|
|
|
near-spontaneous drive to the Shenandoah Valley
Monday, March 17 2025
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I would be beginning my new job a week from this morning, so the days of carefree do-as-I-please living (which has nevertheless been full of things I need to do), were winding down. I thought I should return to my childhood home one last time to see if I could do anything to facilitate moving the Shaque to my brother's parcel across the street as well as grab a few things that I'd wished I'd grabbed the last time I'd been to my childhood home. I didn't tell Gretchen I was leaving until this morning, and she was fine with it. But it was a rainy morning, and she left the job of taking Charlotte for her morning walk to me. It was still raining lightly when I took her on that walk, but I took her for a complete circuit that included the abandoned go-cart track and the plateau west of the Farm Road. Neville didn't join us.
On the drive to Staunton, I took the usual route through Newburgh, Scranton, Harrisburg, and Harrisonburg. On the way, I listened exclusively to the audio of a YouTube channel ThePrimeTime hosted by a software developer who talks a lot about artificial intelligence. I hadn't much wanted to consume content about software development since being laid off twenty months ago, but now that I'm going to be working again as a software developer, it's suddenly interesting to me again. That said, the content on the ThePrimeTime is not very dense, and it seems to take an hour for a paragraph of interesting things to be said. I listened, for example, to a show about why it might be that ARM processors are so much more energy-efficient that Intel ones. After learning one possible reason: that Intel processors have variable-length instructions that make queuing them for decoding difficult, it turned out that energy consumption differences might just be a result of the different business requirements between their respective customers.
I gassed up the Forester somewhere east of Scranton at what turned out to be one of the highest prices per gallon I could've paid ($3.159 when I could've paid as little as $2.95). But I hadn't been able to see posted gas prices and didn't know what the range was. After that, I drove continuously all the way to Staunton, using a plastic peanut jar to catch my urine whenever I needed to piss. (I tried to fling it out the window when nobody was behind me, but some poor woman I didn't seen entered I-81 north of Harrisonburg from an on-ramp just very close behind me as I tossed out my urine, and I saw her flip on her windshield wipers.)
I went directly to the Staunton Walmart to buy a flashlight (which I'd forgotten to bring) and some wine. (Wine is much easier to get in Virginia than it is in New York, where one can only get it in liquor stores.) I ended up buying a whole box of Franzia Pinot Grigio Columbard. Next I stopped to get two Impossible Whoppers and two fries at the nearby Burger King so I'd have dinner to give my brother Don when I arrived at Creekside.
Don met me just after I'd parked in front of his trailer, and I gave him the burgers and fries I'd bought for him. The inside of his trailer had a somewhat-unpleasant smell to it, but I thought I might be able to eat in there. But I quickly decided to instead eat outside. Temperatures were in the low 40s and the sun was setting or had just set, but the air outside paired much better with industrial vegan junk food. Burger King hadn't given me any ketchup, so I was forced to use some from a bottle of Food-Lion-brand ketchup that Don keeps on his cluttered dining room table. It tasted okay but had a weird coloration in the diffuse light of early dusk, looking kind of blue where it was thick and kind of grey where it was thin. That's of a piece with the low-key gross of everything at Creekside.
I carried my burger over across Stingy Hollow Road to eat it while looking in detail at the Shaque to see whether it or not it might be easily moved to a new location. Troublingly, I saw that the floor joists all ran length-wise on the eight-by-sixteen foot structure, meaning I couldn't easily put four by fours under it for extraction from a short end by a flatbed truck. Also of concern was that some of the floor joists date to the original structure that I expanded, and only run some fraction of the Shaque's length, which means the Shaque might not want to hold together if it gets pulled length-wise.
Using the flashlight, I returned to the honey house attic, where I'd put all the electronic treasures I'd found in Oberlin and Charlottesville back in the 1990s. I've picked over those treasures numerous times in the ensuing decades, but what interests me keeps changing. In recent years I've become more interested in the eight bit computers that, a couple decades ago, I decided were so obsolete that they were eWaste. I've never experienced any rekindled excitement about any early phase of the Intel ecosystem, but I do have an interest in esoteric ISA boards, particularly ones featuring coprocessors, so when I found an ISA board that included an intel 80286 with an 80287 math coprocessor, I was delighted and grabbed it. I also found an accelerator for the Macintosh SE that included a 68030 and appropriate math coprocessor. One thing I definitely wanted was a third-party Macintosh floppy drive, since I have a bunch of floppies, many in old GCR formats, that I would like to get copies of before they turn into dust. (I made a point of collecting a broad swath of esoteric Macintosh software that I found on university networks when visiting those universities in the early 1990s, and it would be great to release all of that on Bittorrent. In the cases where such software employed copy-protection, I almost always succeeded in cracking it using a version of RegEdit equipped with a very nice disassemble). I then drank some wine and surfed the web the way I like to do, that is, on a real computer, using my phone as a hotspot.
At some point, I needed to poop, so I went over to the neglected field along Folly Mills Creek just east of the Creekside trailer, and did my business using a fallen white ash as something of a toilet seat. As I walked across the long grass back towards the road, I had a thought about my parents now that they are completely gone: they'd were completely done putting me into the world. I am now alone, at least with respect to my origins, when doing everything I do. My parents haven't really contributed anything to my well-being or life trajectory in decades; I think the last advice from them I may've had a real effect was my father's suggestion that I marry Gretchen, and that would've been in 2001 or 2002. But once all your parents are dead, you really are alone to stare at the inevitability of mortality. My parents' job, whether they did it well or not, is well and truly over, and now I have to fend for myself. Of course, obviously this is absurd, since Gretchen is very much alive and has been much more significant in my life than my parents since we reconnected back in February of 2001.
I wonder to what extent my nagging (and illogical) feeling of parental abandonment is related to the sudden absurdity of a second Trump presidential term. Nothing so ominous and malevolent ever happened during the 88-year lives of my parents (which, due to their age differences, spans over 100 years), Yet, just as the last of them dies, American politics becomes unrecognizable, and I have to face it completely without them.
For a week or more, Don had been repeatedly telling me over the phone that the spring peepers hadn't been making any sounds and that he was sure that some fungus had wiped out all the amphibians. But tonight, despite relatively cold temperatures, I heard them. People are born, live a life, sometimes pack their house with worthless crap, and then they die. Meanwhile the sun rises and sets, the rivers find their way to the sea, and the spring peepers come back every spring. At least for now.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250317 feedback
previous | next |
