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it's not delivery (it can't be)
Monday, June 24 2002not far from Camp David, Appalachian Maryland, USAKnowing I'd be away from a keyboard for a few days, I'd brought some of my acrylic paints along with me to the cabin. This morning I started work painting on a piece of wood paneling (measuring about three feet by two and a half feet) that I found in the basement. As I often do when beginning one of my paintings, I started out by laying down a background consisting of two large rectangles of color bisected by a wispy white horizon line. Then I just let it sit there awaiting some revelation for how to proceed.
Gretchen, who is still recovering from mononucleosis, was weak most of the day from the over-exertion on our long "we're lost!" walk in the forest yesterday. Nonetheless, we did venture out in the car in hopes of finding a swimming hole, stopping at the LDS General Store (that doesn't stand for Latter Day Saints) for provisions. What an odd little place it was. It had corn chips, a necessary provision for life as I know it, but it didn't appear to stock salsa of any sort, not even that disgusting stuff that comes pre-mixed with cheese. Shades of Casey, Iowa. Then there was the refrigerator, a prime location for the stocking of the much-sought summer beverage known as beer. Hold on, maybe LDS did stand for Latter Day Saints; this place didn't sell beer! They did sell icecream, however, though it was only one brand: the hitherto-unknown Hershey's icecream, as in "Hershey Highway" (US 422, west of Lebanon, PA). There was even a congratulatory plaque on the wall celebrating how much Hershey's icecream the LDS General Store had sold - probably mostly to unhappy fisherman who had come looking for beer.
After buying some provisions (including a big box of Hershey's icecream), we found that, while small-town folksy in terms of what it sells, the LDS General Store vies with a Tribeca boutique when it comes to prices. Not only that, but the dull-witted teenage cash register boy couldn't think of any suggestions for places for us to go swimming. So we ended up stopping on the way back to the cabin and wading around in a forested section of Middle Creek. I built a little dam with the plentiful stones while Sally splashed around and went charging around in the woods. At one point Gretchen stepped in the mud and nearly lost her sandal.
Before leaving New York, we'd anticipated our isolation well enough to respond to the advertising of a certain brand of frozen pizza. You know the commercial, the one where a smarty-pants yuppie husband offers his wife a slice of pizza and she's like, "Wow! that's some good delivery!" But then the truth comes out. It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno! Knowing we'd be well out of range of a pizza delivery (and in a place where her cell phone wouldn't even work), Gretchen had bought three of those DiGiorno pizzas. Tonight she cooked them up and, yes, they were good. Not that they didn't lack a little something that a fresh delivery pizza has, but in some ways they were actually better than New York delivery pizza. You see, neither Gretchen nor I are big fans of the thin-crust New York pizza style. We prefer a more Midwestern kind of pie. In this regard, DiGiorno (with its thick, fluffy, somewhat buttery crust) didn't disappoint. Pizza is, I believe, the most "rock and roll" of foods. DiGiorno, then, is the Foo Fighters, a guilty-pleasure good time of a pizza.
Tonight, as part of the film history survey course Gretchen is teaching, I saw my first-ever Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup. I don't know, perhaps history is less kind to comedy than it is to other forms of expression (Huckleberry Finn not withstanding), but I scarcely found Duck Soup funny at all. It was a real disappointment, because I came to the film wanting to relate to people in the 30s as though they were as funny and had as much to laugh about as people today, but I found most of the gags tedious. The only scene that I found remotely funny was "the mirror scene." Gretchen, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying it a lot more than I was.
Sometime before bed I began painting two stylized human profiles in my new painting. I did this initial compositional work out under the porch light while Gretchen worked on a crossword puzzle.On several occasions today Gretchen found tiny Deer Ticks embedded in her skin. They're so small they might be mistaken for a freckle, but then you scrutinize them carefully and see the legs. Unlike conventional, larger ticks, Deer Ticks seem to prefer burrowing into the skin in hairless places, sometimes in folds of skin. For example, I pulled one out of Gretchen's butt crack, right below her tailbone.
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