Realizing that this stasis-and-travelog, running towards 27 years young, is the anti-thesis of readable: the narratives rarely approach “what I am thinking” in that empathetic way, and seldom speculate on “what is/are s/he/they thinking?” And actual feelings, well, those seem rarely to be included at all: this hurts! A loss of narrative opportunity, though I never possessed what could be called a readership. Begging friends to subscribe was a useless and debasing activity.
Once was a time when I purposely (heavily) filtered the content, simply not commenting on the events I was living through, for fear of revealing too much to certain of my theoretical readers. Recognizing that there are essentially no readers should be a freeing dimension, support for an unleashing of creative word-play. But stream-of-consciousness is tired and lacking, wrists ache from online workdays.
Smoke in the air, hot and dry wind swinging a loose cable along the wall. I catch sight of the ground squirrel brazenly digging under my foundation. He can’t hear that I’m on the deck because the wind is so loud. I throw the nearest thing handy, a broom which scares the bejeezuz out of him, he takes off . I am sensitive to the foundation situation: I ended up deciding not to have a formal inspection of the house before closing, as most house-inspectors aren’t all that competent. Even though I was aware of some foundation ‘issues’. Turns out that the house foundation is simply mortared rocks, from 10-to-50 lbs size, sitting on the original ground surface. Inset into the top of the mortared rocks is a somewhat level ‘beam’ which acts as a simple stem-wall. A squirrel can simply burrow through the soil under that mortared section and gain access to the entire crawlspace. <sigh>. Under the deck, there is a section of the foundation that was simply built around a huge cottonwood stump which has since completely rotted. Rick helped remove it when he visited on one of the first days of ownership. Now there’s a sizeable divot in its place, and that corner of the house is subsiding.
It doesn’t matter, none of it. A house falling down is the same as the failure to articulate life in writing, the same as body failing. Life’s perverse resistance to entropy is the core vanity of living. Writing out of this temporary excess of energy seems futile when faced with the heat death of the cosmos.
The smoke, arriving from a distant conflagration, is now a dense and uniform white haze, all horizons gone. There is no wider world. Perspective narrows, memory contracts, active engagement ceases.
The idiocy of the work environment continues to devolve. Over the phone, colleagues relate their disgust and frustration with the vacant ‘management’ of the organization. No surprise there. The ‘failing upwards’ of incompetency almost completely neuters the effectiveness of any team efforts. Primitive (read: 1980s extractives industry) mgmt styles and largely autocratic ‘communications’ substitute for substantive and balanced dialogue; team-building, non-existent in the face of challenging work loads; vision, also non-existent; imagination, null.