Hot Hot Heat

 

Bellingham, Washington.

Booze

Since I moved back to America in February I'd say my daily exercise level has improved just a bit over my routine in Korea.  About six months before I left Daegu my exercise bike gave up the ghost, so I started taking one hour to ninety minute walks daily around my town.  If I was in the office, I took to getting up every 30 to 45 minutes and doing 1,000 steps up and down the hallways and stairs.

It's easier here in the middle of nowhere, Whatcom County.  Every morning I've walked my Dad's private road two kilometers each way, then another kilometer around the house pulling up weeds or branches.

I don't see six-pack abs in my future, alas, but I feel like I'm getting at least 90 minutes of decent movement every day without fail.  (I missed one day back in February due to snow, but I shoveled enough of it to make up.)

And since I'm trying to be honest, I'm also drinking very little alcohol these days.  This is a huge change from Korea, when I would regularly stop in for two tallboys of Korean or Japanese beer on my way home from work, and more on the weekends.

My Dad still drinks very cheap red jug wine, but much less than he used to.  And this is more than understandable at 92, because one decent-sized glass will put him to bed pretty quickly.  I'm actually treating myself to a beer as I type this, but since I've come back from Asia (almost five months) I've gone through exactly 36 beers total (three cases), with 12 sitting in the pantry right now.  (My sister is visiting soon, but she'll at most have one when she gets here.)

I'm 46 of course.  I couldn't drink like my younger self even if I wanted to.  (I'll admit, there are times when I want to.)

All of this is to say, I'm feeling pretty good on the physical front.  I've lost a little bit of weight but was honestly hoping to have lost more given that I'm drinking (almost) nothing but well water, and a cup of instant coffee in the morning (Dad's preference).

Living out here isn't easy but at least my liver is thankful.

"wild with freedom"

"The second fight was good, too.  The crowd screamed and roared and swilled beer.  They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes -- they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out -- they were wild with freedom.  They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty.  Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps.  The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements."

-- Charles Bukowski, Women

Heat Wave

There's a heat warning in effect for Western Washington starting tomorrow, Friday, and lasting until Monday.

We should be fine, but I'll make sure the Old Man drinks enough water.

While L.A. folks might scoff at all this (only 95?) you have to remember that most homes in this area don't have central A.C.  Other than two weeks out of the year at most you generally don't need it.

Anyhow, it'll be hot but thankfully my Dad left up most of the trees around his house to provide shade.  You'd be surprised at how many of his neighbors did not.

"with a bad joke written over His head"

"That was not for her to know, either.  God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him.  It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations.  It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back.  It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

God was a gamesman -- if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann's general store back in Hemingford Home.  He played red to black, white to black.  She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle.  He would prevail in His own good time.  But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand. . . and she would not overestimate the dark man's craft and cozening.  If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land.  Only another private soldier -- long past retirement age, it was true! -- in the service of the Lord."

-- Stephen King, The Stand

"piety, chastity, charity, your company"

 

Drive Like Jehu, "New Math"

Things continue apace here in lonely, quiet Bellingham.  I'm doing some research for a mobile phone plan (yes, I still piggyback off of my Dad's landline these days) and a car.  It's tough though -- while the Old Man won't admit that he needs full-time care, he does.  But he also wants me to get a job, which is totally fair, but that means I need a car (pretty easy) and to leave the house a lot (again, he thinks it's fine, but the moment he can't get FOX News to come up and have me fix it for him there'll be hell to pay).

This stuff is hard.  When he retired back in the early 90's he wanted to move as far away from D.C., and cities in general, as possible.  And for a long while, having him live in the middle of nowhere had its advantages.  But now, the isolation is a problem.

As they say, be careful what you wish for.

Turn, Turn, Turn

My dad moved here from the D.C. area in 1994, as part of the "first generation" out here on this private road.  What's interesting is that times change, and older folks have moved on in their different ways.  I guess that makes me and my sister "second generation" out here, but eventually I see myself moving back to the D.C. area.  It's a lovely place, but I know nobody in Whatcom County, or Seattle or Vancouver for that matter.  It's not mine.  D.C., even though it's been a while since I've lived there full time, still is.  And some bits around it too, including Baltimore.

This is a roundabout way of saying, I'm pretty sure I heard a hippie drum circle in full swing about two houses away last night.

Things have definitely changed.  (To balance it out, my Dad's immediate neighbor is an ex-Navy lifer.  And at this point in my life I probably have more in common with him than I do hairy pot-smokers.)

Hater

I really like Lorde, but I don't go to her music looking for "summertime banger."

That is my hate-y music comment for today.

Thank you for your time.

"not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice"

To ban discussions of uber-scary "Critical Race Theory" is to ban discussions of racism in America and, by necessity, the works of -- Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Langston Hughes.

That's a very cursory start, of course.

And this is America, of course.

"an element of madness in this plan"

"Now the connection you have been waiting for is suddenly made.  You can now remember the route from here to the Lexington Market.  You can remember the names of streets from here to there.  You plan now is to get some crabcakes, and find some way to keep them fresh enough to survive the trip back to Iowa.  You will need ice and a plastic cooler.  And you will need luck in shipping the plastic cooler on two different flights.  There is an element of madness in this plan, but it also contains a certain boldness that you have not felt in many years.  You determine to do it."

-- James Alan McPherson, Crabcakes

Programming Notes

I've really appreciated the feedback and encouragement on what's shaping up to be -- gasp! -- my first novel, The Give and The Take.  I've been writing a lot, much more than I expected, since I got out here in February to take care of my Dad.  The subject matter is, of course, pretty damn obvious.  But I do feel as if the project has arrived at an important point -- a good point -- where it would be best to keep my first drafts more private, less public.  For a while though it really felt good to get something out there, even if this blog doesn't get a whole lot of readers (Quality over Quantity!).  It's funny living in the middle of nowhere -- on the one hand I'm surprised, daily, by something, something the Old Man says or does, or talking to a neighbor.  But it is lonely out here -- there's no other word for it -- and the gates of my memory are more greased-up than usual, and have been for months.  There's no telling what ghosts, friendly or otherwise, will walk out and start yapping at me at any given time.

I was keeping notebooks in South Korea but rarely taking the time to go back and give that material the editorial muscle it really needed to be shaped into something worth sharing.  A few good bits of it have made their way into The Give and The Take, and will continue to do so.  But while I'm going to keep that stuff "private" for now, I am going to start posting some of my short stories on this here blog.  At some point I'll even polish them up and send them out for potential publication, but I know from experience that that whole dance takes work, and you can't half-ass it the way you can popping up an eight page short story online.

For what it's worth, I wrote poetry for many years but basically stopped around the half-way mark of my time in Korea, around 2013 or so.  There were a number of reasons, but none more important than the fact that I haven't really read much poetry since then either, and don't miss it all that much.

So my longer work is going into the garage and I'm lowering the doors for now, but hopefully you'll be entertained by some of my recent efforts in writing stories.  And, for better or worse, they aren't all about my ten years living in South Korea!