Home Life

God, Pop can sit out there all day - in the hot afternoon, with the air-conditioner running wonderfully inside the house. He won't even put his lawn equipment away first. He loves the cats, but ... he won't go out of his way for them. He knows the cats are afraid of that equipment and will stay out of our back yard so long as he leaves that stuff lying around. He is willing pay for their food and litter, and that is enough in his book, and it is certainly the main thing. My love won't feed a hungry belly. Nevertheless, if Pop is willing to suffer the heat, stay seated out there, then I can be at peace with the idea that he is not purposefully just making the cats suffer. He is just being himself, a little too self-centered. I cannot imagine myself staying out in that heat one minute longer than is absolutely necessary, especially when it is so blissfully cool inside.

At least I think I got the weed-eater figured out. I was out there with him for the first couple of hours. I think I can work it on my own now, replacing the string and everything. However, I am not sure that this is now understood to be my chore, in the way that mowing the lawn is. I'm not sure that Pop actually wants to give it up. He is a hearty soul. Naturally, I am not inclined to fight him for the job, not just because I am a very unhearty soul, at least when it comes to labor, but because I figure it is better that he expend some of his energy this way rather than, say, spending more time cleaning the house and stinking the place up with those sprays and cleansers. I imagine we'll see how things shake out over the next few weeks.

Old Poet

I posted on my social blog my personal bit about not having anything to watch over my meal, about suffering at having only my own paltry thoughts for company. In the discussion with Old Poet (instead of calling him Pig Shit), he dropped a good, hard line against my ode to books, in which I told him, without books I have nothing to think.

He said, "LOL anchor in a storm, boxes of books are heavy to move, they have great inertia, to abandon them would be like leaving solitary confinement, you would miss the cracks on the wall and long for the sound of paint peeling.. page by page.."

That's not bad at all. It does catch the shadow side of the business.

In any case, since then, another solution has occurred to me, for when I have nothing to watch while I am eating: my little memo pads of gold nuggets from the Three Journal (which I think I will start to call my Little Golden Books). I long ago dismissed the idea of being able to read while I eat, and so I was not inclined to see this answer. However, the charm about these memo pads with their little quotations is that it is not terribly inconvenient to read these over my meals. To be sure, desiring to preserve these with some carefulness, I cannot read them when I am eating fried chicken or pizza or tacos, any greasy hand-food. I also probably shouldn't eat them with Doritos or Cheetos, either, when I am having sandwiches. That's not too restrictive, but there is also probably a problem with buttered rolls, which does make for buttery fingers. That is a little harder on me, because rolls are a frequent part of my meal. However, so long as I can keep one hand clean, this should work.

Nevertheless, I am onto something. I enjoyed reading my gold nuggets very much, consisting as they do of snippets from my discussions with my old e-friends as well as the very best from authors and thinkers. There is that sense of intimacy about them that I have always sought in my writing projects. It feels a little more like eating with friends, my invisible friends.