|
|
|
believe and evangelize
Sunday, June 17 2012
It was a sunny Sunday, and as usual Gretchen and I enjoyed our weekly french press of coffee. It was having an unusually powerful effect on me because, though I was trying to read James Gleick's Chaos, I kept feeling the waves of elation wash over me that made me want to stare at the ceiling and think about things, I forget exactly what. They were probably mostly to do with the upstairs of the greenhouse. At some point Andrea came over and went on a walk with Gretchen and Eleanor (Ramona was still visiting Deborah and Allou).
I did some web development work here and there on an impossibly-complicated project I've been working on for over a month, though of course I took occasional breaks to work on the greenhouse. At this point I'd nearly walled-in three fourths of the walls (the south wall is special and its design will have to wait until I have most of the windows that will be going into it). As I was down at the greenhouse waiting for the paint to dry on a small triangular prefabricated piece to go above the door in the west wall, I heard Eleanor start barking. And then, there he was: Mark. Mark is a friend who occasionally comes up from the City with his wife and daughter; usually they stay with Ray and Nancy or out in Lakehill. What I like about Mark is he's handy and into DIY culture (including punk rock and Makerbots). Less appealing (though still amusing) is his willingness to believe and evangelize bizarre conspiracy theories. Then of course there is that snuff habit, which makes sharing a doobie that much more repulsive.
So I showed Mark the new greenhouse upstairs as well as the jungle of tomato vines in the two tomato patches. Mark likes to help out when I'm puttering around, so there he was holding that triangle of siding while I fired some screws through it.
Mark had fled Ray and Nancy's house because it had been "boring." But meanwhile Ray had been cooking one of his gourmet meals and he was getting irritated that Mark was so slow in returning. So Ray called Mark and told him to get his ass back down the hill. Mark invited me to come join the meal, saying that it was veggie burgers, which had me thinking of an informal setup around a barbecue. I asked if Mark was sure that Ray was okay with that, and Mark assured me that he was. So we convoyed down into Old Hurley. I brought Sally and Eleanor with me, but I didn't bring any contributions to the meal except my scintillating personality.
Ray was in the kitchen and when he realized I was there, he was clearly irritated that Mark had invited me without giving him a heads up. But there turned out to be plenty of food, and I have to say Ray's burgers, whatever they were made out of, were delicious. The poorly-guarded secret to Ray's culinary success is oil and a lot of it. We know it, he knows we know it, and we know he knows we know it. But who can argue with success? Mind you, the burgers weren't really burgers in the conventional sense; they were more like piles of individual savory nuggets; Ray says he is still trying to figure out a better binder. I should mention that Ray had also cooked chicken for Mark's wife and daughter, who evidently can't be made as happy as I can by a delicious veggie burger. (Interestingly, though, the daughter didn't eat the chicken either and in the end settled on peanut butter and jelly. And by then she had pretty much disappeared as a social participant, directing all of her attention to a game on an iPad.)
After the meal, we all went outside and sat around a metal fire pit in which Ray and Mark started a fire. At some point I noticed Eleanor had vanished, so I called her. When she appeared, she wasn't wearing her collar. But then a minute later some random dude showed up. He was from four yards over and had tried to catch Eleanor as she'd been snooping around his house, but she'd struggled free and escaped without her collar. It turned out the guy was really into dogs and couldn't get enough of Cheddar, Mark's new Rottweiler. Cheddar was rolling around on the ground with the dude's arm in his mouth and he loved it, not even expressing concern when Cheddar wouldn't let go.
One subject that kept coming up this evening was Bittorrent and the morality of getting all one's media for free. Ray and I have both feet in the 21st Century on this one. Information wants to be free, man! Why get HBO when episodes of Game of Thrones and Girls are available a half hour after broadcast? That sort of thing. Mark is more 20th Century when it comes to free information, though he's mostly concerned about music and musicians. "That model's dead, man!" I decreed, adding, "musicians have to find other ways to make money these days." And then I pointed out a fresh example of how the old money-for-CDs model didn't end up helping musicians anyway. I mentioned Jane the rock cellist (whose performances have been on at least one CD that went double platinum). She lives in a crappy apartment in Kingston, the music in her head obliterated by the constant repetition of three notes from a neighbor's wind chime.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120617 feedback
previous | next |
