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Archive for March, 2009

The last wind storm tore the hell out of my roof. It was so fierce that it took off not only shingles but also part of the tar paper beneath them. The house, built in 1927, has a roof of solid wood slats beneath the shingles, not plywood, so there were plenty of gaps between the boards for the rain to get in once the tar paper was gone. The rain came in, flowed down into the ceilings and destroyed them. The insurance adjuster determined that the roof was a total loss and wrote me a check to replace it.

It was the Spanish-speaking roofing crew who accidentally created this piece of found art. The triangle of metal sitting on the railing is a piece of the discarded old drip edge that was torn off and tossed to the ground. Instead of finding its way back to Earth, it happened to land on the deck, positioned perfectly on the railing. I shot the picture with my cell phone.

The roofing job was easy enough to tolerate, just two days of banging on the roof and the dogs going crazy with all of the strangers running around the house. That part was easy. The hard part was the interior repairs. The dining room, my office, and one upstairs bedroom had damage to their ceilings. Everything had to be moved out of the rooms. Years of papers, books, disks and equipment had to be boxed and moved out. This was trauma. It was one of the most mentally exhausting things I have done in a long time. I had to buy a laptop so I could continue working, not knowing how long the chaos would last. No, I’m not looking for sympathy on that one. I have wanted a laptop for a long time, and this was a good justification for biting the bullet.

This is an exercise in creative destruction. I have needed to do this for a long time. It’s kind of like backing a dumpster up to your brain and dumping years of accumulated crap out of your consciousness, then standing in the empty room and asking, “OK, now what do I do?”

Night wind with a storm moving in – it’s my favorite kind of air. Lucky, the German Shepherd, is nervous and pacing around. He would like us all to go to the basement. I watched our new president, Barak Obama, defend his budget to the blood-thirsty press. He did a good job.

The wind whips my cigarette smoke around the corner of the house. I’m going to have to quit smoking, but I don’t want to. The fascist government keeps raising the taxes on them – one minute they say it is to make me quit and in another, they say it is to raise revenues. You can’t have both ways, guys. If I quit, I won’t pay the taxes. I think it is the second – to raise revenues, because their corrupt government thing is failing and bankrupt, and they are desperate to soak the people for every dollar they can.

Lucky lies at my feet, his nose two inches from my shoe. He will protect me from the impending storm. That is his duty and he has a keen sense of it. If only a tenth of the people on this planet were as good as this dog, we wouldn’t have any problems.

The air is deliciously cool. I’m writing this on my back porch, on my sexy new laptop computer, a Dell Studio. It is more powerful than nine out of my last ten computers, and costs less, too, but it is the size of a three-ring binder. Technology is way cool. I guess now I could go to a coffee shop and patch into the wi-fi, drink a latte and blog about the social alienation of the modern world. XLNT.

I scanned the wireless channels and found a half dozen networks I could connect to, piggybacking onto someone else’s Internet connection. I logged onto a couple just to test it. There was Google, CNN, my blog… fascinating. One day, the Internet will be everywhere, ubiquitous and free.

The storm is taking its sweet time in getting here. That’s all right; I can wait. I can soak up the beautiful air for hours. It is such a gift after the long, evil winter. The rain has started slowly, and the wind is colder, not as exquisite as it was an hour ago. I have moved inside because the rain and the new laptop are a bad combination. The storm isn’t amounting to much. I’m a bit disappointed. Storms have provided a lot of excitement around here in recent months.