Slowdown

I haven't had a thing to write in weeks. Do you ever have a spell where everything seems done? Every thought you have and every idea you try to put down? As if someone else had done it, or maybe even you years back. I think the feeling is called unoriginality, or at least it should be. Utterly normal, average. That's me.

A very anonymous thing. Like walking in the woods and hiking up to some nice overlook above the treeline, so there's a goal, and then all the beauty along the way. In this environment for some reason it's an easy feat to drop all the self-conscious blather and walk natural and think better, meaning less. Obliteration to the unique, destruction to comparing everything to things actually unalike (doing that human thing where you spin it closer, as if things shared a shred of common ground). Lowering the goddamn bar, for everything.

Hey Andrew! Alterum ictum faciam. Which is to say, I'm going to take a mulligan. And why not?

In this episode Cubby manages to lock his own doors and consequently me out of the car

I was on my way to work the other day, heading up to a new site along the ridge looking down toward the Pacific south of the city. We just put in twenty traps near a tree farm recently bought by the Open Space Trust. They do nice things like that, buy up land and make it public. Sometimes they take everything out and restore it with native vegetation, which can be pretty intensive. I like it when they let it just go wild, let it go. I'm hands-off in most scenarios. Abbeyian ideals of just closing off the road, let the treeroots break concrete, bridges chip and crumble, let the invasives go... I think they'll eventually lose.

This tree farm is up on Skyline, a beautiful winding road leading the length of the San Francisco Peninsula. It's a long way from home and with a few cups of coffee in me I was struck with a desperate need to pee along the way. I found a side road, turned off, and quickly parked against a wall of willows. Leaving the music a little loud and car running I broke into the willows. Returning to the car I found all the doors locked and my cellphone inside, brilliant. One of those moments where you just know memories will be made. My coworker was expecting me up at the worksite and I couldn't reach him without the phone, not knowing his number nor having the means. What I did have was my hoodie and after a little searching I found a big slab of concrete that the road no longer needed. Wrapping the chunk tightly in my sweatshirt, I wound up and gently kissed the backdoor's small window practicing my aim, then slammed the chunk into glass. A hollow thud resounded and back my concrete chunk was bounced. I did this four more times giving more hmpff with each blow and each time rejected by the mighty glass.

A car on the road now. I flagged down the quintessential elderly affluent caucasian in generous luxury automobile, returning from a friendly tennis match I learn. He cautiously looks me over and listens to my story, his dentures gleaming in the sun. The running car beside me helps my case. He decides to take me up to the mcmansion, but won't let me in. Instead brings me a phone book and a sterilized (thank-god) bottle of european aquifer water. He's alright though, just has to keep an eye out for all his shit now that he has it. Gotta protect the casa, you know the story. I work it out with my insurance company and beat my chest once for the big guy (not really) and that extra ten bucks I paid for roadside assistance.

The towtruck guy finds me and has a laugh at my story. Apparently I tried to break out the second most expensive window in the car. You wanna break in he asks? Just kick this one in here, he smiles pointing to the passenger side. I didn't tell him I hadn't planned on paying for it, I imagine he assumed so much. He deftly inserts a sheet between my doors and pumps it up, creating a good inch of space into the car. Checking the blood pressure, he grins. I wonder how many times he's said this. I have to say though, this guy is good. He then chooses from a variety of rods that he's rolled out on the hood, exactly like a chef's knives. A true artist of the trade; he inserts one and opens the door.

August and Everything After

It was good, don't deny it just because its ridiculous now (perhaps Adam Duritz was a little whiny). Always is easy looking back on things like Hungry Man (people still eat that!) and 80's hair (Mexicans still wear that) and making a final opinion on it, forgetting the initial hysteria. That makes up many of the chapters of my life, somewhere with someone and me making an ass of myself, that's how I remember it now.

It's August now. What does that mean? Well, I guess it corresponds with the coming NFL football season, which for some reason is very exciting. That's me right there, by the way... me, being true to myself. So be gentle. What else? Where does time lead? Seems like us Americans tell time by stretches between vacuous holidays. Bummer when you despise each one of them. I use to be partial to a few, Halloween and Thanksgiving or some such thing. I'm moving on that. I like good times, give me that... skip the holiday, whatever. The Holiday: as if to say, oh I almost forgot... I love you or I care. Remember love forget the rest.

Here's something to look forward to: clouds, rain, weather patterns. Give me autumn, I'll look forward to that. Color and contour and shading. Steep hills with moist soil that gives to the boot and knees. Wetlands and reservoirs filling up (maybe even the aquifers too, for those suckers who believe in such things). Good things to come.