Experience
Walking away from class yesterday, there was a strange conversation:
Mind if I ask you something?
No, go right ahead
I’m trying to keep things together that have come out during the class so I just have to ask—you haven’t ever joined a circus have you?
No, I can’t say that I have.
Sometimes it seems like you’ve done almost everything, so I just wanted to make sure that there was something you hadn’t done or been involved with.
Today, the first thing I read was this:
Leverage
Ideas surface that cannot be written out, due to intense pressure and procrastination. I haven’t been this blocked-up as far as writing goes since I broke my ankle years ago. Sympathy pains, I suspect.
Just an aside—I keep crossing paths with a poem written by Ralph Burns, who was always trying to get me into his poetry classes at UALR. It is dedicated to Simone Weil, who famously claimed that her body was a lever. I begin to like that analogy more and more as I think about issues of causality. Ralph’s poem just sticks with me somehow and I get tired of looking it up so I’ll place it here.
Not surprising
Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 55% General American English |
| 15% Dixie |
| 15% Upper Midwestern |
| 15% Yankee |
| 0% Midwestern |
I come from nowhere, it seems.
My mother claims that I developed all of my speech patterns from television. I guess midwestern dialects were poorly represented in the media content of the 60s and 70s.
Industrial Music redux
I thought there might be a break in the noise, so I wrote a summative post. Then, five or six hours later, I was awakened by Krista prodding me.
“Hey, hearing-person—what is that noise?”
It sounded like an attack of crickets on crack. I went to the window, and it wasn’t coming from outside. I went into the living room. No, it wasn’t coming from there either—no technological malfunctions. I looked out the peep-hole in the door.
It seemed unlikely that someone was throwing a rave in the hallway this early in the morning, so I suspect that the flashing strobe lights and screaming crickets must mean that a fire alarm was going off. I saw a neighbor carrying out their trash, so I deduced that it must be a false alarm. I went back to bed, and explained the noise to the non-hearing person. Then, I lit a cigarette.
Krista got dressed and crutched to the door. She opened it, and then announced that everyone was standing outside in their pajamas. I caved, and decided that maybe I should get dressed. Then, I was seized with the impression that I smelled smoke. Krista suggested that we grab the laptops and go downstairs. I thought to myself that it’s become weird when the first thing you think of saving is a computer.
I opened the door and noticed that there were half-a-dozen firemen in the hall now. I asked what was up.
“Equipment malfunction, most likely.”
I then realized the smoke I was smelling probably came from my cigarette.
Industrial Music
Moving into a northern climate has been a little odd for a guy raised in the dustbowl of California. For the past week, there has been a crew of guys outside my window trimming brush with chainsaws. It seemed like overkill to me, given that most of the brush had stalks less than an inch in diameter. The trees have barely begun to bud and are still dry and brown—and seem to have survived the onslaught of the chainsaw crew who have their sights set on smaller prey.
The noise proceeds for hours, and just when you think it is over, they fire up the wood chippers. The bass tones cause the foundation of the building to vibrate. After three days of this, I thought it might be peaceful.
Then, this morning I heard a different sound I couldn’t quite identify. Going to the window, it turned out to be leaf blowers. Five of them, to be exact. People marched along the path cut by the chainsaw brigade, creating the strangest chords. Each blower had a slightly different note, and they were modulating in such a way to provide a unique sort of industrial music. Then, a lawn mower so large that it required a trailer to cart the grass came around to provide a melody to match the blower rhythm—neatly hacking off the first half inch of grass to grow this year.
The sick thing is that the landscape only lost its coating of snow about two weeks ago, and it is still brown. But the weather is nice and the skies are blue; it will be green soon, and hopefully the industrial drone will subside.
