(no subject)

I can't remember the inane things I started babbling about then
I know it didn't really matter
She wasn't listening
She just yanked up on the emergency brake
Dropped her seat back
And told me to lie on top of her
On top of those leather pants of hers
(Extremely expensive leather pants, mind you)
Her hands immediately guiding mine over those soft, slightly oily folds
Positioning my fingers on the shiny metal tabs
Small and round like a tear
Then murmuring a murmur so inaudible
That even though I could feel her lips tremble against my ear

She seemed far, far away

"Pinch it", she'd said
Which I did,
Lightly
Until she also said "Pull it"
Which I also did
Gently parting the teeth
One at a time
Down under and beneath
The longest unzipping of my life
-- Mark Danielewski

Get this song. Mark's spoken word isn't the best I've ever heard, but the words themselves stand on their own.

Nice day today...

So am I playing golf? No, I have a billion things to do around the house. It's domestic day!

I have to nuke the yard with weed poison because my neighbors' weed colonies have established a beachhead on my lawn. The garage has to be cleaned out. I have to move a stack of firewood from one side of the house to the other because my wife likes it better over there (and, regretfully, I agree).

Meanwhile, my sister in Florida has 10 out of 11 symptoms of appendicitis. It's nearly textbook. The doc says could be, may not be, let's wait a couple of days and see, meanwhile he's jacking her up on antibiotics in case it's another kind of infection. So, I'm calling her every now and then to check up on her.

Domestic Epilogue

Okay, so I nuke the lawn, cackling madly at the weeds soon to shrivel and die....when my neighbor walks up to me.

Now, I'm a quiet neighbor -- I know the folks on my block, but an occasional hand wave is about the extent of our relationship (and we all seem to like it that way -- in Atlanta, neighborhood peace and quiet is vastly preferred to socialization). Still, I've always had the impression that these neighbors in particular aren't exactly comfortable with my wife and me -- I don't know if the gargoyle lawn faucet, gargoyle doorbell, and snarling lion door knocker offend their Southern Baptist sensibilities.... I'm just hoping he isn't gonna get pissy at me for using water whilst poisoning the herbacious parasites in my lawn, since Georgia is still technically under a watering ban due to drought. We've had some water nazis in our neighborhood inform on other neighbors using a sprinkler five minutes after the allowed watering hours.

However, it turns out I was just a victim of paranoia, and he did me a big favor. It seems the last storm blew one of my roof vents almost completely off -- living under my house, I couldn't see it, but (being across the street) he had a good view of it. The next rainstorm would have dumped lots of water directly into my attic. We traded notes on the shoddy building habits of our builders, then I got onto the roof.

Even though I've taken flying lessons, jet often across the country/world, bungee jumped, rock-climbed, fish-spot from fishing boat crows-nest, etc..., I'm not exactly what you would call a fan of heights. In fact, heights tend to bug the beejesus out of me. But, hiring roof guys to hammer a half dozen nails bothers me more, especially since I probably couldn't get them out here before the next rain, so it's up to me. I get up there and all five of my roof vents are loose, so here I am, 30' or more above my driveway, trying not to look down as I'm pounding galvanized roofing nails next to rusty, short, loose nails that probably shouldn't have been used in the first place.

I finish, climb to the ground, and down a beer in about 20 seconds flat.

Nikki, you probably don't want to read this next paragraph....

Then we move firewood. I found a ton of mouse nests, and a few black widow webs. I'm hoping the mice ate the widows and moved on, but a mouse surprises me anyway. A good-sized one, too. I'm feeling okay about it (it's just a happy little mouse, and spiders bug me about five angstroms less than heights do), until the mouse bolts directly into my open garage. *sigh*. I figure the traps we have in the garage will probably get it. I find the nearest trap to check the bait and it contains the mummified remains of a mouse that was probably caught months ago, but somehow I never saw. The other traps have all been sprung (and are empty), the peanut butter licked clean off the levers. Time to rebait. I figure it's getting warm outside...the mouse has a choice to live free outside in my lawn, where I will ignore it in peaceful interspecies coexistence, or it will try to squat in my garage, in which case it will probably end up with a slightly shorter lifespan, the details of which will be left undescribed.

I'll leave it up to karma.

Time to cook dinner.