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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   ancient nasty carpet fragments
Tuesday, January 14 2025
This morning my brother Don called me from my mother's ("Hoagie's") bedside this in the memory care ward where she resides in Fishersville so I could wish her a "happy" 88th birthday. Joy Tarder had driven Don there for this occasion. Surprisingly, Hoagie was actually communicative, uttering a few recognizable words and familiar clichés. Her vocal capabilities seemed still somehow intact, though it was clear that all the mental facilities beneath that layer, the stuff that models and predicts the world or processes sensory data, was now just a spongiform mush. I wished her a happy birthday, though there wasn't much else I could do (except perfunctorily ask how she was doing). Don then pointed out that she'd already outlived our father, who had died early in the morning on his 88th birthday (which was over thirteen years ago). The last thing Don had told me about Hoagie was that she had stopped chewing her food and now depended on it being processed into a slurry to be spooned into her mouth.

Now that Oscar is gone and no longer shitting and pissing in random places throughout the house (particularly the laboratory), I've been doing some work to clean up the little dried-up puddles of urine and remove the few remaining carpet fragments, most of which seem to be at least partly contaminated with either cat piss or residue from the period when Charlotte the Dog was also pissing and pooping in the laboratory (something she hasn't done in months). The two pieces of carpet fragments that I removed today were pinned beneath the legs of my homemade computer desk, my computer, a homemade table, and a large mirror that I'd taken from the basement of Gretchen's Brooklyn brownstone when we'd moved upstate. That last item had been pinning the same carpet fragment for more than 22 years, and the floor beneath it (unlike the floor in the rest of the laboratory) had never been painted. To get the carpet fragments out, I tug them a little distance and then push everything that had moved with it back by about that same amount. If you do that enough times, you can remove a carpet without having to first remove everything sitting on top of it.
This afternoon, I took the dogs (both came) for a fairly short walk involving the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and the Stick Trail. After a brief reprieve, the brutal face-hurting cold was back, and I should've been wearing more than just a hoodie. But at least I was wearing gloves and combat boots. And my big yellow jobsite headphones carrying audio broadcast on an FM frequency from my computer was keeping my ears nice and warm.

Back at the house, I used a big nearly-full gallon-sized bucket to paint and repaint the OSB subflooring exposed by the removal of those carpet fragments. Raw OSB isn't fun to walk on or even rest your socked feet on, as the the corners of the chips get snared in your socks and then tear loose, making you wonder how much material remains. But painting OSB gives it a smooth non-snare surface that feels great underfoot. The key is to use lots and lots of coats and to make sure paint gets worked under the edges of any loose chips. I found some chips that seemed to be delaminating in the middle, bubbling up a bit when swollen from moisture in the paint. I sliced these with a razor blade and worked wood glue beneath them and used brass and copper fittings as weights to pin them down until the glue or paint could dry.

Later when I was taking a bath, the water died on me twice. The pressure switch has been getting stuck occasionally for years now, and all you have to do is conk it with the handle of a screwdriver to get it to snap and the well pump to refill the pressure tank. But I'd never had to do this twice in such as short amount of time.

This evening before I went to sleep, I read a harrowing story in New York Magazine that Gretchen had forwarded to me about celebrated gothic writer Neil Gaiman, who has a house in Woodstock and does occasional signings at the bookstore where Gretchen works. (She's never been a fan, finding him unpleasantly imperious, a quality that also comes through in the recollections of the women interviewed for this article.) If the story is to be believed (and it reads as true to me), it turns out he's a serial abuser, a rich man with a fondness for degrading waifish young women. He likes anal sex but doesn't apparently like consent, foreplay, or lubrication. One thing that doesn't seem to trouble him is coercing sex out of the help while his young son is present. (That son even took to referring to one of Gaiman's victims with the term Gaiman had been using, "slave.") And, because he's such a powerful man preying on vulnerable marginalized women, some of whom are estranged from their families, Gaiman has been able to get away with this behavior, solving most of his problems the Trumpian way (that is, with non-disclosure agreements). The difference from Trump is that Neil Gaiman had developed a reputation as being something of a feminist writer. According to the article, Neil Gaiman was raised in a highly abusive Scientologist family, and it's possible the abuse he can't keep himself from propagating is an echo of the abusive behavior of L. Ron Hubbard himself.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250114

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