning right against the one-way, and those that do so reach the sidewalk safely.  However, this isn't the point, a driver shouldn't try to outgun people crossing the street by scaring them with a four-wheeled monster, including the cyclists, baby strollers, and people with boxes of donuts.  These people do not wish to pat your car in neither admiration nor affection, they more likely want to bazooka it and you all the way back to your grandfather.  I don't blame them.

Today I drove to a farmer's market, the usual Saturday foray; my friend and I brought home apples, squash, and cauliflower heads for our families, all trundled home in the back seat of my red car with the one black door.  Rain and wind blew sideways, but I got home with the goods without harm, warm and mostly dry except where the replacement door seal is not tight.  A few drips hurt nothing.  Carrot and squash soup, a beef stew, and a frittata were concocted for the week's menu, thanks to the convenience of being able to haul groceries in the car.

The winds have subsided; here is a short story: a silver bird ornament hangs from a kitchen cupboard and was tinkling like a bell for no apparent reason.  It rings against the wood when the door is opened, but there was no movement except for the shiver of the bird alone, tinging and tanging delicately, musically. Am I losing my mind?  Why is this thing moving?  Grandma? Is that you?

No, it wasn't a visiting ether of Ida Ruth.  The building was swaying because of the high winds, this twelve-story brick monument was giving and bending with the force of wind.  Remarkable, but there I go again, thinking magically when physical fact was at hand.  The realms overlap so much sometimes it's hard to tell, so I will continue to tell my car that it is a good car, and pat, pat, pat.

I know you appreciate the machinations of inanimate objects, the strength of rope, the durability of good winter mittens, the piped in hot water, the turn of a page of flattened wood fiber.  Every night we wrap our tired selves in sheets and blankets, set clocks, and extinguish currents running to lamps.  We have so much to be thankful for, and I think we are.  Children say goodnight to things, do you?  Goodnight wooden dresser that once held my mother's folded things, goodnight shoes that fit just right, goodnight apples in a paper bag that make the place smell like earth and sustenance.  Goodnight, you.  It will be alright, things always work out in spite of unwanted changes.  Hold on.  Life doesn't get easier, it just keeps going and makes places for you to be, in the lives of those that love you.  Night is here, angels fly. Always.

Treasures and Toxins in the Woods

One sunny Saturday, a group of naturalists and I loped through a forest preserve searching for wild fungi.  A parent had brought his young four year old daughter, which for a mushroom hunt can be questionable as the dangers out there are irreversible and slowly fatal.  Emphasize the word slow, for death will pry you from this plane languidly from a meager ingestion of 7 mg of one of the eight known amatoxins for an adult.  If you don't know for Certain, you are far better off going to the grocery where many species have become marketable and are delicious.  Believe and quake reflectively regarding the fact that even a scientifically trained mycologist can be fooled.

Stay away from anything all white, near white, greenish white, or that looks like it might have been white at some point in its short life.  Puffballs are often considered one of the safe, identifiable species, but the white roundness can be the stage in which the Amanitas grow egglike before bursting through the outer veil.  You are to cut the puffball in half to examine for the outlines of a mushroom head and stipe forming inside.  Hell's bells, I have eaten puffballs and frankly, I would rather eat a styrofoam coffee cup; the consistency is flaccid, poofy, tasteless and not worth wasting the butter in the pan.  Perhaps as a survival food, but that would happen only after I ate any chipmunks within rock-throwing range.  Even inside the puffball genus live poisonous Scleroderma, which is another reason for cutting the thing in half, for their centers mature into black, fetid masses of spores.  It won't kill you, but you will be beholden to the porcelain god for days after.

The mushroom foray was sanctioned and fairly formal, held in Reinstein Woods on a beautiful day in late September.  Of course, anything else interesting was celebrated as well, and being a preserve, everything stays left alone, nothing is to be picked or carried out.  A dead mouse, a dead bullfrog, and an almost dead salamander were considered talismans and celebrated with whoops by the young naturalists on this morning walk.  Invasive species from Europe and Asia were pointed out, and apparently the favor has been returned by American poison ivy and our grey squirrels that are currently raising Cain in England and pushing out the cuter, milder ones that Beatrix Potter adored, the red squirrels.

The father of the young girl asked if there was anything in the woods that could harm her if she handled it: absolutely.  Kids shouldn't be fed wild mushrooms at all, some species have toxins that don't bother adults as much as they could a child.  But there are poisonous ones, such as the above-mentioned Amanita that allegedly has a good flavor and often has evidence of animals nibbling at the cap.  Well, let me tell you, within four days whatever has eaten it is now kaput for it destroys the liver via a series of arcane steps.  After a bout with gastrointestinal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, there is resolve and you think you are getting better after this two or three day period; however, the slower-acting toxin has been busy destroying your liver resulting in jaundice, internal bleeding, delirium, seizures, coma and death in about six to sixteen days.  Survivors usually require a liver transplant.  Don't handle Death Caps, don't put them in a basket used for edibles.  Really, stay home and make eggs.

My fascination is that it was something we did as a family when I was younger, and as a result, I took courses at the Museum and then at college in mycology.  Neither plant nor animal, fungi has been named as a separate kingdom amid the animalia, plantae, monera and protists.  I have eaten wild mushrooms, but only the ones I have been sure to be edible.  Shaggy manes, Suillus, Agarics, Boletus edulis, Boletus bicolor, Collybia radicata, Pholiota squarrosa, Craterellus cornucopiodes, Hydnum repandum, Grifola frondosa, Lepiota procera, Leccinum scabrum, Lactarius deliciosus, and Dentinum repandum are not easily mixed up with anything deadly.  Mostly, I am happy with the store bought stuff, and will never serve anything fungal that I've gathered to anyone else.

It was a nice walk in the woods, something I miss doing on a regular basis.  The air in a forest is exceptionally fresh, oxygenated, and energizing, and anchors you to the earth after a life of cars and pavement, buildings and smartphones.  The smell of earth and fallen leaves reminds us of what we've removed from our lives, for the most part, but think of this: pizza.  Without fungus, there is none, for the crust rises with yeast, a fungi; next, add cheese made with fungus-based rennet, suitable for vegans; top this with Agaricus bisporus, the everyday supermarket mushroom, and you have dinner.  Eat mushrooms, for they are some of the strongest anti-cancer fighters science has studied; in fact, in some groceries this month you will find mushrooms packaged in pink cartons, in support of breast cancer awareness.

This post verges on rambling, my apologies.  Maybe it will lull you into that state of brain just before you decide to turn out the lights and hit the hay.  This is it, you think, the downward slide into that lovely, warm stupor of silence and deep unconsciousness, maybe a glass of milk before, brush teeth, one last look in the mirror before dreaming of dark crevices and fallen logs, hopping toads, and Alice, who was advised by caterpillar to try one side or the other of mushroom cap.  Sleep unfettered, walk through dreamtime's pathways, all pine needles and stalked fungi.  Good night, earthling.

Horizontal Hold

Far away and out in the sticks, a lot of what young I learned came from a 16-inch black and white screen.  My family was hardly the sort to glean social skills from, as my mother was painfully shy and my father taught us how to disarm a German in hand-to-hand combat by slugging him in the throat.  I took after my mother, for the most part.

Television was my babysitter of sorts because after a day of tempering machine parts, Dad had no interest in sharing the dinner table with kids who didn't like green beans.  I remember a few suppers at the table in the knotty pine dinette, before which Mom would prep me in behavior, pleading with me not to make faces or complain.  It was difficult at age three, especially since I had already decided that I would like to get rid of the noise in the house and have Mom to myself; I hadn't developed discretion yet.  My father's irritation irritated me, and I would shoot him a look.  We would battle, with it ending in my mother getting yelled at for my moody little self.  Her solution was to turn on the television, spread newspaper on the living room rug, and plop my dinner plate down.  On the floor, I guess as a safety precaution. This was the golden era, with the new tv dinners touted as timesavers for families to watch more programming together instead of mom being stuck in the kitchen; maybe she thought television was a great idea or more likely she was desperate.  It was weirdly isolating, but I soon dissolved into what I thought were real lives on the screen.  I never ate with my family again.

So, what was on at supper?  Two stations, even though the tuner went up to 22 channels, were broadcasting at the time, WGR and WBEN.  A third station eventually started up in 1958, the logo being a rabbit with bent ears supposedly as antennae.  There were plenty of Popeye cartoons with Mike Mearian and Buttons, Three Stooges shorts, and sometimes seasonal shows like A Visit to Santa with Forgetful the Elf; there was a story book show that had puppets who talked very slowly or maybe that was just me.  All of this verified life as I knew it, with Popeye and Bluto beating the brain matter out of each other, or with Bluto choking Olive Oyl for not being his girlfriend and then you would have Christmas.  Sort of like disarming Germans.

Remarkably, for all the encouragement, the only instance in which I behaved badly in a physical manner was when one of my older cousins took a comic book away from me and refused to give it back.  It was showing Catnip the Cat getting hit with a frying pan, making his head match the shape of the pan. We were scooched on the floor, he grabbed the comic, the action of which put his rear end conveniently in my direction; I bit him.  He was my favorite cousin, and how on earth could I do such a thing?  Simple: in my mind, I was mimicking the enlarged choppers of a character in a cartoon, and how was this not a solution, Mom?  I apologized sincerely, once realizing the denouement of my idiocy, helped by my mother who was a gentle soul, supremely embarrassed by her child.  I now have a cat named after that cousin, and his older sister recently told me that he probably deserved getting bit anyways.  No, he didn't.

Cartoons fueled my brain, Saturday mornings gave me a buzz like a bowl of Sugar Pops knocked down with a glass of Nestle's Quik.  I had preferences, being spoiled with the writing and animation of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, and grew a strong distrust of Harvey Cartoons, especially those concerning  Casper the Friendly Ghost.  Fraud!  Deceit!  A friendly ghost doing good deeds and hanging out with woodland animals?  One that got bullied by three nitwits when he had powers of invisibility and flying?  Really, after watching Disney's Fantasia sequence of the Night on Bald Mountain and hiding behind the couch as a result, I knew marshmallow-shaped Casper was just biding his time before pulling out some ghost combat on the unsuspecting animals and children.  Now that I am older, my idea is that the reverse is true, that spirits are mostly a benevolent people that do no harm and maybe do make friends with chipmunks and lost puppies.  Just leave me alone.  Skedaddle.

But how do we get through our lives?  By what degree are they shaped by people around us, by environment, by the current popular culture?  How do we learn to make proper decisions if there aren't many people around to learn from?  Kindness isn't automatic, I subscribe to the notion that we would all be knocking each other over the heads with caveman clubs if left to our own talents, a la Lord of the Flies.  So, what makes us good?  Brain chemistry, sure, but maybe also a hope that we can make things better for others, therefore benefitting ourselves by loving the next living thing as best we can.  Find something and give it some love.  Buy a newspaper, send a letter, donate five bucks to an animal rescue, pick up someone else's wrapper.  Don't just read to a kid, but find an older person who can't anymore.  Keep us going, it's hard work but so needed.  Descent: I climb down from the soap box.

Warm days and cooler nights signal midfall changes in seasons.  Today at the market, large orange globes lit up the areas under wooden tables, no shortage of pumpkins in this area.  The leaves on the city trees are changing to yellows and a few emotional reds; the greens are aged and less vibrant, no longer lush or unmeasured.  We are getting ready, steeling our northern selves for the coming drop in temperature and sun; hardy, tough, determined, that's us.  We sleep fiercely, dream deeply, and abandon ourselves unafraid to the oceans of timeless space between midnight and morning.  Sleep well, sleep in temporal rhythm.  With love.

Contraption

Every night, whether springsummerfallwinter, I wrap myself into the tubing and velcro head straps of a CPAP machine that keeps me breathing through the bouts of sleep apnea.  It's been over a year that I was tested and found to wake 43 times an hour to get air and no wonder I was not remembering in which drawer the car keys were, but how did they get in the fridge?  "Do you snore?", asked the doctor after the umpteenth complaint she heard from me regarding memory and energy loss.  How would I know, the cats never crabbed about it.  I went for an overnight test and Alakazam, the results demonstrated a lack of deep sleep. The machine itself is about the size of a lunchbox, and sits next to the bed.

The tubing is a nuisance, for it flips awkwardly and fills with condensation, causing burbling noises that sound like a dog drinking out of waterbowl.  Not a big deal, you shake out the water and pop it back together.  What my biggest complaint concerns is the plastic bubble part that sits on your face, sealing the jetplane pilot mask part to you, sort of.  If it isn't velcroed down tight enough, the thing slips around and leaks pressurized air, generally right into your eye.  I had started with the smaller mask, as the doctor I visited back then fussed about a full face mask being a danger if you were sick and aspirated vomit.  I have never vomited in my sleep in my life, maybe this is something to look forward to.  Also, with the small size mask I had to tape my mouth shut, or I snored, defeating the purpose.  This size also has tiny outlets for air to be released that fill with enough moisture to whistle like a high-pitched teakettle from hell.  No amount of toweling, cotton, or wicking relieved the whistling. All Night. This was a nuisance, and made my blood pressure pills roll around, laughing.

Opting for the larger mask that covers the mouth and nose was a better choice for me, but there are drawbacks.  The larger bubble separates from your face and produces whoopie cushion noises that do not respond to adjustment unless I took the darn thing off and repositioned straps, mask, blah blah.  Several times a night, this doesn't help the condition and creates a loss of sleep exacerbated by throwing the mask across the room.  Going online, I found what apparently is a solution.

The small box came today, and I am excited to try it out!  Whee!  Fabric triangles patterned to match the mask interface supposedly cushion things, relieving displacement, face farts, and those red marks that make you look like a 3 a.m. victim of a beating, especially on your way to work.  They are called Remzzzs Full Face & Nasal CPAP Mask Liners, and the box says they promote a comfortable, full night of sleep.  Sign me up, bwana.  I realize this is not big news to anyone but me, unless you are within a social orbit that circles my planet and have been waiting for me to do something for you that I said I would, like maybe three years ago but I've been so busy wrestling with apnea masks that a good sleep was sort of an itinerant tinker that stopped by as often as you now see the Fuller Brush Man, which is never.  A shame you don't run into those Fuller Brush people anymore, those brushes outlasted both my parents.

I also have ordered a new type of mask from the interwebs, touted as a lighter, easier to wear invention, as compared to the Star Wars get up donned nightly.  One can hope, for my sleep is better with the inflationary circus than without, but there is awkwardness and noise which makes me search for solutions.  Onward.

Time now to go for a test run with the mask liner, I am optimistic and heartened at the collected responses from Satisfied Customers on the ordering site.  It is Wednesday, a middle of a week day come to evening, sliding quickly into Thursday and Friday.  Stars are out, cats are already curled in favored roosts, and the plecostomus knows his feeding time is now.  His fins are out, like a Cadillac from 1962, his fishy eyes blink into his head, his nose rises to the surface to be rubbed.  Good night fish, good night cats, good night good people; to sleep, to sleep.