18.5, and the heavy lifting
18.5%: that’s my current body fat measurement. Solidly in “good” territory and close, very close, to “excellent.” I suspect this means I’m close to my target body weight . . . body mass index be damned.
After my last session with the trainer, I rented a truck, came home, and loaded up all the cardboard and packing paper. I suspect I had a couple hundred pounds or more of cardboard — maybe more, since I’m terrible at guessing weights. I know I filled a ten-foot truck and that it took four or five hours to load and unload.
Unloading was the real bitch. The recycle bins are designed to discourage dumping; you have to fit your cardboard through slits and holes and smallish squares, so there’s really no chance of depositing boxes in their natural boxlike state. I had a couple dozen boxes jam-packed with packing paper, and I had to unload all the paper then break down each box. That’s in addition to the dozens and dozens of boxes I had already broken down.
So what it all amounts to is several hours of an almost total body workout: not much on the abs, but lots of leg and upper body work in 90 to 100 degree weather. I’m bushed.
Here’s what I want to know: is there a mitzvah for recycling cardboard and paper? Our rabbi back in Crescent City, a lefty if ever there was one, once tried very hard to find some basis for environmentalism in the Old Testament. He couldn’t. Nevertheless, Judaism is if anything a flexible religion, adaptable to changes in technology and social mores, and so he felt one could exercise great liberty in declaring that certain practices are, indeed, good in God’s eyes.
As an agnostic, this is little more than a passing curiosity for me. I guess I’ll have to be content with the fact that I had one hell of a workout today.
In other news: we received Jake’s midterm grades, and he’s pulling As in everything except his theology class. I suspect this is because he missed an important test, and the teacher probably had to count it as a zero until he makes it up. Or at least I hope that’s the reason. He makes up the test on Monday, and I think we’ll email the teacher to make sure that’s the reason for the low grade.
D.
48
The earlier years are nested inside me like matryoshkas: the early confusion, the youthful romanticism, the 20-something premature jadedness. They’re all still there.
48 has such beautiful symmetry:
48
24
12
6
3
Halfway to 96. It’s still not too crazy to say to myself, Only half over. (Yes, that’s getting to be a progressively more difficult argument to make.)
When I look in the mirror, I still expect to see 18-year-old me looking back. I still ask the same question I asked back then: Who are you?
D.
That time of year, I suppose
It’s September, but here in Bake-o it feels like the middle of summer. And I keep thinking about how, before Karen broke her hip a few years ago, we used to take a summer drive up the Oregon coast. It must be the time of year, but I keep remembering those drives. How on the last drive we made it as far as Newport Oregon, and stayed at an ocean front hotel that had a jellyfish tank in the lobby, and how very pleasant our stay was, and how I thought, “It’s really not that much trouble to get away. This is nice enough, we ought to do this two or three times a year.”
I think that was in 2006, maybe even 2005.
These memories assault me unbidden:
There’s an old guy, in Bandon I think, with a model train collection. He lets people visit but he takes a dim view of children — he watched Jake with a steady intent that was nearly insulting. (Yes, he doesn’t know our son, doesn’t know that Jake is not and has never been a destructive force of nature. Not like some boys.)
There’s a place in Newport where you can paint pottery and get it glazed and fired. We had them mail us a bunch of pieces . . . most were broken when they arrived, but we still have the salad bowl.
South of Newport, there’s a sushi place we’ve been to twice. Last time, they made us wait two hours for our food. They were able to keep Jake (who was quite young at the time . . . six or seven?) well supplied with tofu, but it was still a grueling wait. The kid was great, never kvetched, just played with his toys and ate his tofu.
I keep thinking about the Newport Aquarium, which I think is better than the Monterey Bay Aquarium — every bit as nice but half as crowded. Recently, unpacking, I found a stuffed animal from our last trip. An octopus.
We’ve been to the Oregon Seal Caves twice, I think. Always impressive — both as a geological formation (I think it’s one of the largest sea caves anywhere) and as a noise/stench. Lots of seals or sea lions or whatever. Noisy buggers.
I miss these trips up the coast. I miss the silly dinosaur park north of Gold Beach, the place with the giant cabbages. (The cabbages are real. The dinosaurs are fake.) I miss the petting zoo in Bandon, where my young son had a penchant for taking pictures of animal poops. It’s one of the biggest petting zoos in the world, by the way, and if you have young children, it’s a reason unto itself to make the trip to the Oregon coast.
I miss the coast itself. It’s indescribably beautiful, especially the stretch from Gold Beach to Port Orford. I miss hiking with my son along the coastal trail. They seemed like such boring hikes back then, but now my heart aches for them.
More than anything else, though, I miss traveling as a family. We do a lot less of it nowadays, since Karen doesn’t travel well.
And I keep thinking about the ocean, and the wind in Bandon, and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in Newport, and Yachats (which is just a fun name to say), and all the bridges large and small we cross on our journey north, and the little hotels and tiny towns and restaurants, some gems, some crap, always a surprise.
I’m an odd bird. I was restless after ten years in one place, and yet I dislike change, too. I guess some losses take a while to register.
D.
Coughing up a lung, unpacking
This is one of those viruses where the improvement is incremental. I know yesterday was better than last Friday because I had no fever, no chills. I know last night was better than the night before because I got to sleep without a cough drop in my mouth. For the past four or five days, I’ve been able to lie down without feeling my lungs collapse into a layered pastry of velcro. And this morning, I had the energy to unpack.
I brought in six or seven boxes from the garage, most of which were labeled ‘kitchen, store,’ meaning these were low priority items that could be left in storage as long as necessary. There’s a futile feeling associated with such unpacking; after all, I have a fully functional kitchen now, so anything I might unpack is, at the very least, unnecessary. And so I’ve had to decide what to do with another two huge pyrex casserole dishes, another three frying pans I never use.
Some things are useful. I found our electric can opener, our Belgian waffle maker, our bread machine. I also found the base of a Cuisinart (nothing else left, just the base), an old mark-up board written on with indelible marker, a wire rack for barbecuing fish (which I’ve never used), a joke drinking mug, a caulking gun.
And so forth. I threw a bunch of stuff out, and I put more stuff out into the garage for eventual donation. I kept the mini-Bundt pan, the fajita iron, the bamboo forms for making sushi. We keep all our wedding china, naturally, but we’ve had perhaps two or three occasions to use it over the years. I broke one of our wine glasses from the wedding china sets — I doubt it will be missed.
I don’t know what impulse led us to grow over the first two decades of marriage, but at last we’re finally shrinking.
Still. I haven’t found our flatware — I know it’s out there somewhere — and I haven’t found the one thing I tend to think symbolizes our decades of uncontrolled growth: an aebelskiver mold I bought in Eugene, Oregon. I even used it once. So, yeah, there’s at least one more box of kitchen stuff out there, along with countless boxes of books.
Oy, the books: we had a built-in bookcase in our master bedroom in Oregon, and nothing like that here. I have no clue what I’m going to do with all of our books.
Time to drink more water.
D.
Coming back to it
We got the old computer out of mothballs — that’s the one that has all of my old writing on it. Seemed prudent to transfer all of those files to this laptop before the old computer emits a wheezing gasp of ozone and cacks it. Anyway, for lack of any true inspiration, and because my reader Maureen suggested it, I think I might revisit Brakan Correspondent and think about a revision. Lots of good stuff in that novel, but then there’s lots of stuff in the novel. Way too many characters, everyone fighting for center stage.
I’ve been away from the manuscript for a year. Is that enough time for objectivity? Do I have what it take to cut scenes — to cut characters?
I feel kind of pessimistic about the whole thing: first, that I have the discipline to take a razor to the text; second, that it’s a worthwhile endeavor and not a fat waste of time. I’m not sure I do have the objectivity to see the right thing to do. At one point, I thought I should turn the whole thing into a narrative with two limited third person perspectives (Cree and Boron, for those of you who remember the characters) but then the titular Correspondent’s story becomes too hard to tell. So I’m back to the multiple POV interlaced story line, and that’s just Brakah. What about the giant tarantula subplot? Talk about something which could be surgically excised without damage to the story! Except that Bare Rump does have some of the best lines.
Maybe the undisciplined approach is best. Keep the story wild and woolly and obviously a first novel. Just fix the plotting and tighten what I can.
You’d think one year away from a manuscript would make things easier.
D.
The number ten spot
Sorry, no link, but I caught a story this morning in the Bakersfield local paper regarding the top ten religions listed by folks on Facebook who mentioned a preference on their profile. Christianity came in number one, not surprisingly — they lumped together Catholics, Protestants, JWs, Greek Orthodox, Mormons, all of them. Islam snagged the number two slot, and I think Hindus took #3.
My tribe took seventh. Not bad, considering how few of us are left in the world. We were beat out by the agnostics and atheists.
Who took the #10 spot?
The Jedi.
D.
More sickos
There are at least four of us on my floor of the clinic, all with the same symptoms — painful hacking cough, fever. I can’t really claim I have it worse than anyone else, but I might. I asked our pulmonologist to take a look at me today. I was wheezing and my temp was 102.5. Well, that explains the chills I was having all day. He was concerned by my report of drenching sweats, and sent me off for a Valley Fever blood test. Also, he started me on a couple of inhalers and an antibiotic.
Meanwhile, my mother has problems. I’ve always subscribed to the “too mean to die, she’ll outlive us all” theory, and that may yet be true. In recent weeks, her mental status has taken a steep plunge, and my father has been assuming it’s dementia.
I kept telling him to take her to the doctor to rule out treatable illnesses, and I explained organic brain syndrome to him, but he hasn’t listened to his youngest son. Tonight, apparently, her behavior became sufficiently whacked that he called 911 and got her admitted to the hospital. Or at least I really hope they admit her to the hospital for a workup. Nowadays, hospitals are loath to admit people for things that can be done in an outpatient setting. Medicare loves denying payment for unnecessary hospitalization. In any case, I hope the doc who sees her tonight treats this with seriousness and thoughtfulness and realizes she’s someone’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. And that the doc hasn’t had a rough day and just wants to get the hell home. And that he isn’t trying to work through his shift with a fever of 102.5.
Bad timing all around. I’m too ill to make the drive to Vegas (where my parents live) and I’m on call for the next nine days. Soonest I can get out there, short of taking more time off (which I have NOT accrued), would be two weeks from today.
Something evolving this fast, it’ll either be some treatable metabolic problem or something horrible. Either way I hope I get to see her. Even if she is too mean to die.
D.