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too late to do anything about it
Thursday, July 13 2023
Yesterday I realized I didn't have enough half inch PVC conduit on hand to do the basement wiring I wanted to do this weekend at the cabin, so at lunch I again drove to Uptown, where I bought two ten foot "sticks" of conduit at Herzogs after also buying some things Gretchen needed at the "Ghettoford" Hannaford. This included unbleached flour, single-source extra-virgin olive oil (something Gretchen insisted on), carrots, and two kinds of cooking wine.
This evening at 6:00pm, we had four guests over for dinner. This included our friend Kate, and two different women named Kaycee, one of whom came with her husband Chris. (Neither of these Kaycees was the vegan Kaycee who lives across the street and turned out to be an anti-vaxxer.) The Kaycee and Chris who came over tonight are the ones who run a couple performance venues, so much of the conversation tonight was about theatre, acting, directing, and the bohemian lifestyle that used to be attached to them (back in the late 1970s, when someone could live for cheap in New York City and dedicate his or her life to art.) None of this was particularly interesting for me, so I didn't contribute much to the conversation.
As usual for this time of year, we dined out on the east deck, though the whole time we were out there, thunderstorms could be heard ominously rumbling away in the distance. And the mosquitoes were bad enough to keep me distracted from what was being discussed. Eventually we moved into the living room, where a single mosquito buzzed around among us all.
After our guests all left, a downpour commenced as I washed all the dirty dishes and Gretchen went upstairs to watch another old episode of the Orville.
In the past, Gretchen's response to glum news was to watch old episodes from the Star Trek cinematic/television universe. It eases her depression to see humans behaving logically and solving problems using their organized intelligence (especially when they might otherwise spin the wheels of monster trucks in a muddy field). As I've mentioned before, the balm this provides is even better with the Orville, which has a much better sense of humor. For the past few days, Gretchen has been in a funk about the ongoing anthropogenic collapse of global climate. It's no longer just an academic debate about the consequences of human-added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; suddenly all the newspapers are running headlines about heat waves, droughts, and wildfires, and the experts who know about these things are appearing on shows (such as Fresh Air) to say that it's already too late to do anything about it.
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