wait what?

I just noticed that I posted two sunset pictures in a row, and rather cliche pictures, at that. For this I sincerely apologize. Sunsets are sort of commonplace, as they happen every single day, and though some are better than others, most are stunningly average. In fact, one might say, on average, they are all average, their only true attribute being they remind us of the capacity in the human soul for finding beauty in the chaos. So, worth something.

Here, then, is a picture of Arthur listening to some Mozart, I think.

Sunset

The sun sets on the West Bottoms

Pictured is the sunset of May 3 (2018) which allowed the night to overtake the Missouri River Bottoms, the Charles Wheeler  Airport (one-time very cool Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri,) commonly called the "Downtown Airport" and once considered the most dangerous airport in the U.S., and the rather hair-pin river bend around the south end of the two runways.

This is also the view from either of the two windows of my loft in the River Market area of downtown Kansas City. It is rather industrial, actually, and one constantly hears multiple train engine units pulling freight along the south side of the river, or across one of a couple of bridges, also visible from my windows. When I was a teenager, we referred to the act of one long, sustained car honk as "laying on the horn." The engineers of these trains sometimes lay on the horn, at any hour of the night, (no matter how wee) and I don't really know why. Is there a cow standing on the tracks? What is a cow doing so far from the barn at two a.m.? Perhaps the laying on of the horn in the middle of the blackness of night is something train engineers do for pure joy. It's loud here; it must sound awesome from inside the engine.

There are other noises.  Bolted firmly to the roof just inches above my head, as I occupy my top floor loft, are, like, five or six air conditioning compressor units. You know the ones. Yours probably sits outside, beside a back, or side, wall, and when it comes on it makes a loud humming and whirring sound. I have five of these and they are old and they hum and whirr more loudly, and they also vibrate and sort of . . . thrum.  If two or more of them are running at the same time, the thumming sets up harmonics, which resonate through the roof and into my loft, ultimately winding up inside my skull, sounding like incoherent demons urging me to do something, I don't know what.  Yet.  I have reported this noise, this local variant of the Taos Hum, to the "Lease Managers."  It has done no good, so far.  According to the Internet, tenants with noise complaints have little legal recourse. The terms for breaking the lease are two and a half months rent, plus 30 days notice.

The math:  2.5 x (too much) = (way) x (too much.)

The Kansas City Sky

I hope not to revert to my old too-many-pictures mode, and do more writing with words instead, but here is a photo of the latest sunset.  I don't do sunrises, because, well, my windows just won't go there. Sure, I could go outside . . . but, kind of early, don't you think?

I also admit to being slightly heavy-handed with the photoshopping, as always, in an effort to make the picture look more like what I saw with my own eyes. It varies.

perhaps, on acid

The Soft Underbelly of Literature

I found myself reading yet another blog entry with tips on how to blog effectively. I can never pass those up, which tells me that I continue to be interested in getting people to read my blog. At the same time, I kind of keep my blog a secret from people I know in my actual face-to-face life. Why is that?

Actually, I have given out the URL to maybe four people, all of whom seemed to me to be hip, avid consumers of literature.  None of them became readers.  I cringe to think of how they may have visited my blog after I gave them the link, read some, then retreated as gracefully as they could, never to mention it again. I like to think they never even looked at it, yet my reasoning for that sort of response has to be that they regard blogs so negatively that they don't bother looking. Either way is a little pathetic.

It seems much more acceptable to Write a Novel. However, judging by the frequency of my blog posts, it would require too much time to finish a novel, and such an endeavor would take me way beyond my death.

Here's the deal. I retired so long ago, now, that I should have completed at least two or three novels. I don't know if I have ADD or what, and I've never been one of those heavy-duty people who can deal with medications--they wouldn't let me into Woodstock...  It's a philosophical problem, the journey vs the destination thing.

Recently I stumbled across a bit of family history that made me think we might be descended from Italian nobility.  I know. Big deal. Everyone in Italy is the same way. I followed the line down from the Marchese di Squillace, and back from my great-grandfather, but I haven't made those two lines meet. A friend said, just say they do.  Who's to know?  Who would question it?

So, in honor of the Trump era of post-credibility, yeah, I'm working on a novel. Which, by the way, means anything I do at least up to its completion, no matter how disreputable, is merely research.  Upon publishing, the bio on the back cover may mention something about the Marchese, with a picture, as he was a handsome man. We'll see.

Nothing

Nothing to report, so far, this week.

I was looking over some paperwork on the loft rental earlier today. I would note that if you pay a deposit for something, and all or part of it is "non-refundable," then it is not really a deposit, is it? It's more like a fee. And if a fee, then what is it for? A fee implies some goods or services to be delivered. I do believe all of these leasing agents are simply engineering their own fees and calling them non-refundable deposits. Same with the application fee.  At least they called it a fee, but to my mind, the owner of a property should be paying his own agents, not me. I'm good with an agreement to send rent checks to the owner and a handshake, and that shouldn't cost anything. I don't need the agent--the owner thinks he or she does.  That's their problem.

-angry renter

This weeks gratuitous photographic image:

I Have No Life

I try to keep busy even though I have apparently reached a point in my life where I don't have to do anything at all, if I don't want to. Well, except take showers and stuff like that.

Yesterday was Monday, so since that is "pancake day" I drove to Independence and had sausage and eggs and pancakes at the Englewood Cafe.  I always sit in Denise's section, because I've known her since the Eighties when she was a waitress at her dad's restaurant and I was a telephone repairman and frequented the place for my coffee breaks. Denise's daughter works there, too. I remember when she was a baby and Denise would bring her into her dad's place on her day off.

Englewood Cafe is the kind of place, by the way, where you frequently get involved in conversations taking place at other tables. I'm not sure just what the cues are, but at some point you just feel free to chime in. It seems odd, but, then, you just don't go there if you don't feel like you could tolerate that. Plus people walking to the register might toss their newspaper down on your table if they're done with them. Yesterday I found an old friend and sat at his table, and by the time that conversation was over, it was almost time for lunch. I drove to Walmart to buy an SD card for my camera, then back downtown to figure out if I wanted a baloney sandwich created from my rich store of food stuffs rattling around in the icebox in my apartment/loft. (Opted for a breakfast burrito at the coffee shop.)

I went for a walk and wound up downtown and got about two miles in.

Today is Tuesday. Wednesday I meet some old ex-phone company employees for our weekly breakfast. Tuesday is "open." 

My son asked to borrow a camera because he wants to learn how to use a DSLR before he goes to Iceland.  His cell phone pics are always interesting, so this should be good. He sent me a picture of his dog taken with the camera I gave him, which gave me an opportunity to explain how the white area caused the camera to under-expose the entire picture just a little. I photoshopped the levels back up to show him how to do that.

Not so Novel an Idea

f you ever took Psych 101 in college, then you were exposed to all those "studies" that revealed one thing or another about human nature, or maybe we should say human behavior, (depending,) and at the time we weren't holding them to too high a scientific standard, but just sort of sucked it all in, as if they were strangely pertinent Von Daniken works, or Yogic revelations, or even the horoscope section below the funnies, (despite the disclaimer that it was presented purely for its entertainment value and held no scientific basis in fact.) I remember a lot of them and dredge them out once in awhile, more or less as I am reminded of them, like old jokes.

There was the one about the Irish railway workers who of course drank beer all the time while working, or at the very least at noon, and the owners wanted to know, OK, just how many cups of beer can you drink before the beer stops making you work better, and starts making you work worse. Was it seven.  Eight?  Lo and behold, they were shocked to find that productivity dropped off after the very first beer!  Oops.

Similarly, college students who were routinely cramming for tests the following morning might want to know the same thing about how coffee consumption affected fact retention. The results of that study were a little more generous, for "they" found that memory retention and cognitive abilities increased as coffee was consumed, but only up to about seven cups, where things started to drop off. Believe me, some of us were just as dismayed about that result as were the Irish rail workers and their study. It is probably noteworthy that the subjects of the coffee test were college students--the same people who could drink beer and get progressively drunk over the course of an entire evening before the crash--I will always suspect we would have done better on that beer test even though the benchmark may have been how many spikes can you sledge hammer into a railroad tie per minute.

What does it all mean? They didn't teach us that, but I wonder if in the case of these two studies, one or the other of them holds the key to writing novels.

You know, maybe.