Category: Uncategorized

So, earlier today I was working with my grandfather and because of a simple miscommunication, I managed to scratch my left hand twice in 10 seconds on the same rusty nail, drawing blood in both places. Hooray! I immediately stopped everythign I was doing and cleaned out both wounds with hydrogen peroxide, then applied triple antibiotic and bandaids. Then repeated these steps again after about an hour, since my bandaids weren’t adequately applied.

According to dictionary.com, tetanus is “An acute, often fatal disease characterized by spasmodic contraction of voluntary muscles, especially those of the neck and jaw, and caused by the toxin of the bacillus Clostridium tetani, which typically infects the body through a deep wound. Also called lockjaw.” But neither wound was deep. Just tiny scratches. I figure since it lives in an oxygen-rich environment (rust), the anaerobic environment created by hydrogen peroxide should have adequately prevented any infection from these tiny scratches.

Plus, I have no medical insurance or income to pay for shots. Here’s hoping I don’t start going into spasms and die!

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

-Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President (1858-1919)

I have my copy right here in front of me. I actually made two copies, but one of them can only be run in a computer, while this one, labelled only ‘COPY’, has been tested to work in a standard DVD player. Now the question comes: Where should I put it? Where can I put it that it will definitely be seen? How can I be sure someone puts it in a DVD player?

Do I slip it into one of the DVDs at the local library? Do I sell it to Zia inside a used CD or DVD, and hope it makes it to a customer? Do you think I can get a Zia employee to simply give it to someone as a ‘freebie’ or rare ‘bootleg’? Maybe if I sell it online, it will have value, and certaily if someone pays for it, they’ll watch it, right?

I’d love any other suggestions. Also, anyone whose computer is set up to output to VHS, let me know; I’d love to get a VHS copy of this running around. Really, I’m just glad I got the copy made in time. Here’s to Apple!

Words pass into my head as a matter of course, and some are endowed with intensity and force, but today the words that have caused me the most grief have floated my way on the winds like light, dead leafs. They caught up in the works of my body, twisting themselves where they didn’t belong, and I have been tightening like a network of old, rusty springs- and there is acid to them, and I am wearing down. An ancient automaton of the world before computers and robots and before anyone thought to build something to intentionally wear out, but where things simply wore out as a matter of the delicacy of matter. Built from hardened steel and carefully measured springs and sprockets and designed to do one thing perfectly again and again and again until one part wears down to dust and the whole machine just stops. I have not yet come to that final day where my parts no longer fit together and my springs break free, break down, but I can feel the peices inside me wearing down with friction where no two parts were meant to rub together, and I can sense that this is one wind-up-toy that has gone too long without the needed attention and maintanence – without someone reaching inside me and winding me up. I have not been treated with the same care and respect I see endowed upon the antiques and collectibles I sell, yet I feel as though I am more worn out than even some of the parts that have become so old and rusty they are no longer identifiable – people still love them and take them home to be cherished, 100 years after they have run out of usefullness. Perhaps I am of that newer breed of machine, built to fall apart a year and a day from the day it is born, built to be mistreated and misused and thrown away and replaced by something better and newer and younger and forgotten. A relic of a time gone by, but not old – merely designed to be forgotten, a relic of last week. ‘If only…’ and ‘if only…’ and ‘if only…’ I had been different, the world would not be as it is. These gentle words falling on open ears, these words designed to coerce regret and despair and pain. Yes, pain. And I wish I had the strength to resist their gentle tugs on my heartstrings, to go on as I was – as myself – without consideration for impossible nothings. Without spending too long on thoughts of what might have been, or what ‘ought to’ have been, and moving forward to what can be and what I’d like to see.

Okay, this is starting to turn up and away from the exhaustion and tension and resentment and pain that it was supposed to be about – it must be time to go write on something else.

Teel: 1
Cars: 0

Or is it the other way around? I don’t think I had any intention of killing the car. I got over halfway to my destination and through most of the ‘city driving’ that is the most difficult for me, and I even did it with the manual transmission in my sister’s Nissan Sentra. Then I killed it. I will not go into detail about what went wrong until after my dad has had a chance to take a look under the hood tomorrow, but it won’t even turn over, and it was smoking and smelled pretty bad. I’ll let you know how much I have to pay to get it fixed when I know more.

So, errr… we were almost an hour out when it broke, then we waited almost four hours for my dad to arrive (which was very reasonable, he had to finish getting to Pine, unload the truck he was driving ahead of us, do some wiring on and hook up the huge trailer, drive back down the hill with the trailer to the next turnaround, then back up to us), we worked for almost an hour to get the car onto the trailer, then carefully towed the car back home, for a total of nearly seven and a half hours on the road to end up back where we started minus one car. What a day!

So, I’m going to go to bed soon, but I’ll be ‘in town’ all day Thursday at the least, and probably be driven home Friday, depending on how things go. At the longest, my grandfather is coming back down Tuesday to see his doctor, and I can ride back with him then. I don’t know. I should really be working the store this weekend. Someone should be, anyway. With two more new renters opening this weekend & the weather warming up, we’re sure to get a lot of traffic through. Traffic with money. We always hope they’ll leave some.

I was going to work on re-arranging things so I could work on creating new paintings while running the store while I was in there this weekend. That would be nice, and might help spur sales. If they start selling much at all, I’m going to have to be painting at a pretty good clip to keep up with them. High hopes. I’ve got high hopes. Of course, I had hopes of being able to drive all the way to Pine today, and with a manual transmission, no less. You know how THAT went. I guess I should have set my goals lower, gone with the automatic, probably wouldn’t have killed it. Oh well.

Confidence. I must have confidence. I thought I was doing pretty well as far as the driving went … a little trouble teaching my feet the right measure of pressure to push down the gas and let up the clutch to get started from a standstill, but I didn’t stall it out but once or twice, and apparently I had ‘really smooth transitions’ between gears – this from my sister who was riding along and now probably isn’t so happy she let me drive her car. (* I’m sorry, Angela! *) Anyway, I have confidence my art will sell. I have got some ideas about how to rewrite Forlorn so that when I get it going through Cafepress you’ll want to buy a copy – it won’t be what you’ve read so far, a more complete whole. It may even have a plot, conflict, climax, and who knows? Even an end?

Still, I ought to be sleeping now. I will be soon. I hope. Perchance to dream the death of cars.