Headvoice

The Buzz

Maybe it was one of our neighbour's lushly flowering plants that attracted them at first, but we will never know. Like this lovely purple specimen. I must have taken ten shots of it, but this one caught the light of the flash in a weird dusky-evening way.

It was probably a couple of weeks ago... and I was on the phone, walking around and blithely chatting away the morning in a way that underemployed people can do especially well, when I noticed a bee hovering over the pool skimmer. Suddenly it dropped down and out of view, disappearing in a separation of the concrete patio.

A few minutes later I watched the same process unfold again. Nothing is that coincidental.

And so the troops are brought in... the 3rd Infantry. Or, more accurately, a tall skinny guy in a suit that looked like he was heading to Venus for a cocktail at quitting time.

"There's probably forty or fifty of them", he answered when asked about the population of our shrouded little community.

"They live in the ground... and there might be a little traffic jam when returning bees realize what has happened."

I felt like a mass murderer for a minute. Nice. Just what I needed right about now, a little brush with Osama-ness. Tomorrow if I wake up to a flock of ducks in the pool I suppose I have to get out a shotgun, make a nice orange sauce and send out dinner party invitations.

If August brings a plague of locusts I will not be surprised...

Walls

Frustrated by the walls, both real and metaphysical around me. I can see through some of them, but others are thick and opaque. Behind many of the walls are grief and loneliness.

Home Improvement

This shot was taken at the end of last month. The project was the door... which desperately needed some painterly attention, just like almost everything else it seems. He was sitting on a plastic container while sanding the door frame. Funny how pictures you take mean something else a month later...

Half Life

Today I am considering the halfway point in my life. This may sound arbitrary but there is sound science behind this assumption.

Little Green Apples

Mark mentioned it this morning. Some crack about being inundated with apples from the tree in the back yard.

And now that I take a look at it, I can see he was dead on. When the tree first blooms in spring there is a blurring of white blossoms, not plainly discernible as discreet fruit. But now I can safely predict cumulative hours of picking them off the patio, probably wormy and sometimes inhabited by insects. Despite a brutal winter the aged and withered apple tree carries on, producing fruit for people too lazy to appreciate the product.

Who sang that song? Oh... right here.

On the Rocks

Another dearth of postings here with more than a week gone by. Lydia Lame presents… this blog!

Fuck it. I am cranky. Old and cranky with another birthday looming in the middle of this week. I feel like I am going to be 264.

Cocktail anyone? Now that we have no hounds I am taking pictures of beverages. Maybe it is time for me to be euthanized.

Moving the Bust

He lived on the bookcase until last week. I don't know exactly why, but I moved the bust of Ludwig B. down into my immediate range of site, nestled between two monitors. Maybe I need his inspiration even more these days.

The fascination with Beethoven started so early for me I can't precisely identify the exact details. It was at eight or so. And I was quite earnest in my appreciation even then. By 13 I had moved beyond the symphonic work and was playing and collecting the recordings of string quartets and piano sonatas. Can you imagine how annoying I must have been? I have to remember to do more on Mother's and Father's day from now on...

It was wonderful and rich to naively dive headlong into the brilliance of his music. I can still remember the excitement of coming home from the "record store" after having hitchhiked the ten miles down the island and back home. The prize was a boxed set of all the string quartets spanning at least a dozen vinyl LPs packed tightly with a full size booklet—whose contents I would pore over carefully as I listened to the music.

As I read I absorbed music theory and appreciation, almost always at that time reading way over my head, making the occasional glimpse of the author's scholarly thesis through the confusing jargon and my murky knowledge of the history of western music. But the story of Beethoven himself, gilded in the pure twin irony of his genius and deafness, gave his music an extra layer of authenticity that could even be celebrated by my puerile sense of humanity.

The more I read the more it all started to come together. Areas of interest grew to include Vienna, it's political and social hurricanes of the 1800's, and to other composers; Bach at first, then Schubert, Brahms and Mahler. The interest in the history of music became an interest in history in general... and then it was time for high school, which almost managed to suffocate my self-generated motivation to learn.

By 15 everything had changed. David Bowie pushed classical music aside and Kraftwerk finished up the process a year or so later, and Motown was blaring from the record player all summer long. Between peer pressure and puberty the hallowed halls of classical music would have to wait a bit for me to return. But I did.

Driving Away

We drove to a town with a hyphenated name today. The significant other is quite depressed and felt that a “drive in the country” might just be the thing to cheer him, and subsequently us, up.

On the way home I turned into a local AM station whose tag line is, “The Worlds First Radio Station for Guys.” What was the topic? Places and things you would rather rip your eyes out before visiting or doing again with your spouse, and the third caller mentioned the town we were leaving as particularly tedious.

At least we tried. I have pictures, but they are mostly of us grimacing. I will post one later if I can edit one into a usable state. But if this year doesn't improve soon I am returning it to Wal-Mart and asking for a refund.

Pink and Blue

From yesterday:
Full on summer today. No significant clouds, just dry brilliant sunshine.

Why then am I sitting in my office, with the blinds closed, pecking away at email while the Food Network plays in a little window on one of the two pcs? Because the UV index is high enough to create a Hume Cronyn look-alike from Justin Timberlake in about an hour, that’s why.

But to be fully seasonal I am doing the following routine... at least for today. First, spending an hour outside getting some sun, followed by a quick and enthusiastic swim. Then the bathing suit gets peeled off and hung to dry, shorts back on, inside and productive for a bit… marinate the chicken for the evening meal or fold a load of laundry, and then back to the Internet for an hour. Repeat until sun sets.

Frankly though, I am worried that I might scare the neighbor’s children if they see me floating around on the two new inflatable chairs I bought for the pool yesterday. My friend’s Kate and Cam brought us one as a gift last summer, and I loved how Hollywood it made the patio on the fly. But it didn’t survive the winter intact—and it was my recent cause to find a replacement. Yesterday I found new ones located so far back in a local superstore I got lost trying to find the check out.

Another Quixotic mission in suburbia accomplished!

Anybody out there want to come on over and float around for awhile?

Vines to the Ocean

Happy Birthday USA!

That's me waving to the homeland security satellite camera... just over the border. Up north. Past Niagara Falls. Zoom in… there you go. I am the guy in the shorts wheezing in the suburban driveway after my morning run during an ozone alert.

Today I fear I am mostly posing as a Canadian, because I long to be throwing myself into the Atlantic surf on this holiday weekend. The Fourth of July to me means the heat and sun of the beach and the surrounding, implacable, and humbling ocean. I grew up on an island—you couldn’t avoid seeing saltwater, either bay or ocean, at the end of every street.

And it was this time of year when the ocean revealed itself as the ultimate playground. Every experience on the beach was different. Unique. Either it was the weather… or the sea. Never was the combination the same. The water would be warm one day, cool and full of seaweed the next, even if the weather was very much the same as the day before. Or the sea would be similar from one day to the next—and the weather would go from sunny and calm overnight to violent sandblasting easterlies that would drive people to run from the beach.

Now I live far from any ocean. But the memories are close at hand. I can smell the surf and feel the hot sand under my feet if I need to. Last summer we drove down and visited my frail grandmother and parents. The surf was warm, and the beach was lined with piles of seaweed drying in the sun. I remember using the word “purgative” too much. We jumped waves together and suddenly I was 10 again.

It was my vine back to the ocean.

Paperback Reader

Words come hard today, but this picture from yesterday comes easy. The book is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which he describes as relevant to his life right now. This is worrying.

Smoker's Cough

There was a segment on The Today Show this morning on the cumulative physiological effect of long-term emotional stress. The research focused on care giving spouses of late-term Alzheimer patients—both during the illness of the spouse and after the subsequent loss.

Results of the study were daunting. The immune system of the care giver was found to be compromised across the board, and it continued after the death of the spouse. Blood levels of important immune system proteins remained low long after the loss—slowly improving in some patients while remaining suppressed in others, indicating a heightened vulnerability to disease and the aging process. I have to wonder whether this has happened to us over the past months to some degree.

You could just start chain smoking and drinking again. Oh... and please make that de-caf a regular instead. Could you pass the white wine?

Another photo here from the backyard patio from a few nights ago. What did we do before PhotoShop and digital photography? Oh... right. We read books, ate dinner together more, and wrote poetry in our spare time. Never mind.

Today is the fourth day of a long holiday weekend here in Canada. Happy 137th b-day, eh? The weather is a study in early summer perfection; supporting the annual Pride celebration and a bbq with friends. Later this week I will watch 4th of July and raise a glass to my homeland, but I admit to a certain sense of serendipity about my decision to move to Canada in 1999. Given this, and this, and even this. Despite this, and this and even this... it was the right choice.