Breaking Up With Sandy - The Rope Boys Are At The Door

"Big Boy" Flyer

5:47pm Northern Virginia.

            Still raining but more windy. Drove over to Columbia Pike for emergency supplies.

1 gallon Lemonade

2 Magnums of Canada Dry Ginger Ale

1 Jumbo Petroleum Jelly

4 Large Petroleum Jelly

            Let me tell you why petroleum jelly belongs in the emergency kit. And yes, petroleum jelly is the generic term for Vaseline®.

            Yesterday I mounted, attached, a window well cover outside the west facing window here in the Bamboo Room. Drilled holes in the bricks, slathered on a clear silicone sealant and screwed that baby in. The sealant promised a watertight seal after 3 hours.

            During the recording of today’s ArtChat Podcast I noticed dripping inside of the cover. I went out and discovered the sealant had not dried and sealed. With gusts up around 50 and the hard rain the sealant had been washed and worn away. And that is when I thought, “Vaseline!”

            Brilliant. Had about a third of a jar in the Bamboo Room closet.

Goat Head by Ai Wei Wei

            Man, it was windy. I pried off the cover from the jar and the wind whipped it out of my fingers, out of sight in the direction of the front yard. Who cares? I slathered every bit of petroleum left in the jar along the edges where the sealant had washed away. The wind was slapping me with the umbrella while I was dabbing gobs of jelly in the cracks and crevasses of the cover.

            That Vaseline went on real slick, but, I thought, what if that washes away, or another window leaks or the basement floods? I needed more of that colorless goo.

            Now I am back at the beginning of this page. My present caught up to my present so to speak.

            And now for the weather report.

            Here are some pictures of the work I did on the window and in the background I captured in great detail the warp and weft and whisking motion of the maples in the high winds. I just checked the temperature. It is 74 degrees here in the Bamboo Room and the winds are calm. Humidity is right around 93% and the dew point is actually not due for a few more hours. I will get back to you on that. Oh, and the story of Victor and Vernon - The Rope Boys.

Breaking Up With Sandy - The first wave hello

               I just did a walk around the Bamboo Room. Looking for leaks. The windows are holding. It’s still early, 12:55pm in Northern Virginia. The Weather Channel says that power could go out any time. How does it work if an advertiser pays for placement but the power goes out where the ads were paid to play? Who cares?

               I have been bombarded with the message that Sandy will be a catastrophic event. I understand now how people told to evacuate, don’t. I mean, it is like my brain doesn't flip into “fight or flight.” Through the windows I see rain and the maple trees. The rain, moved by the wind, slaps the sides of things and skips off the street before settling down into the gutters, then collects under the street and joins joins with other tributaries to drain into the Potomac.

               This is all much less energetic than the special effects on a cheesy, made-for-tv disaster flick.

               Sandy is such a personable, informal name for a storm. Sort of like naming the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan Little Boy and Fat Man. How often big things star with little things, though. 

Big Gene's Beat

Beatlemania

Summer stops on the sidewalk
and I'm back in Bakersfield. seven,
barefooted
on the cool wet sidewalk.
The sprinklers water the
Girard’s lawn and my legs from the
knees down,
the golden hair on my
July mahogany legs.


Not just a tan -
ironing skin we call it because
it is still warm in front of the tv
when Ed Sullivan introduces the Beatles
and right that second badminton racquets,
badminton racquets became guitars.

Roses the Twins

          First of all, they are not identical twins. They look nothing like each other.

          “We aren’t related,” I once heard them say, in unison.

          Roses the Twins live with blue herons upstream where the river slows into little mirror pools. They are about my age, whatever that is. Like me, they have lived in newMain as long as I can remember. It makes them smile to be addressed as Roses. They have such nice smiles and so that is what I do.

          Roses the Twins share a bicycle. Not a two-seater, mind you. They are always coming up with a new surprise when they ride their bicycle.

          I’ve seen them riding with Roses the Twins on the seat while Roses the Twins pumps the pedals standing up. Another time Roses the Twins sat on the handlebars, legs stretched forward on either side of the front wheel, Roses the Twins on the seat behind her, both hands on the handlebars. Oh, and I saw Roses the Twins sitting pretty as you please on the bicycle. arms straight out to the side, while Roses the Twins ran alongside pushing the bicycle.

          One day I saw all three in the Evening Meadow, both Roses the Twins and the bicycle. They were stretched out on a picnic blanket, eating little sandwiches of homemade bread and some of the cheese Ginny sells.

          Even the bicycle looked happy.

"To Herd Dogs" - an excerpt

with Kindness-Loving-Us

Such pretty flowers, these

night flowers need to be touched.

They don’t look like much after dark,

with full moonlight.

pale tungsten.

A cold glow

warm to the touch.

                       Deer blossoms

How so these flowers grow…

Who waters these deer blossoms?

In my hand, like music.

Two notes,

a happy interval of petals.

Autumn comes to this meadow.

She comes

where the night is sleeping.

Yes tonight,

she comes where the night is sleeping.

                       She says…

“This is

a good place

to

herd

dogs.”

-- Peach

The Cockatoo Lounge

Don't feed the cockatoo.

        I saw a picture today. A fella had fastened a big wood chair to a tree limb about twenty feet off the ground. A big chair made with weathered white planks. The note with the picture said he calls it the Cockatoo Lounge.

        I imagine I could be happy in the Cockatoo Lounge. Of course, I’d have to either add stools and chairs to the tree, or build the damn thing around the tree. Wheelchair access, gotta have access and mobility for those that wants to partake of the fruits and pleasures of the Cockatoo Lounge.

                                                            only one chair in

                                                            the Cockatoo Lounge...

                                                            eucalyptus              

In A Silent Way

Buffalo Shadows

               This morning I paid attention to the sound of sunrise. A song, really. It reminded me of the  Coltrane song, In A Silent Way. I have a Miles Davis version. (look up specific recording date, album, musicians etc…)

Instead of a single legato horn, dawn started with the longest of legato thrums. Earth quickening to the daytime meter.

               I don’t mean the 60 cycle hum that is ubiquitous wherever electricity flows. Fluorescent light shimmy sound, nor refrigerant compressors snap on, chugh off, snap on, chugh off, snap on, chugh off…

               Dawn starts with a sub frequency dynamo spins so slow and steady with earth brruum. With earth brrum.

               Long low notes slow pulse.

               Then wind like a synthesizer swells.

               This must be how angels sound. These voices, what else to call any noise but a voice? Maybe if I were more familiar with these voices… Voices of old things, sand piled in a dune, on a beach, pressed, stored, lifted and weathered into a cliff. Sand hopping, slipping, sifting, great clouds of it, ‘dust devils’, puffs when fat rain falls, sand slumping, sand mud muddy, quicksand. The wind/sand sound is just the barest beginning of today’s synth like swells.

               Now the brushes, not drum sticks, but, eucalyptus trees; the eucalyptus trees that line either side of the dirt road from last night to this morning. A long tunnel of tree sighs, creaks, moans and branches brushes. How like a river this tunnel of trees, this eucalyptus hallway, this wooden course. How like a river the wind in the trees is.

               Next geese pass low over the house with sound nothing like honks. More heraldic, announcing another day is here.

               “Harken, the new day dawns,” they sing in unison. “Your midnight fears are away with night.”

               “Awake the hell up and let’s jump with the morning. Jump the morning. Jump jump-jump. Alive with the morning, awake the hell up.”

               Are these really geese hollerin’? One dawn without garbage trucks and leaf blowers and I am asking myself.

               Are these really geese? A noisy, talkative tribe. Song sing sounding sacred and common. The Holy Vernacular I’ll call it. The regional colloquialism of bushes and bob-o-links.

               Go the crows.

        As goose feathered song fades the geese go and crows come the crackle of drum sticks, paradiddles. Strokes, flams, paradiddles and rolls. The sound now of starlings rushing first a river then trickle then a rush cascade a waterfall then a river an ocean. Truly no two snapshots the same. If I blink rapidly the starlings sudden stop, stutter step, to strobe effect.