There was road construction on the way to the cabin today. Oh, it's been going on the last month, with a little stretch with only a single lane, but this was way more ambitious today, miles of it, and when the traffic stopped . . . it really stopped. The guy in the truck ahead of me actually got out of his vehicle and walked around, either to check his rig or to stretch his legs, killing time, and I rolled all my windows down and shut off the engine and just hung out, thinking. I didn't have anywhere I needed to be, and no worries as far as time went.
But something even more unusual happened during the drive today. I was passing by some fields, when a bunch of little yellow objects started hitting my car. I thought it was bees for a moment, but then I splattered a few of them on my windshield, and I realized they were grasshoppers--hundreds of them, all flying or jumping beside the highway. Because my windows were open, a couple of them actually made it into the car with me, and I took a picture of one (this one dying) on my pantleg as I drove. When I got to the cabin, I cleared a couple more out of the back seat (alive), and from the well below the windshield wipers (dead).
It started raining before I got up the canyon, and the temperature dropped from the nineties in town, all the way down to the fifties up here. I'm actually wearing a jacket while I type this, which I figured was preferable to making a fire (it's forbidden right now anyway because of the drought and the wildfires, but also, I can't build a fire that doesn't go out to save my life).
One of my goals for June was to get my story "Waffle Iron Man" published, and since it'll be July when I come back, that's not going to happen. I did sit down, though, and do the cover art drawing today (something I've meant to do for three months now). I saw last week that my nephew had some crayons, so I brought a sheet of paper up (a single sheet, since I figured it didn't have to look very good), and sat down to do the art.
It's supposed to look like the work of a child, and so I used my left hand to draw it, but the damned crayons were all worn down so that none of them had any points, and that made the art look really light, and hard to photograph. So I went over it again, "sharpening" two or three of the crayons on a napkin, this time with my right hand.
It doesn't look perfect--not like I wanted it in my head--but it'll have to do. I had considered asking Big or Gino to get their sons to draw it for me, but I hate to be beholden to others for this stuff, and it's doubly-hard to ask for help when I know I can't do the work for myself.* In retrospect, I might have asked one of my nephews to do the art for me, or at least to write the lettering, so that it looked more like a kid did it, but I wanted it to look like I wanted it to look, and you know, I'm going to say that it looks fine and move on.
I also set a goal of going on a hike every month this year, and I didn't actually do any hiking in June, unless you call traipsing around the lake and the nearby hills the last couple of weeks. I told myself I could at least walk to the top of what I like to think of as the "Sound of Music" hill behind the lake, where the melting snow runs down in little streams to feed the lake. But today it was raining, and when I went up to the lake to either walk around or sing a song (I had two possibilities in mind, but have neither one memorized), it was just so cold and windy (and dark--even though the sun goes down around 8:45 or 9:00, it was already dark by seven) that I didn't want to try.
 |
| Yes, it doesn't look rainy here. But that's because I took this picture tomorrow. |
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In June: 3242
I continue to write the long-form Lara Demming story**, and this one is largely sans Holcomb. It's been delightful to write so many of these in such a short time, but I do wonder if I'll ever go back to the "Dead & Breakfast" series (and my friends Natalie, Mason, and Meeshelle), or to the COVID-inspired outpost story I got about halfway through at the start of the year, or the Will Choner sequel that I started and abandoned. Of course, there's always "Balms & Sears," and it's funny, I looked at a blog post from 2018 that mentioned that story, and that I was getting close to finishing it then. So sad.
It's so sad that I can't see things through to the end. But it's also so sad that I can't stay focused on one thing, or motivate myself to finish old stories, or put out the ones that I have finished.
I've been reading Stephen King's latest collection, "If It Bleeds" here at the cabin, and the most recent story I read was actually three short stories bound together in three acts, but King tells the story backwards (with the first part telling the death of this character Chuck Kranz, the second one about something that happens in his adulthood, and the third one about his childhood). I don't know how one comes to the decision to tell a story backwards like that, except that King has been doing this a hell of a long time (I've been writing every day for five hundred days, but imagine if I'd been doing that for twenty, thirty, forty years . . . how many tales would I have old?), and he has to keep himself entertained somehow.
Push-ups Today: 50
Push-ups In June: 3633
I went upstairs to do some sit-ups just now, and afterward, I "rewarded" myself by going out on the upper deck, high up among the trees, and gazed out into the darkness. It was kind of glorious, but because of the cold (I'm still wearing the jacket), there was almost no sound out there, no crickets, no birds, no bugs. I did hear an owl once, which was kind of baleful, and at one point, I heard something moving down below, in front of the cabin, but too dark to see.
It should have been pretty terrifying, but there was a sense of safety being way up on the third floor, knowing that unless whatever it was was supernatural (and hey, don't rule that out, come on), it couldn't possibly get to me up there.
And there went June, kids.
Words Today: 1393
Words In June: 26,209
*I remember working on the TV series "House M.D." in about 2005, and I played a patient in a wheelchair, that another extra playing a nurse (this one a regular, featured extra) pushed around the hospital. We did take after take, and I kept apologizing that she had to wheel me around, saying stuff like "If I'd have known you'd have to push me for two hours, I wouldn't have super-sized my meal last night" and "Okay, next take, I'll wheel you around in this thing," thinking I was amusing, and finally she said, "Why don't you shut the hell up and let me do my job?"
It was surprising and harsh and made me think I wasn't taking my "acting role" seriously, so I shut up and let her do her job. I think I saw her two or three times again after that, every time I worked on "House," and always steered clear, as though the sour bitch would remember me. But when I watched through the series, years later, I sure remembered her, every time she was on screen.
**I did a word count just now (the one thing that still works out here, even if there's no internet), and it's at 16,258 words--which is less than I have for the month. Still, if I consider that I'm halfway done with the story, that's not quite novel-length at all. Which is fine. Age ain't nothin' but a number.
No comments:
Post a Comment