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").



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   driving experience threshold
Monday, October 11 2021

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

The tips of my fingers are still uncomfortable today after having been burned by the portland cement in the thinset I'd used to install tile at the cabin. I'm having particular trouble with the tip of my left thumb, the skin of which I'd accidentally snipped with a pair of scissors the previous weekend. That skin had healed up nicely last week, but that was all dealt a setback by exposure to such a caustic alkaline environment. In the past I've noticed I can expose myself to such environments for hours without too many bad effects, but perhaps this time the exposure was compounded by the exposure from the previous weekend. In addition to the sore spot on my left thumb, I have little ulcers on the outside of both pinkies, and the skin on the tips of my right thumb and index finger seems thin and sensitive.

This evening, Gretchen suggested I meet her in Woodstock for dinner at the Garden Café. It was a balmy day, meaning we could eat outside and avoid the spiky balls of coronavirus drifting around like mold spores. I drove to Woodstock in the Prius with both dogs, but Gretchen thought it might be nicer to just leave them in the car so we wouldn't have to spend any mental energy on them as we ate our meal. For food, we both had the lentil vegetable soup. I also had a TLT and a glass of Montipulchiano wine, while Gretchen ordered three or four side dishes. We sat in a corner of the outdoor dining area. There are always lots of people with dogs in this area, but today there were also a lot of diners with human children.
The meal was mostly so Gretchen could tell me about her recent trip to Arkansas. We hadn't had much time to chat since she got back. She told me her brother's house is huge and looks great on the inside, mostly because it used to belong to the man who developed the neighborhood of McMansions it is part of. Outside, of course, it's ugly and stylistically ambiguous, with a weird mix of stone, brick, and siding that resembles wood (but might be made of plastic or aluminum). Such neighborhoods never have big trees, but perhaps some day they will (though the houses themselves might all have been mined for materials by then by the mole people who will inherit the hellscape we leave for them).
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Gretchen has had a rash of some sort on her face since shortly before leaving for Arkansas. At first she thought it might be acne. Then she thought it might be an allergy or a fungal infection. In Arkansas, her sister-in-law saw the rash and thought it resembled shingles, which she'd had on her face. Her husband, Gretchen's brother, agreed, and even dusted off his old prescription pad and wrote Gretchen a prescription for a suitable antiviral medication. Shingles is caused by the chickenpox virus, which stays in our body after we first contract as children only to reemerge later in life during a period of stress, senescence, or other immune-system-weakening conditions. With Gretchen, the culprit is probably stress resulting from multiple sources: the cabin project, Powerful's hospitalization, and the various classes she is teaching to prisoners and former prisoners.
Amusingly, as we dined tonight at the Garden, people would come up to Gretchen and express their sympathy, and she would assume it was about Powerful, but it was actually about her case of shingles (which Gretchen had mentioned casually in an email she'd sent to a bunch of people).

As I was driving home in the Prius on Route 375, I found myself held up by a very slow-moving car two cars ahead of me. There's no place to pass on 375, so I just had to grit my teeth and drive at the dreary pace of maybe 30 mph at most. Finally the slow car signalled it would be turning into the Hurley Ridge parking lot. But then the car just kind of crawled to a stop as it was crossing the oncoming lane. What the fuck? I flew into a fury and started honking my horn. I did this as a series of beeps, not the one prolonged honk I sometimes give the shooters at the bus turnaround. I don't know what's come over me, but I'm subject to intense feelings of road rage these days. I've always been one to ask "Really?" when another driver does something stupid. But in the past I've only honked my horn at bus turnaround shooters and people who nearly caused an accident. Now, though, I'm raging at what are probably well-meaning little old ladies. I think the difference is that I'm closing in on some threshold of driver experience that makes me feel entitled to proper highway etiquette. Remember, I drove very rarely as a teenager and didn't start driving regularly to a job until I was 50 years old. It's only in recent years that I've had much driving experience at all. So perhaps I'm only just now arriving at the level of driving experience that most Americans (at least of my generation) reached in their mid-20s.


I harvested this summer's cannabis crop today, and this is what it came to. At five females (one of them big) it's more than I've ever grown before. Unfortunately, Gretchen found the skunky smell it gave the house a noisome fragrance.


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