Writing while traveling
And then this
A spring, the water
feeding on air
I thought,
Let the world be replenished
But, no, the world
replenishes itself
Loud current, green leaf
The fallen log
be runneth over
until rock:
Nature smoothes its future,
becomes hard as a fossil
in the tumbling flow
We are warned.
A funnel, an umbrella
The reverse of an umbrella
The force washes me now
downriver, everything
important
left behind
and I cannot
go back
to get it
Itinerant. Now there's a good word I don't use, have never used, to my recollection. It means "passing about a country". That's the adjective, as in "itinerant laborer" or "itinerant preacher". But there's also a noun version: "one who travels from place to place".
And I'm thinking this might be fitting for us as we head to Chicago tomorrow, knowing the route I'm looking at taking, off-highway, through all those random little Illinois farm towns, Raymond and Stonington; Blue Mound and Boody; Pontiac and Ransom...
Hotel lobby, the comings and goings of guests. I emailed a PDF of the house building plans to the front desk with a request that they print it for me. Information continues to trickle in, about what we will be doing. According to the itinerary Dan sent out to all of the participants by email, "This mission trip is an intergenerational trip" where we will be "building houses in a depressed area of Tijuana."
Last night Graham informed me he and I are in charge of Van 7. I thought that had an eponymous ring to it. "Van 7", like it's a movie, or at least there's a trailer for a putative thriller called "Van 7" where a couple of guys—brothers-in-law: one a pastor, the other an underachieving blogger—are part of a church group that goes into Mexico except their particular part of the group ends up getting lost, drives into a bad part of Tijuana, has to use their fledgling Spanish, a little bit of luck, and the grace of God to get out alive, et cetera. It's actually not a bad idea...
* The pillowcase. I wasn't happy with the resting place the lumpy pillowcase offered. It's not the pillowcase's fault. When I woke at night after I got the good air mat from Frank what woke me up was my sleeping mind's dissatisfaction with the lumpy pillowcase. It was lumpy, it was damp, it was full of dirty wadded-up clothes or my balled-up second towel. What ended up working the last night was to stuff just the bottom compartment of my backpack and then put the neck pillow on top of that. So forget the pillowcase.
* Backpacking airmats. Completely useless unless I can sleep on my back. What just gives me an everlasting chuckle is how somewhere during the first night as I was tossing and turning on my mat—and as Graham was tossing and turning on his—I heard him completely let the air out of his mat, like a mat assassination. I don't know if that is what he was trying to do, in some sort of "F this mat" move but as the air was going out I thought to myself, "We should probably move on from these mats..."
I. Neck Willow.
I'm an untapped resource. I'm a gathering storm.
"Place the six and the eight for $12 each." My total investment: $24. If either number is rolled before the next seven, I win $14. If a seven is rolled first, I lose both bets. If I hit a couple of my numbers, I deploy some of those profits as bets on the five and the nine. Then I have five, six, eight and nine covered. A seven still means I lose all of my chips on the table.
And tomorrow I will circumautolate another part of the country, virgin to me, assuming I make it onto the plane. We fly to AriZona to visit River's parents. They say they have enough water but I am afraid they will try to tap into her, claiming genetic rights of appropriation. Gila, Salt, Colorado, her. I imagine large red rock formations, poisonous creatures of sand, water-hoarding cacti, shimmers of heat appearing to rise in the distance off of the road we are traveling. Lizards, near-tropical birds, political animals, billboards, a pool, a cadre of golf courses. I need only the stars, a red light and enough sobriety to make a little sense of a timeless sky. I will not pack any of my meths but I shall be able to get plenty of them there, for paper scratch.
I. Strep To.
Who wants to riverboat gamble? Bramblewine, Charley Pride, kiss an angel good morning. At 4:35 a car on St. Ann honked, a woman whooped and I coughed this cough I've got, craning for health, for a clear cranium, for enriched uranium, for heavy water—Enough. It's not a cough I've got but a sore throat and a wicked one. All my life I'd hear about other people getting strep throat and I can't recall ever having it myself...until now? Dunh, dunh, dunhhhh! I have been under the weather for weeks and now I'm in New Orleans, Louisiana—what am I doing here? Sipping room coffee at five a.m. because I can't sleep and my throat hurts and I don't have my trusty foam contour pillow, upon which I have grown heavily reliant. The day will unfold, though, and it might just get better. The only tool of destruction I have here is the liquid—no grass and no pills. I have a legitimate chance of remembering the good time I'm going to have out there on those patchworked cobblestone streets in this old amorous city on the river...
September 3, 2016.
He and I are laid up, stuck, at Lambert. Our flight was scheduled for 11:05, pushed back to 2:25p. The plane is detained in Oklahoma City for maintenance. There was an earthquake north of there this morning, about seven o'clock. Some in St. Louis—my mom—said they felt the tremor. B and I were running, felt nothing.
I went and got us coffees, long line at Starbucks. There is TV noise, there are children, there are many aboard the blunderbuss of airport confusion. The board is clean except for our flight. Bad luck, bald luck, bad eagle. It's been awhile since I've had an unpleasant flight experience, not since a layover in Miami coming back from The Mexico in 2010. I can't recall what amount of time that required. There's a lady from my eventual flight on her phone, talking away. One call after the next, as if her talking keeps the phone charged. She's telling people the flight was canceled, and rescheduled. Not true. Alarmist. Unruly kids, agitated mother. I'm not long for this seat...
October 3, 2011
10:55 eastern time.
I have moused this little notebook from a cupboard at work. The market is bouncing again this morning: first down 95, then up 30, then down 90, now down 62. The S&P 500 is at 1125. I will wait until it hits 1080 to buy again.
My dad and I leave tomorrow to travel northeast. We will fly into Boston, spend one night in Ludlow (MA), drive up to Vermont for the Contrary Opinion Forum (three nights, Tues-Thurs), then return to Ludlow for four more nights. B—and my sister!—fly into Hartford on Saturday the ninth.
I am worried that the market (1) will fall—it's already been such a crummy three-month stretch; and (2) will hit my buy tripwire while I'm gone. I am also worried about ongoing furnace and AC installation/replacement while I'm away...
It is just shy of three in the morning on Saturday. I am here with B and our dog June. It was warm out yesterday, 91° or so, and it'll be warm soon enough here again today. I've got the AC going, set to 74° but the thermometer I've got has it at 75.9° in here. We brought a box fan along with us, and that's going, back in one of the bedrooms where B and June are sleeping. I couldn't really sleep or I just don't want to sleep. I like being awake when everything else is so quiet. I can take a nap today if I want.
We've camped here in the Park a couple of times before. This time we wanted to bring June and stay in a cabin. I can't sleep even a little at these temps in a tent. It's a little buggy in here. I know it's not a hotel room but within minutes of getting into the cabin I noticed a large spider clinging to the wall between the door and the sink cupboard...
Full travelogue here...
JBR.com 