Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   brother's concern about the state of my head
Sunday, May 13 2018
This morning, the kids all got up early with their squealing and stomp-running, but it all ended mercifully early when Gretchen drove them all to Woodstock for brunch. The idea was that she would then go to her bookstore shift and they would catch a bus back to Manhattan, but of course they missed the bus and hung out at the bookstore for an extra hour. Long after they were gone, another little girl was singing tunelessly in the store and by then Gretchen was so sick of spoiled white children that she wanted to pound her head in.
Meanwhile, I dined on an uncommonly delicious fraction of leftover strawberry-rhubarb crumble Gretchen had made. She and I have both lost our ability to tolerate excessively-sweet food, so it was only mildly sweet at most, and it tastest absolutely perfect.
Yesterday while I'd been sweaty and exhausted from bringing home a load of roadside firewood, my old friend Josh Furr had called from Virginia. That's always a scary thing, since it often indicates trouble with my family, with whom I've had zero contact in two years (and very little contact since 2011). In his usual repetitive style, Josh had said that he'd run across my crazy older brother Don somewhere, and he'd told Josh to tell me to call him, that he had a question for me. Fearing something was up with our now-81-year-old mother, I thought I should call him. So I dialed the number, which is still contained in memories formed as a small child (though the area code has been 540 since 1995). My mother answered the phone, and she sounded exactly the same as always. "Hi, I'd like to talk to Don Mueller," I said. "Who is this?" my mother asked. "This is Gus Mueller," I said. "Oh, he'll be happy to talk to you," my mother said. This wasn't cold in detail, but in effect it was just more of the same problem I have with my mother. When Don got on the phone (I hadn't talked to him since the summer of 2013), he led with how sad it was to learn that I was going bald. That was a bit of surprise, given that if I'm going bald, it isn't yet evident to me. Indeed, I'd had a webcam coincidentally hovering over my head earlier today and had gotten a rare look at the top of my head, and my hair doesn't appear to be thinning at all. Don claimed he'd seen a picture of me with a balding head, though perhaps it had been one from years ago after I'd, you know, shaved my head. I suppose I should've just gone with it; given that my brother is a crazy person collecting SSI and, at the age of 53, still living with our mother, perhaps his still having a full head of hair was something he could hang on to as a tiny bit of relative good luck. He quickly moved on to the subject of some book about the origin of birds I had once given him. He wanted me to remember this, but the span of years and the things I've given him was too great, and I couldn't. After badgering me for awhile about this memory, he finally got to the point: he would be getting a second edition of this book. He proceeded to describe how it is he buys books these days. His preference is to take a bus (only fifty cents!) out to a bookstore in Waynesboro (Books A Million?), where he can browse titles somehow and then order books that aren't actually in stock. These are then mailed to his house. "You know," I said, "If you buy books on Amazon, you can just order the books online and never leave the house and they are mailed to your house." "Yeah," Don agreed, "but I don't have access to the Internet." Poor Don, stuck forever in the 1980s right down to his muttering about the Ayatollah Khomeini. I asked about our mother, and he had little to say. She's still doing art but no longer riding horses. She's also having some big fight with her friend Anne Lake, whose offenses include voting for one Donald J. Trump. Don said he hadn't actually voted in the last presidential election, and that it was a good thing because the polls had terribly long lines (probably, given the demographics of the Riverheads precinct, with Trump voters). Don wanted my number, so I dictated it to him as best I could. Given his dyslexia, he read it back to me wrong several times and it took awhile to be sure he had a valid number. I then made sure he had Josh Furr's number, which will probably prove more useful in an emergency with our mother. At the end, I told him to tell our mother that I love her. I don't really feel like I do anymore, but it seemed like the diplomatic thing to say. Don told her immediately, as I was hanging up the phone.

I made several runs down to the site where I'd been salvaging wood yesterday, the place where a large red oak had been cut down to clear vegetation from the power lines below our downhill neighbors' driveway. This time I had to bring both a chainsaw and a splitting maul to get what remained of the high-quality (easily-processed) wood. Once woodstove-length piece of trunk that had already been cut was too heavy to move until I'd split it in two. As I worked on these things, our neighbor Andrea happened by, and we briefly discussed the death of our neighbor Kay, who'd died at the age of 93 a couple weeks ago. Her husband lives on at the age of 99. I should mention that people stopping to chat with me while I'm salvaging wood is not an uncommon thing; yesterday some guy had passed me and then turned around and come back to tell me of some great white oak to salvage further up Dug Hill Road near Never Alone (the place where urban delinquents are scared straight by the power of isolation in nature).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180513

feedback
previous | next