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never giving Brian Wilson a chance
Sunday, July 22 2018
It was a rainy morning, but at some point it let up enough for Gretchen to take the dogs for a walk. Eventually, while Gretchen was off at the bookstore with Neville, the clouds broke up and the sun even came out. I'd been working at my computer in the laboratory, but at some point I was so surrounded by critters that I had to stop. All five cats and Ramona were with me in the laboratory. Charles was on the Ottoman, and when Ramona sniffed him to see if there was room for her, he swatted her cruely, forcing her to lie on the floor at my feet. Diane had been lying with Charles on the Ottoman, but now she was bored and looking for things to do while Celeste and Oscar licked each other about ten feet away. But most disruptive of all was Clarence, who was on the surface where my keyboard and mouse sit, and this was preventing me from doing anything. He was there in hopes of convincing me to go downstairs to give him an additional lump of wet food, something I often do because of his thin elderly-cat body.
Eventually I fled and went down to the screened-in porch and stapled up two more screens, meaning six of the eight four-foot-wide wall screens are up. (I'd done the preceding four yesterday and the day before.) Today's work was a little tricky because I was working on the east end and couldn't do any work from inside the porch. I was forced to set up a step ladder on the tilting, unstable ground outside and climb nearly to its top to reach places I needed to staple. Somehow nothing bad happened to send me crashing down. As I worked, Celeste took an interest. She's been spending a fair amount of time just hanging out in the screened-in porch, occasionally interfering with me as I try to measure and cut pieces of screen.
For the past few days, I've been drinking loose lapsang souchong tea that Gretchen recently got me. (I'd been intrigued by lapsang souchong since reading a description of it as a young teenager in James Michener's Centennial, so it became one of my favorites as a college student.) Lapsang souchong is not as rich in caffeine as other teas (such as the bagged Red Rose I traditionally drink), so today I took a couple 500 mg guarana supplements. Guarana's main active ingredient is caffeine, though there are enough other things in there for the resulting buzz to be a little speedier than, say, a regular cup of brewed coffee.
Late this afternoon, I made a run to Woodstock with Ramona to pick up Neville from the bookstore. Gretchen would be seeing Brian Wilson tonight at UPAC in Kingston, so Neville would need to be coming home. When I arrived, the bookstore front door was wide open, which is apparently now okay even when Neville is there. Gretchen was so busy at the time that all she could do was wave goodbye.
I stopped at the Tibetan Center thrift store on the way home just as a cloudburst was concluding. Though I looked methodically under all the piles in the increasingly chaotic electronics section, there was nothing there that I wanted.
I made a great sandwich artist discovery today when I made a sandwich from toasted bread, homemade cashew-based cream cheese (that Gretchen had made), raw tempeh bacon, pepperoncini peppers, and lettuce. The balance of flavors in that sandwich was its own lucky miracle. It was so good that I made a second one, not even bothering to toast the bread.
As the Brian Wilson show was getting out, Gretchen sent me a Facebook message asking me to download Pet Sounds. She'd been amazed by the show, even if Wilson himself doesn't have much of a life (or voice) remaining. As for me, I'm the opposite of a Beach Boys fan. I find their cheerfulness so vapid and dispiriting that I've never given Brian Wilson a chance.
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