Chop wood, carry water

Up just before dawn today to walk the dog. Then I planted two black raspberry plants, pulled up a dozen or so ragweeds, then cleaned and refilled all four of my big bird feeders. Added a small platform feeder which immediately attracted jays and cardinals.

I'm going to find something to eat, then dose the kittens.

Saturday night

I have nothing to report.

Random stuff of the past couple of days

A couple of nights ago Bailey growled at me when I tried to push her out of the middle of the bed so I could have some room. That's the end of Bailey sleeping in bed with me, and she's adapted quite well. I bought her a dog bed at PetSmart, pointed to it, and she hopped right in. She took to being crated right away, too. She's a pretty smart and good-natured dog, so the growling surprised me.

I went to the Paseo Arts Festival this past weekend, and bought two tall metal candle holders. I forget the artist's name, but he lives in Lexington. These holders are quite heavy, and have a low center of gravity, so they should resist being tipped over by wind. I'm going to use them in the back yard to hold oil lamps rather than candles.

I also bought a fused glass piece by Rick and Tracey Bewley, which will go in the house somewhere.

Almost three weeks ago, I dug up two plants in the back yard which appeared to have died during the winter. I left them lying on the ground, intending to throw them in the trash eventually. Lo and behold, both plants (of the same species) started putting out new leaves this week while just lying on the ground! I've replanted one and will replant the other in the next couple of days.

I'm looking forward to the garage being finished and the yard back to normal.

Another 'previous life' dream

Just woke up from another dream about my 'previous life.' I won't go into details. The main thing for me is that I have these dreams at all. I keep thinking I'm over them, then I have another one.

I once lived next to a retired postal worker who told me he still had nightmares about his job twenty years after he retired.

Monday evening

I am past due for posting pictures of progress on the garage. I will try to get some up this week. The framer got the garage doors pretty much finished, and I hope we'll have them hung by week's end. The electrician is scheduled to start wiring tomorrow.

Work inside the house has stopped, for a number of reasons. I have one really nice room, which is frankly as much as I need. Bailey, Rollo and I share it and seem comfortable. I may go forward with more rooms or I may not. I have little enthusiasm for this part of the project now.

If I can keep just one room clean and pleasant I'll be doing better than I've done in the past. And this room is so dark and so quiet it's just about perfect.

Happy

I am by nature not a cheerful person. I don't do 'happy.'

But there have been moments in my life when I was happy. What those moments had in common was that I was usually alone or with a single female companion (who may have been a romantic partner or a platonic friend); that there were few if any other people around; that we were outdoors; that we and our surroundings were calm and quiet.

We might, for example, have been taking a slow drive down a country road, or sitting on a bench at Lake Hefner. I've had similar happy moments, especially last fall and summer, sitting alone in my own back yard.

You may have other things that make you happy, but these are the things that make me happy, however boring or goofy they may seem. My mother, for example, couldn't begin to grasp the idea that a person could be happy without being drunk and surrounded by other drunks. I've known other people who simply had no personal life apart from OU sports or the Dallas Cowboys.

All of these experiences, including my own, share a common failing: they are all externalities which eventually end. Romances end, and eventually the time for romance passes. Pleasant autumn days give way to gray, cold winter days. Football season comes to an end. Eventually, you have to sober up, at least for awhile. And then your happiness, predicated on external, temporary conditions, fades.

I have not mastered the ability to find happiness within, free from outside influences. I hope someday I do, but I suspect I lack the DNA for happiness.

Which is not to say I'm miserable. Life is pretty good just as it is, and I'm mostly content.

Apropos of the previous post...

From Daily Kos: Two looks at our physical selves

For psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, the human body in the 21st century has become--as it clearly was for Delmore Schwartz when he penned "The Heavy Bear" more than forty years ago--a burden. "Our bodies," she writes, "no longer make things." They "are and have become a form of work. The body is turning from being the means of production to the production itself."

Another bitter, mean-spirited post

I hear people - artists, usually - talk about how the 'human body is beautiful.'

I suppose.

To me, the human body is a large slab of meat whose byproducts include shit, piss, pus, puke, phlegm, snot, sweat, toenails, methane gas and tiny flakes of dead skin. One of the first things a new community does (in modern times, at least) is build an underground infrastructure to carry away all the nasty stuff we produce so we don't have took at it, smell it, or think about it.

Artists talk about how beautiful the body is, but there's a reason Michelangelo didn't sculpt David sitting on the crapper and Botticelli didn't paint Venus changing tampons. If you're aware of any works by the Great Masters portraying someone with acne, let me know.

I understand some people are sexually aroused by shit and piss. To each their own. To my knowledge, though, no one is sexually aroused by pus or tiny flakes of dead skin, so maybe we need to open our minds more. Not that I've Googled those to be sure - nor do I intend to.

As I've said before, if someone could show me a way to detach my consciousness from my physical form and just float across the landscape like a cloud, I'd do it in a minute.

Oh - I forgot that crusty stuff on your eyelids when you wake up in the morning. But that's actually snot, isn't it?

Friday night

This has actually been a fairly eventful week, although some of what has transpired is probably better left unmentioned.

It has been a rough week for my allergies. I have an anti-allergen filter on the return for the AC, and another in the floor register in the bedroom. So the air is filtered going in to the AC, and further filtered coming out. In addition, there's a HEPA air purifier running full time. As a result, I can camp out in the bedroom and stay fairly comfortable.

But when I take Bailey out for her morning walk, I start sneezing. My eyes start to itch and water. And then I just feel like crap off and on for the rest of the day. I want to do even less than usual. This has also had the effect of making me irritable and cranky.

I wonder if the Buddha had allergies. I'm guessing he didn't.

Sunday night

The skylights have been installed in the roof of the garage. We had planned to install nine, but the installation requirements of the skylights themselves limited us to eight.

The carpenter is building the garage doors from scratch. These will be the old-fashioned carriage house-style doors that swing open. I've never been all that jazzed about overhead doors.

The siding is all up and the windows in. Shingles go on the roof starting tomorrow. Then we spray in insulation, install the toilet and shower and do the wiring.

Meanwhile, inside the house, the master bedroom is finished except for molding, and the back bedroom is almost done.

I have been planting and laying down brown builders' paper and mulch in the flower beds. I enjoy having nice flower beds, but I don't enjoy working in them. My sinuses swell up intermittently, and my eyes have been itching continuously for more than a week. They itch right now.

Friday night

Guess we're going to have more weather. Other than that, I have nothing to report.

Drapes

Ms. HRP and Bailey hung drapes in the master bedroom yesterday.

I love my dog...

...and my dog loves me.

The fork on the floor

Someone at the coffee shop brought up the 'fork on the floor' item I posted a few days ago. It appears further elucidation is needed.

What makes a fork a fork? I would say, and I think most would agree, that a fork is characterized by its handle and three or four tines that lift food.

A fork is not characterized by its location. A fork is still a fork whether it's in the silverware drawer, on the floor or up on the roof.

We fetishize eating utensils. I can get a plastic fork at KFC that is perfectly servicable. Or I can get a fork clad in some precious metal, which comes in a velvet-lined wooden box. And both are still fundamentally characterized by their handles and tines.

Where does a fork belong? And what do we mean by 'belong'? We might say, 'forks belong in the silverware drawer.' But according to what? Newton's law? Custom? Artificial imperatives created by the marketing departments of Martha Stewart Living and Bed, Bath & Beyond?

There's a lot of blind acceptance of the status quo here, folks. Let's not be afraid to challenge our closely-held beliefs. How else can we grow?

I'm kind of a homebody, but I'm not afraid to push the envelope when it's called for.

Friday night

Those Q-Tips were still in the wrapper.

I couldn't relate

An acquaintance of mine got married over the weekend. I didn't go to the wedding, but I looked at photos that friends posted online.

Somehow the emotions displayed in those photos seemed alien to me. Even though I've been married myself, I had difficulty relating to what I was seeing. There was a world there with which I could not identify.

Speaking of things to live for

...today I'm going to live for getting the dog a toy or two or three. She's gotten a little rambunctious now that she's settled in here.

Nothing to live for

About ten years ago, I found myself at a point where I felt I had nothing left for which to live. Looking back on it, I can see I was basically right: I didn't have anything to live for.

The choice I made then, although I didn't have it clearly delineated in my mind, was to simply live, rather than seek to live for something.

If my makeup in 1999 had absolutely required me to live for something - some external goal or cause or person - I guess I would have jumped off a window ledge, because I had absolutely nothing of that sort left. (Well, I had Beasley the cat, and he certainly counted for something.)

If you have to believe life has meaning, what do you do if that meaning is taken away? There's nothing you can have in this world that can't be taken away from you. (Except your delusions, which may help explain why some people cling so tenaciously to creationism and other myths. Maybe they feel like that's all they've got.)

I haven't acheived perfection in this business of simply living. I'm attached to my house and new garage. I always become attached to the animals around the house.

If there's anything in this life you worry about losing, I think you're living for something instead of living.

Two rooms

I've made no secret of the fact I'm a horrible slob as far as my home is concerned - my car, too, most of the time. Except for a brief period when I was about 12 years old, I've been that way all my life.

I think I mentioned this before, but I once dropped a fork on the floor of my den. It lay there literally for months. I must have looked at it a hundred times. But not once did the thought pop into my head, "Huh. What's that fork doing on the floor? I should pick that up and take it back to the kitchen." It wasn't a matter of putting it off; it was a matter of my not being able to see that the fork was out of place on the den floor.

After a half-century of being this way, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that I'm suddenly going to have some transformation that makes me a neatness freak.

Thanks to Ms. HRP, I now have two rooms in my house that are clean: walls freshly plastered and painted, floors newly stained and refinished. The challenge now is to keep these rooms clean, when not a single strand of my DNA inclines me toward tidiness.

I find myself occasionally looking around my bedroom to see if there's anything out of place I haven't noticed before. It's a matter of looking, for example, at the chair and saying, 'All right, what am I seeing here? There's a blanket in the chair, but that's for the dog, so that's OK. There's a sweatshirt hanging on the back. That should not be there; that should be with the laundry.'

I don't think I will be able to keep this up forever.

Just for the record...

I personally am not all that jazzed about nipple clamps. But your mileage may vary.

3:12 am

When I talk about my 'past life,' I mean my television career, not a past life in the reincarnation sense. It's just a euphemism.

Similarly, I use 'hit by an asteroid' as a euphemism for the end of humanity, which could be brought about by any of a number of means, or a combination thereof.

I admit I've been on the fence about the 'life is an illusion' thing. I used to believe life was a meaningless illusion, but lately I've begun to think it's a meaningless reality.

And if there's some meaning of life that is beyond my ability to perceive or even imagine, that might as well be no meaning.

But again, just because life has no meaning doesn't mean you can't enjoy a walk in the park, gourmet cupcakes, a Chopin nocturne or nipple clamps.