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unfortunate lawnmower blade
Thursday, August 28 2003
I thought I was going to get a new registration window decal for the truck today, but it was only after I drove down to the Kingston DMV that I remembered that the truck was registered in Gretchen's name. What a waste of time! I was so pissed off about this whole being-pulled-over-in-Saugerties debacle that on the drive home I found myself doing the road rage aggressive driving thing - which I don't think I've ever done before. Truth be known, I've never really driven a car where that was even possible. But I was in Gretchen's Honda Civic, and (surprisingly enough) it can pull its weight as a reasonable approximation of a hotrod when you're pissed off about something. It makes a really angry sound when you rev the engine to 6500 rpm, something that happens when you impulsively floor the gas pedal when travelling at 45 miles per hour on a flat.
Later today I mowed the lawn for the first time in something like two months. It was only the fifth time since we bought the house back in October. The grass had grown pretty tall and the lawn mower kept choking and stalling on big wads of wet grass that, had it been pureed in a blender, could have been sold for $3/30mL shot. Then there was the continual danger of objects hidden in the grass. Most of these things were dog toys, a few of which I was able to see before running over them. But I managed to have two serious collisions with obdurate objects: first a rock, and then a stump. Both times I had to beat the blade back into shape so it wouldn't rub. Rub - that's such a redneck term for mechanical problems of this sort. I read in the New Yorker recently that when two NASCAR cars touch each other, the drivers refer to it as "rubbin'."
Gretchen is obsessed with women's basketball these days. She watches all the games she can, no matter who is playing. I've lost interest because the New York Liberty were doing badly and didn't make it to the playoffs. But tonight I watched the Minnesota Lynx come back from being 21 points behind to trounce the Los Angeles Sparks. You should have seen Gretchen screaming and hollering when that happened! (Sally figured something pretty great had happened, so she grabbed a white teddy bear and trotted around the room.) Both Gretchen and I reserve a special hatred for the Los Angeles team, particularly their star player, Lisa Leslie. What an unmitigated bitch! She wears makeup on the court, she throws little parties of self-congratulation whenever she does anything useful for her team, and she throws incoherent pity parties when her team loses. Tonight, at the press conference that followed the game, she claimed that what had just happened had been "bad for women's basketball." What? Is she insane? Or completely self-obsessed?
Eleanor surrounded by laboratory chaos.
That mirror is filthy, and who's that legless veteran?
Gretchen discusses with me how best to bulk up her second poetry chapbook.
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