Almost Ready to Blog Again

I'm getting tired of being a sadsack. She's been gone too long for me to act like I care as much as I do.

Stay tuned. Maybe we'll call this Project Recovery.

We Need More Scaffolding

Across the street from the window of the second floor room where people get coffee and sit on sofas, the insurance agent is having the house he occupies rebricked.

Re- makes it sound like it used to have bricks, but I'm virtually sure that the only bricks that house pretends to have are a kind of odd aluminum siding. I cold be wrong, they could be just very well laid bricks. In any case they only go halfway up the house and, judging from the scaffolding and the ascending lines of bricks, I'm assuming that he's having the whole thing bricked in.

Did I tell you before about the dreams that I have? That I am doing design work INSIDE of the computers I face everyday? I am responsible to physically push words and columns and spacing and leading around. By hand. It's never difficult, but always tedious. I wake from such dreams wanting to ask for money back. But its a long drive to church from our house so I just mumble and gripe all morning instead.

These bricklayers writhe through the crisscrosses of scaffolding like fish through seaweed. They treat the four by sixes they walk on like magic carpets which seem to fly up onto their shoulders and then shoot out of their hands -- landing on more scaffolding mili-seconds before their construction boots land on what would have otherwise been nothing but a twelve foot drop.

It's the most mundane magical thing going in town. I'm sure of it. But it doesn't seem to be showing up in the ENTERTAINMENT section of the paper.

I wonder if they dream scaffolds like I dream layout and design. I wonder if the scaffolds have become such integrated parts of their bodies that sometimes they try to shoot four by sixes up into the rafters of their garage to ascend and pull down the Christmas tree. I wonder if they visit their friends houses and measure the space in terms of scaffold ladders.

What if everything had scaffolding everywhere? What if permanence and finality were the exception rather than the rule. And of course I mean "finality" with irony. Don't be absurd. Every storefront is simply a measurement of the last storefront's deficiencies, also a stopgap measure until the standards shift and sufficiency becomes decay.

Work is good, but

"Jobs" are bad.

I'm coming to make that more universal observation after previously only holding it for particular jobs. I'm willing to go out on a limb now.

Work is good; a job is bad.

I wish I could send myself an email

Back in time or forward in time. Either way. I'd just like to remind myself about some things. I'm not thinking about the Big things either -- stock market windfalls and such. I'm also not thinking about the really small things (remember to pick up milk or Karen's going to beat your ass). Other stuff like, say new years resolutions that I think of in July. Favorite tastes that may taste good in a smoothie only there's no time to make Smoothies in the middle of life.

Ear Buds

Does anyone else think that this is a very wierd name to give a technology? I mean I *get it*. They blossom music into your ears. Great metaphor, but still, the idea of pushing something called a "bud" into my ear just feels completely odd. A strange aural violation.

BUT these "buds" are my salvation. Everytime the banging of the boiler starts up -- what? did you think that it had gone away? just because i wasn't whining about it regularly on my blog? oh no, i still work inside the cavernous innards of a company that does something I'm still not exactly sure of, but that has incredible employee benefits -- everytime I hear the first ominous belch, in go the buds.

A few of you asked if I had moved offices or something. No. I just found buds. I'm thinking of using them next time I have a conversation with Richard.

Has Anyone Ever Died of a Swollen Uvula?

Because if they did, I realized as I lay in my bed trying to hold the panic at bay, having exhausted the ligaments in my jaw by holding it wide enough to stare at my obscenely absurdly large and pinkish white eleventh thumb, if they did, it must have been a horribly embarrassing ordeal for the family; an entire life rendered into naught but a cocktail party punchline with something as silly as an allergic reaction to hummus combined with alcohol (source: careful combing through seven pages of googled folk wisdom).

I got up to blog this entry only briefly before I return to my (death?)bed to lie awake until the sun rises and Dr. Hennessey's answering service will take my first of 22 calls.

I stumble up the driveway in the dark, two beers past where I should've stopped,

and in my head or heart wherever such things come from I write a little song:

I'm afraid that skunks are everywhere,
When the Moon is lying low
My heart hurtles through nocturnal air
Always unfaithful to the bow...

I can barely stay awake long enough to type thi...