More Exquisite Details About Bird Mites as They Relate to My Well Being

 Just for form, I'll round off the bird mite story, even though the saga does continue. We asked the management team to spray for bird mites outside, where the pigeon nest must be. And while they're at it, we suggested, they might locate a nest (as there must be one,) remove it, and take measures to deter further nesting. Some buildings have netting, some have those bird spikes. Careful and comprehensive Internet research told us that the mites wander around looking for fresh blood as soon as the baby pigeons leave the nest. So management did go out there and look around, and did some spraying which, by the way, is a very inadequate solution, and to what degree it's not, pretty temporary. At this point they apparently thought, and acted like, they were done with this whole issue thank goodness. 

Partner continued to research pigeon nesting behavior and bird mite behavior. She found something interesting. Bird mites, when they do wander off, only go a very short distance--just a "few yards," due to the fact that they are so tiny, and move so slowly. I don't know what size monitor you have, but I'll bet a dozen or so of these little guys could stand on the period at the end of this sentence. Or the head of a pin, if not for those pesky dancing angels. 

Armed with this new piece of certainty, that is, the short travel distance of which mites are capable, I measured up the room and the location of the electric outlet through which the mites always arrived. Then we walked around the building and into the alley and did a little measuring and brick counting and looked at the outer wall of the building five flights up, to the part of the wall just opposite the electrical outlet in said room. There was a vent way up there, with no grill. I ran and got my camera, put the zoom lens on it and returned to the scene and got this picture: 

That is a mama pigeon head.

Voy La, as they say. I went to the management again and explained how that is the vent and this is the location of the nest and that is why bird mites are getting into my bedroom and biting me, and please do something about this. 

I said I measured and counted bricks carefully. This vent, along with the nest and pigeons and mites in it, is maybe seven feet from my side of the bed just on the other side of this wall. I mean, it's a stroll in the park even for a little bird mite. 

End of story so far. Five days have gone by. Today I asked about the progress on the bird mite mitigation project, but, no, haven't called the critter control company yet and I'll get back to you as soon as I do. Yup. Thinkyew. Later.

Next Post:  It's almost SepSceneWriMo time, which, like NaNoWriMo, is meant to create a reason to write something only this is looser and seems almost possible and, actually, more interesting. I hope to participate in this. Which springs eternal.  Hope, that is. 

Fistpump McRunpants

 

Here, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley
seen fleeing the scene--a "traditional 
masculine virtue." 

Old Age

 I've been thinking a lot about old age, lately, and have decided it is having a deleterious effect on me, because the longer I think about it, the older I get. I don't know about neural plasticity and all that, but I perceive a trend here. Just kidding. I'll throw in here that if you're not old yourself, you will be, someday, if you're lucky.  And I say that advisedly if not slightly sarcastically. 

To get to the whole point of this post, however, we must veer away from this irrelevant introductory paragraph. I'm talking about editing text. In addition to authors and journalists, bloggers and anyone who emails all do at least some editing on what they write. I do. And it bothers me when I find really stupid mistakes, and it bothers me as I wonder if there are some that I don't find. I'm getting old, I lament. Damn it. I don't think I used to make this many errors, let slip this many grammatical errors and wrong words. Wrong words especially with the advent of auto-correct. 

Then I realized that I actually see a ton of all of these when I read news articles on the Internet. I must assume that all the professional editors behind these articles are not nearly as old as I am, since I am well past the typical retirement age. This makes me feel better. It's NOT just me. Then, as I breathe a sigh of relief, it dawns on me that we are all getting stupider because of the Internet, regardless of our ages, and I begin to worry again. 

It's always something. It never ends; and if I can say that, I must not be that old after all. 

And Over the Weekend

It was pretty uneventful around here last night--at least in terms of fireworks. I could just barely hear the display over at the river park which I guess as the crow flies is not too far from us. But there was nothing else, and I was able to fall asleep with my usual alacrity. 

Sunday was a different story. We were taking in a walk in the morning and when we got down close to the Power and Light District, this kind of youngish, unkempt looking guy materialized behind us and started yelling at me. We walked on. He then trotted up the sidewalk toward us to catch up, looked right at me, and started yelling about how veterans are treated, I think. Or something.  I couldn't tell exactly, as he was pretty pissed off and not quite rational--not sure what drugs or medication he was on.  I "stood my ground" and said nothing while I tried to figure out how dangerous he was, or how crazy. I finally said, “you're interrupting our walk."  

He stared at me for a couple more seconds and then walked on and, in the manner of an over-aggressive tom-cat you just shooed off your yard, every few steps he would turn and yell at me some more before continuing his retreat. We stood there about a minute more to let him get on down the street.

Later that same day we were eating lunch at Pickleman's at 12th and Walnut, sitting inside, close to the big window front. Someone driving very slowly along 12th Street caught my eye. 12th Street is one-way, going east, and the car was correctly headed east, but it slowed even more and right in front of Pickleman's the driver (a woman) executed a slow and laborious three-point turn and then headed off west, the wrong way. She disappeared down the street never to be seen again. Not by us, anyway. 

How do you decide in those critical moments what to do? I should have run out to the street and told the driver she was crazy, and the angry veteran that he was going the wrong way. 

Darren Bailey Wants to be a Governor

Darren Bailey, Illinois gubernatorial candidate, wins the Blogorahmah award for fastest GOP dismissal of the shooting in Highland Park. Just a few hours after the shooting, and only 20 miles away, he tells a crowd, let's move on and celebrate the holiday. 

He made the obligatory vague references to "thoughts and prayers" and mentioned a couple things about mental health and crime prevention, carefully skirting around any reference, even vague ones, to guns.  The usual.

I don't like to post political stuff, and only a few of you read my page anyway, but, c'mon. 

Sad to say, and very inconvenient, we have more than one problem in this country. If you're a Republican and reading this, then, sorry I don't mean to offend, but maybe you could look into this Bailey guy and decide if this is who you want to represent your party. If you're a Democrat, and live in Illinois, maybe find out who's running against Bailey and help them out. This is our government--it IS "us,"--so let's think harder about who we hire to run the government. 

Oh.  Wait. Bailey's campaign later issued a clarification. Well then. We stuff his words back in his head. Never mind. Nothing to see here. 

On Being a Little Kid When School's Out for the Summer

Endless sidewalk

Blue sky

Hot concrete

Stop to watch ants crossing

There is no time

when there is no beginning 

and no ending. 

For the writing prompt at Go Dog Go Cafe. 

What Was I Thinking?

Google Street View (altered)

 

Lately I've been thinking (too) hard about my past life. No, not the one where I was a Centurion in Caesar's army--the other one, where I was just younger. When I got out of high school in 1968, I decided to blow this town (Palo Alto, CA) and . . . uhm . . . go somewhere else. This I did. I drove to Independence, MO, stayed with a friend for a short time and then rented a little house. It was the first place I lived all by myself. On my own. It is pictured, above. This is a recent picture, lifted off of Google Street View and Photoshopped a bit. I assure you, when I moved in 50-some-odd years ago, it didn't look much better.  The gravel driveway you see certainly wasn't any better. It was winter, and there was a weird little furnace in the living room (if you could call it that) whose pilot light required re-lighting at odd wee hours throughout the night. 

For context, this is where I lived when I worked at a foundry for six months and began a long and laborious education concerning how to make a living. 

Small Rituals

It’s a funny challenge, to write about something routine, since usually we write to document the new, the unusual. the different:

Hangin' 'round downtown by myself

And I've had too much caffeine, and I was thinkin' 'bout myself

And then there she was.

Instead, I take the elevator down, walk across the glossy lobby floor and push my way through the door and out onto the street. I like the lobby because of the subdued, piped-in piano music. The lobby, like the entire building, is Art Deco, and with the music, makes me feel like I’m in a ’40s movie. 

My morning walk begins in a dizzying canyon of glass and concrete.  I check out the flower beds built in alongside the curbs. They did a good job. Downtown needs all the help it can get. They planted trees, too--locust trees with primordial fern-like leaves that aren’t lush, but grow like weeds in the Missouri climate. Better than nothing. A homeless guy begins to veer toward me, and I know what’s coming. With a mixture of guilt and smug satisfaction I head him off with a preemptive nod and a smile and a brief explanation. Sorry. I don’t have anything on me. Bless you, he says, but I know better. At the first intersection I encounter, I have a red light. I look both ways and cross. I always look for cars--the light won’t hit you, as they say. 

Birds are actually chirping. I wonder as always if anyone but me notices their little songs. 

The ordinary is worth cultivating, I figure. There’s so much of it. 

***From Poets and Storytellers United . . . 

Enough

 Today I finally had enough of Google and Chrome. I've already read that you can't really escape Google even if you want to. But I do have a choice of web browsers, and of search engines. What did it for me finally was what happened as I was attempting to do a Google search on the string, "modernism."  I typed the word in the little rectangular box, with which we are all so familiar:  m, o, d, e, r, n, and then, right in the box, and not in the list below, before I could finish with i-s-m, suddenly it looked as if I had typed "Modern Family." That's a TV show, I guess. 

Mind you, this is not about the list of suggestions that appears below the search box as you type. This had taken over my typing and made my search request say "Modern Family."  

This is B.S.  I switched over to Safari, and the behavior was slightly different the first couple of times, but then it did it there, too. 

I tried DuckDuckGo.com and everything worked AS IT SHOULD. 

What is happening to Google? This is truly invasive and annoying. I have low expectations when it comes to the Internet and anything on it, but this is, finally, too much. 

Since I have two Mac computers and an Apple iPad mini, I have started the switch to Safari. I know, I know--they all have their fans as well as their detractors. In the end, it really doesn't matter. When you compare these apps, looking at the lists of "PROS" and "CONS," the items amount to a matter of convenience or lack thereof, to a few extra mouse clicks here or there. It kind of comes down to what you're used to. Anyway, what are a few clicks of a mouse compared to, say, rolling a ladder along stack of books in a library with 20' ceilings, climbing said ladder and retrieving a moldy volume and then awkwardly descending said ladder? I'll take the mouse clicks every time, whether they be one or two or even a few in sequence. 

Or, you know, maybe I'd take the ladder. I'm in no hurry--I'm going to die on the same date no matter what I do until then. 

Cars, Collars, Hair

The picture, here, is one taken by a friend's mother--I don't recall exactly when--when I drove into their driveway on a spring day. She came outside carrying a camera and said since she was sure I didn't have any pictures of myself, I might want one to look at years from now. In that spirit, I posed, leaning against my '65 Pontiac Tempest, with the thought that I was looking through the camera into the future, where my future-self would be looking back. So, now, when I look at this picture, I easily imagine that I am looking into the past with a certain intensity of reality. 

I remember that shirt, for some odd reason. The collar was, you know, like, six inches wide. Must have been the early Seventies. I see, too, that I had hair back then. 

The car was purchased while I was living in California briefly around the early Seventies. I broke my '57 Chevy and was too disenchanted with automotive technology (i.e. laying on my back underneath a car that probably dripped oil on me) to fix it. A friend told me a customer at the gas station where he worked was selling this old Pontiac. (At the time, not really that old, but more about that in a minute . . . ) He told me the guy was convinced that the car had very little life left in it, as it had 118,000 miles on it. Back then, it seemed like everybody regarded 100,000 miles as the limit of a car's life. 

Parenthetically, my theory is that--back then, at least--used car dealers routinely rolled back odometers, so a car like this would be sold as having, say, 60,000 miles on it, rather than the actual 118,000, and so we all went along thinking cars just didn't GO that far. 

Richard Custer, (yes relation,) the friend who knew about this Pontiac, said the guy had it serviced at their station pretty regularly, and in his opinion, it was in very good condition despite the high mileage. I test drove it and liked it and bought it for the princely sum of $300.  We, the original owner and myself, both walked away from that deal chuckling in victory. However, I was the winner. I drove that car until it had almost 190,000 miles on it, still running as it always had. 

Now my memory is running away with me--through the portal of this picture, my mind's eye looks around at the familiar setting and its attendant memories. However, blog posts should only be so long. 

 

Buildings

 

From left to right:
Waltower Building, Scarritt Building, Rialto Building.

Where I live has its own landscape. Not trees or mountains, but buildings. Kansas City must have been thriving in the Twenties and Thirties, because that seems to be about when all these big fancy buildings were erected. About half, or more, maybe, were banks. The building I live in (that's its east wall on the left edge of the picture) started out as the Fidelity Bank and Trust Building. It was built in 1933, the company went bust pretty quick, and the building sort of languished. 

In 2005, some company converted our building into a 32 story apartment building with a penthouse and two towers. The Waltower building is now apartments, the Scarritt Building is soon to be apartments with some retail and commercial on floors 1 and 2. The Rialto Building, of late the Ozark Building, is being converted into a high-end Marriott hotel, with restaurant. No telling how long all of that will take. I know they're making a lot of noise. Lot of noise. 

I'm still working on the courtyard there. I changed the way the wires ran for the lights, and I put up a couple more of those hanging basket things. (I don't want to do too much lest I defeat the whole purpose of living in an apartment instead of owning a home in the 'burbs.)

For this picture, the camera is facing north, and we do get some direct sunlight--just not all day. Like, I doubt I could grow tomatoes. Not real big ones, anyway. 

That's my blog post.  Just didn't want to get rusty. 

The Mysterious Room

It’s not that remarkable. As a telephone company repair technician I’ve been in thousands of houses, met thousands of customers, and fixed thousands of broken, deteriorated lines, jacks, and telephone sets. I have maybe a dozen or two funny stories. (Either “funny haha or “funny mysterious.”) Pretty low percentage. 

Well, maybe more. More come to you as you tell them, like telling jokes in a bar. “Reminds me of the time . . .” 

The one I was thinking about today concerned a customer who called in a report that his “phone was dead.” Obviously, a common malady in this line of business. The telephone company ran automated tests on reported lines and the result on this one was, short. 

Seven or eight times out of ten, a short in the absence of a ground and/or stray voltage meant the problem was going to be in a phone jack or wiring inside the house, so when I arrived  and no one was home, I walked around to the back to see if I could isolate the trouble to the house wiring, leave a “no access” card and move on to another job. 

Sure enough one of the inside wires had a short on it. There were a few inside wires going off in different directions, stapled to the siding, and I could see that the bad one led to what was probably a bedroom in a back corner of the house. I left it disconnected and hooked everything else back up—any other phones would work OK now—and wrote up a no access card. 

As I was about to hang the tag on the front doorknob, a car pulled into the driveway and a guy got out. I told him who I was and explained to him that his problem was caused by one of the lines running into his house and that I needed to go inside in order to fix it. 

OK, he said, and he opened the house up and let me inside. I saw a door that was obviously leading to the back bedroom where that bad line was headed, and I stepped toward it, saying something like, I'll need to check in here. 

He panics. “No!” he said. “Don’t go in there!”  He trotted toward the door to put himself between it and me.  “It’s OK. Don’t go in there!  Just leave that wire disconnected. I don’t need it. Just never mind.  You can go on. It’s good.” Or words to that effect. 

That’s my story. Once in awhile I wonder what the hell was going on in there, because I left as he suggested, never did go back, and never found out. 

Not Illegal

You gotta think,
no, that's not really a good parking spot.

 

What to Blog

happy shiny clean people inside

 

What to blog . . . what to blog . . . there must be something to write about. Well, here's a picture. It depicts the Church of Scientology headquarters here in Kansas City (Everythin's up-to-date in Kansas City) which I found somewhat dismaying when I ran across it last week. I had a brief exposure to Scientology years back in the form of being approached more than once by a young lady who wanted me to buy that Dianetics book.  This is the book that outlines the scientific method used to "clear" somebody. I say "scientific" because it involved using tin cans connected with strings, or something--can't remember--and something called "e-rays," which is pretty darn sciency, fer sher. The girl's name was Mary.  She was pretty, somewhere in age between high school and legal drinking age, and, I feel, was a very lost soul. When I asked about her circumstance, she said she was working for the Scientology group in order to be able to buy the treatment proposed by L. Ron Hubbard to become a "Clear."  I guess they charge money for that. Hmmm . . .  Anyway, she wasn't finished and was only a "pre-Clear."  As one journalist explained it, this is when you're only part-way through the program and your mind was still clouded by the occasional thought. Fast forward to witnessing Tom Cruise explaining Scientology to some TV host and laughing maniacally in a fit of Charlie-Sheen-like narcissistic fervor. Anyway, no. 

The only other thing of interest might be this photo taken quite accidentally of someone in the building across the street from me trying to smoke a cigarette in their apartment without setting off the smoke alarm. I was taking a picture of the building in general, saw this open window while processing the picture in photoshop, and zoomed in on it. So, no, I'm not actually a stalker. Not intentionally, anyway. 

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy. 

Tipping (not cow)

 Yesterday I took a little walk and wound up in a coffee shop, thinking a cup of coffee and a cookie would be nice, even if I was sure it would be overpriced. That's just the way it goes. The place was nice, kind of old-fashioned looking, lots of that prerequisite for downtown hipster dining--exposed brick. Two young ladies behind the counter were chatting idly.  I asked for a cup of coffee and a certain type of cookie. I was handed the cookie on a plate and the self-serve coffee cart was pointed out to me. 

I got a cup of coffee--and I mean a "cup." As in, a small traditional coffee cup barely capable of containing one generous slosh of coffee. I sat down, ate the cookie, drank the coffee. As I rose to leave, I noticed a sign on another cart by the wall that read, "Please help us by clearing your own dishes." 

Feeling rebellious, I left without doing so. My reasoning was that I had added a tip to the debit card screen--there were instructions there to guide me: 20%=GREAT service. 15% GOOD service, 10% adequate service, or something like that. The amount wasn't actually calculated for me.  At the time, I thought, well, I'll go with 15%, which is my default tip anyway. So, I tipped about a dollar for basically being handed a cookie and told where the coffee was, and then asked to clean up after myself. 

I don't care. I understand that the two young ladies were probably being underpaid and tipping is more or less built into this particular economy. It's just that it doesn't really make sense. 

I didn't plan this, but it so happens that later I was looking at Google maps and I saw the coffeeshop and decided to read the reviews. The usual.  A handful of effusive, breathless 5-star descriptions, a bunch of 4-star, a handful of 1 or 2 star, these being cases where the customer asked for a Big Mac and was told they would have to go to McDonalds, and other stuff like that. 

I decided to write a review. I was very generous, but I did mention the tip business. This is just because I feel the tide turning on this and I wanted to raise the volume a little bit. Food industry workers need to be paid more. This is obvious by the number of help wanted signs you see everywhere. But, workers should be able to make a living without relying on something as random as customer tipping, where they are penalized when business is slow, or penalized when the kitchen is slow and customers get upset--all these things, and more, are unfair. 

Am I wrong here?  Of course I am. 

Night Life

 For me, there is not much night life downtown. There's a couple of Netflix binge episodes I turn to before staggering to bed, and that's pretty much it, most of the time. Here is a picture of downtown, though, taken a little less than an hour after sundown on a Wednesday night (Feb. 9,) featuring about two human beings and as many cars. This is about two and a half blocks from my apartment building. I must have been going to the store. 

I've never eaten at Pickleman's.  It's one of those sandwich stores that serves them up each built upon its own laterally bisected loaf of bread. They're into bread, and I hear you get about fifteen choices of what kind you want your lunchmeat on. Too many carbs. Not a fan. 

Speaking of carbs, here's the real culprit . . . never been in here, either, but it's nice to have just a little taste of New York. 

Starting Up

First I add here, just for documentation purposes, (which I have found helpful in the past,) that here on day 8 of the virus, I am almost completely restored to what passes for normalcy nowadays. A home Covid test produced negative results, so it was just some nasty bug.  Very nasty. There's also a chance it was a Covid variant, since the symptoms aligned perfectly, and home tests are subject to false negatives to a greater degree than "real" tests. Whatever. 

Further, the grand "go car-less" experiment continues to work. We do have the one car, a nice 2013 sedan, so we're not talking radical lifestyle change here--just a bit of tweaking. I enjoy not owning a car. It fits in nicely with my not owning a house. Maybe one has to be old to feel it, but this ownership thing, this Feng Shui nightmare, is not only not what it's cracked up to be, but is a somewhat negative force. 

The downtown move is working. Pictured, above, is our patio, or courtyard, if you will. It's no suburban paradise, true, but I really like it. Sitting here, I can look up and see four historic buildings, all art-deco, all very calming, somehow. At the time this picture was taken, we just underwent a severe wind event. I had just installed that basket with the vines draping off, and we're working on putting some lights there along the brick wall. Being able to step outside for some fresh air, look up at the sky, more than makes up for the lack of a dramatic downtown street view or vista. This is more practical and realistic, though I admit the photo ops are a little more scarce. A pair of peregrine falcons nest on the opposite wall of the building to the north (left) in this picture, so occasionally we will see one or both of them swooping around for a meal.  I just read they are the fastest animals on earth, known to achieve speeds during flight in a dive, of over 240 miles per hour.  That is seriously impressive.

More on the downtown thing: I have acquaintances who don't understand why I wanted to move downtown. I'm kind of done explaining it to them and they will probably never understand that once the initial adaptation is accomplished, this feels very neighborly and safe and far, far more interesting. I couldn't stand to be back at the old house, sitting there wondering what's going on in the world that I can't see. Kansas City is, of course, no New York, or Boston, or LA, but it's big enough, and I have no more intention of defending it in that regard than I have of explaining the allure to my aforementioned friends. Life's too short. I think you do have to be kind of old, at least, to fully understand how profound a statement that really is. 

I will end this by reiterating just how good it feels to almost be over this goddam virus. 

Day 6

 Yes, believe it or not, the virus is still working its magic on me. Just to a lesser degree. This morning we both took a home Covid test, and both turned up negative.  So it is something else. I'm better today, in fact I'm getting ready to take a walk outdoors, but I have to say this is the longest I've ever had to endure the worst phase of one of these viruses. In my experience, the worst is always over in three days. So, yeah, this is Day 6. The good news is I'm getting plenty of rest.  

It's hard to come up with a worthy blog post based on a week of days spent sleeping and/or moaning and whining and/or puling. The wind has died down to normal levels, and I say normal with some reservations because up here atop the north facing river bluff the wind freight trains in across all the open space above the ancient river bed, unhindered by trees or buildings, and then finds itself being funneled and multiplied by the halls of downtown buildings. But we're used to that. Chicago isn't "the windy city." It's one of many, I suspect.

I'm better. I'll try to be more present. Time for my walk. Or maybe I'll take another nap. 

The Epizoodic

 In a world where we actually have no control whatsoever over the various forces around us, we turn to explanations, theories, and so on, to discover the ruling principles under which we so laboriously toil. Two days ago I mounted a hanging basket (sort of) on the far brick wall surrounding our patio. I had to drill holes in the grout between the bricks and sink a metal screw part way into it--this was to hold up the metal basket. 

The building is 90 years old. As I drilled the first hole, I had to push pretty hard, as the grout was hard, but at some point, an inch or two in, a puff of fine, white dust shot out of the hole, around the drill bit, and right into my mouth. 

24 hours later, I get a pain in my chest, and congestion. It feels like one of the final stages of the flu, whenever I used to get that, only without the preceding post nasal drip, sore throat and runny nose. Just went straight to the bronchial tube. Given the lack of other symptoms, I'm worried that the century old silicate dust (not good for you) got in my lungs and now I'm going to get some kind of exotic ailment.  

So now, day 2, and I'm actually relieved, somewhat, that I now have the more commonly experienced symptoms of a virus--fever, head congestion and headache, body aches, chills, and still the crap in my chest that hurts like hell when I cough.  But it's a known quantity, and at least up until now, always passes. I just haven't been this hammered for a long time. My head is swimming, and I'm sure this post is rife with grammatical errors and logic fails. 

I'm looking for pity here. I don't often look for pity, but I am so piteous it's only right to do so at this point. 

I should probably go out for a walk soon just to get the blood flowing and maybe clear the lungs out a little bit. The wind is blowing HARD. The basket I hung on the brick wall has vines draping down from it, and at the moment, they are perfectly horizontal, flapping and quivering like a battle flag. I'll probably stay inside. 

If you're here, reading this, thanks for visiting the blogger.com site. I apologize for any inconvenience. Of course, it's not like you had to walk a mile to get here--it's just clicks and stuff. Very little energy required, though I'm about to conk out from the effort of writing. 

A Downward Spiral

 

This is the stairwell that takes one from the end of the hallway where my apartment door is, down to the lobby. Built in 1933, a lot of the features in the building are ornate like these wrought iron balusters. 

On the Off Chance

 If you came here, thank you! No new posts but perhaps more to come soon. 

Thanks.

Meanwhile, here is a picture of the City Diner in Kansas City, Missouri. 

R.D.

One Afternoon in New Mexico

Driving alone on U.S. Route 66  through New Mexico in a car with no speedometer is problematic. There’s no way to gauge your speed except by the tune of the engine and the tires on the pavement, and the slow truck I passed half an hour ago just passed me. I sped back up, once again wishing the radio worked. 

The highway turned into the main drag of some small town. Baking under a merciless sun was an intersection with a stop sign, a two-pump gas station, and a small building floating in an empty sea of gravel with no cars in it. A sign said “open.” From the name, it looked like a Mexican restaurant, and it felt like it was about lunch time, so I pulled off the highway and parked by the entrance. It was a hot day and as I walked around the front of my old Chevy I heard the engine ticking as it started to cool down.

It was cooler and dark inside. There was a scattering of empty tables and chairs in the area in front of the kitchen. I took a seat. 

The waitress was probably the owner, and the cook. She appeared and set a glass of water down and looked at me. I set the menu down and said, “I’ll have a bowl of the chili.  And a coke.”

“Green or red?” 

It took me a second. If I was from around here, I’d probably have an opinion about that. “What’s the green chili?” I asked. 

Without skipping a beat she replied in her thick Mexican accent, “The green chilis are younger.” I was only eighteen. What did I know from green chili? A red flag way back in my subconscious started waving back and forth trying to get my attention. 

“I’ll take the red, I guess.” She smiled and nodded and disappeared into the back. A few minutes later she returned and set my glass of iced coke down as well as a thick, white ceramic bowl full of chili--red chili.

I ate some of it, and it was good--real good--maybe a little spicy for my taste, but bearable. I ate some more. Outside, another car pulled up next to mine, its tires crunching on the hot gravel, and four guys got out. They were about my age and demographic, wearing blue jeans and t-shirts and fooling around and laughing too loud as they got out of the car. The came inside and occupied a table near the door. 

As I finished my bowl I watched this little drama play out. There was laughing and joking that stopped only long enough for one of the boys to order. “Chili,” he said.

I waited. 

“Red or green?” More laughter and the guy said, with perhaps a tint of bravado in his voice, “Green.” A moment later the owner returned with the bowl and set it down. The boy picked up a spoon and ate him a big mouthful while his friends giggled. 

He stood abruptly. “God DAMN!” He bent over the table and grabbed a water glass and drank, and some water spilled onto the front of his t-shirt.  His friends laughed even more loudly. I figured this guy must have lost a bet. 

I got up and paid the lady. She was friendly and polite and paid no attention to the rowdy bunch at the table. I walked around them and went outside, got in my car and left. I pulled onto the highway and accelerated until the singing of the tires sounded about right, and wished again that the radio worked. 

Collin's Singular Day

 For the weekly Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner, inspired by the picture here. 

Collin was not his name, but its rough equivalent, which was "young one." One day he came upon something he had never seen before. He kept his facial expression neutral as he regarded the sphere that hovered in front of him. In his mind, Collin thought of the sphere using a short string of symbols which would roughly translate into English as "fruit without a tree." It really was puzzling. It was the wrong color for him to even think about eating it, but it was puzzling and Collin liked puzzles. 

Collin heard clicking noises that seemed to come from inside his head. He thought of them as "beetles inside Collin." He found the noises unpleasant but he moved closer to the sphere anyway, and the noises became louder. 

The puzzle of the fruit without a tree gnawed at Collin. He held out his hand and was able to grab it. When he did so, he felt pain in his hand that made him fall back onto the ground.  He did not have a symbol for that. It was a totally new thing and therefore would be its own symbol. When Collin looked up from his supine position, the fruit without a tree rose up into the sky and in a moment or two, ceased to exist. 

Collin rose and returned to the band. He found some fruit in the tree, where it properly belonged, and ate it. That night he dreamt about the fruit without a tree. 

Impotent Rant

Just wondering if we could all get by OK if all the headlines to news articles were just left off. They are never totally accurate, and are just designed to sound alarming. If all you read were the headlines, you'd think it was the end of the world--asteroids and all. 

For some reason, journalists and media outlets think that the ordinary rules of responsible journalism don't count when it comes to the headlines at the top of the article. Who says? 

The exception is articles about Marjorie Taylor Greene, because she actually says stupid, inflammatory and outrageous things all the time, and it would be hard to misrepresent her idiocy with creative headlines. But besides that, is there no way to hold journalism responsible for the abuse of headline content? 

OK.  Sorry. Impotent rant mode off. 

Five Things I Don't Want to See in 2022

This is in response to this blog entry way over there at Wordpress, where Salted Caramel asks the question, what five things would I love disappearing in 2022. The challenge here would be to keep such a list halfway down the single digits like that. I'll give it a try on 1.4 (approx.) cups of coffee. 

No. 1. The anonymous 7/8ths of the Internet.

Too many people (?) and too much information and too many opinions that are mostly irrelevant, misleading, or misguided. I'm just guessing, really, that the amount if about 7/8ths, discounting advertising. Instead, maybe to use the Internet should require some sort of controlled registration. Maybe then people would calm down and/or try harder to avoid embarrassing themselves and be held accountable, at least socially, for what they submit online. 

No. 2. All self-driving cars that might begin to show up this year or next year or soon, and "driver assistance" features. 

Who thought this was a good idea? Who thought it was a good idea to allow some software to control a ton of rolling metal with the only warning to the human occupant to "remain vigilant?"  Who are they trying to kid? 

No. 3.  The very idea that computers are best used to replace humans, rather than assist them. 

This is only slightly related to No. 2. I'm talking about the corporate use of computers that are being utilized mainly to allow the companies to hire less people. I mean when you call just about any company, like your insurance company, say, and get a robot voice that directs you to a "call-tree" to ostensibly route your call to the correct department. Typically it takes about ten to twenty minutes to get this accomplished, when a human operator could do it in about five seconds. And I'm being generous. Very often, a caller never gets to talk to a human, ever, and their question will remain unanswered, and they hang up and still have the original problem. This is not good service, and this puts people out of work. 

I add that it does not hurt my feelings to cause corporations to have to spend more money to conduct business. I don't buy the argument that money saved will be passed on to the consumer. Additionally, when a single human can have more money than Argentina, then something is wrong. 

No. 4. Bad driving.

That's such a huge category, it's tempting to pick one or two peeves, but I think all bad driving can be boiled down to one or two problems. But I'll start out by saying most humans must be pretty good drivers, because if you consider how many thousands, or millions, of cars drive through your town every day, and how few accidents there are, it speaks well of us. But when you do see bad driving--and it's frequent enough to cause stress--it's because either the other driver seems to be in a hurry, or the other driver is not actually paying enough attention to what they're doing. Let's make it three things: the natural tendency for humans to be self-serving, or just competitive. 

Once in awhile we are in a hurry. No denying that, but just a little thought will reveal that driving faster is not going to help that much, if at all. And if a person is in a hurry every single f*cking morning on the way to work, may I suggest to them that they set the alarm clock for, say, seven minutes earlier. They'll hardly notice. And then, most of the time, NONE OF US is in a hurry. C'mon. 

Paying attention while driving seems like such a no-brainer, right? Maybe we should reinstate Driver's Ed classes in school and go ahead and show the gory movies to demonstrate that what car manufacturers tell about how safe their cars are is just advertising BS, and there is no safer way to be than to NOT GET IN AN ACCIDENT. 

I don't know what to say about competitive driving. That refers to the idle non-thinking response of speeding up because it looks like someone is going to get ahead of you. Think about it. There are always cars ahead of you. Lots and lots of them. As far as the eye can see, quite literally. You can't get ahead of them all. There are lots of cars behind you all the time, too, if that makes you feel any better. Get a grip. Despite this being America, home of the self-sufficient, freedom loving, gun-toting cowboy, driving, especially on an Interstate, is a group activity. Most of us, if we square danced like we drove, we would be kicked out of the barn. 

No. 5. Mean people. 

Get some therapy. 

Out of the Frying Pan

 This is my take on the picture, below, offered by A Writer's Community as inspiration for flash fiction. 

It would have been the hottest summer on record. Plants withered, dried up and died, and wildfires cropped up seemingly out of nowhere. The west coast of North America had erupted in flames, and the smoke from the fires blocked the sunlight over much of the central part of the continent. Although small groups of people huddled here and there in relatively cool pockets--mostly in what was once Canada and Alaska--in truth, there was no one interested enough to record such a summer. Survival had become so difficult as to demand all the attention and time a person could afford to give. 

It was the same all over, and getting worse, but only one band of a few dozen humans from America had the resources to escape. The ship, named The Phoenix in one uninspired moment, rose from the flames, attained orbit in eight minutes, and from that lofty perch set out on a years long journey headed for the most likely exoplanet their astronomers could find. 

In another uninspired moment it was named “Planet B,” like, “Plan B.”  Get it? Only by definition plan A was always preferred, and this was the case here, for during the colonists’ first winter the temperature dropped to -143F, and the last survivor of the Planet B expedition was only barely able to look up at the sky and see the arm of the galaxy known as the Milky Way set behind the mountain. It contained billions of stars, old Sol among them, but there was no one out there. 

Ground Hog Year (!?)

2021 was so bad, the best thing that happened to me was after my Covid vaccinations, I got to quit worrying about dying. How do you brag about that in your Annual New Years newsletter to the family members? 

My take on it is that we just love round numbers, and cycles, which help us pretend that we understand what's going on, and of course celebrate the idea, mistaken as it may be. The only problem is that when you eventually realize that it's all artificial, you still feel like you've been robbed of something, but--here's the rub--it's something that's not real, so you can't go find it and get it back. That leaves only one option, which is to just move on, and yet you can't, because after December comes January . . . again.

And I might not have thought of this except for Facebook. Facebook loves anniversaries of all sorts and because it has a perfect memory, it is always able to remind you.  It’s somebody’s birthday, or you and so-and-so have been friends for a year. Omigawd. 

And then this: yesterday, on January 1, 2022, I’m sitting in my living room drinking coffee and perusing the Internet and occasionally looking out the window. It is snowing. It hasn’t piled up yet, but I can see it beginning to cover the blades of grass on the lawn and there are miniature swirling, white drifts across the boards of our deck. I open Facebook on my laptop and see,

“One year ago today.  See your memories.”

and my post from January 1, 2021 (“One year ago today.) It is a picture of my deck, taken from that very window,  covered with a couple inches of snow, as was the yard below. 

I had written, "2021 is quiet so far."  And it was.  And it is.