Sculpin

I’ve just come home with the best garage sale score of my life, plus something to think about.

The score: a Pilates reformer with accessories for twenty-five bucks. And this thing is rock-solid. The same model is going for about a thousand dollars on Craigslist right now; it was about $2400 new. My jaw dropped a bit when I tried the machine out; I’d expected that I’d at least have to replace some springs.

It’s perfect for me. I’m perfect for it. We are precisely the right match for each other. I’ve got the half-decade of Pilates experience and the recovering back injury that makes mat work imperfectly tenable. And I am oddly serious about Pilates — I tend to treat it like other people treat martial arts. This is going to be fantastic for my recovery.

Here’s the thing: the fellow who was selling it wasn’t ignorant. He knew exactly what he had and I’d bet he knew what he could get for it. But he was an interesting man. It looked for all the world like he had made a deal with the universe: he would allow his reformer to go out into the world at an unbelievable price, and in return, his reformer would go to a person who would make unusually good use of it. I had the unnerving feeling that he was seeing me as completing some kind of magickal circuit, and that this was completely ordinary for him. When we were chatting, I mentioned the disc injury; I expected him to perk up a little in happy surprise — it’s nice to know that your old stuff is going to go out into the world and do good work — but instead he relaxed. He gave every impression of thinking, “Oh yes, good, this is the one I made the appointment with. I thought so.”

It makes me wonder — what would it be like to live with that faith that things will work out for the best? It seems to be working for him.

Josh: *lifts his head, listens*
Cam: *takes out the earplugs*
— BANG BANG BANG –
Cam: “Gunshots?!”
Josh: “Yep.”
Cam: “How many did you hear before?!”
Josh: “3, maybe 4.”
Cam: *checks the clock* “1:48. From the north maybe?!”
Josh: “There’s no way to tell really.” *goes back to sleep*
Cam: *big-eyed look of WHAT WHAT WHAT*
Josh: *HOOOOOONK*…*ssss*…*HOOOOOONK*…*ssss*…*HOOOOONK*…

Nobody in earshot has called an aid car, according to Realtime 911. Whatever that was, I hope… well, it’s hard to know what to hope, isn’t it? So now I’m wide awake and vigilant. But even if had been were something to hear, the vigilance has done me no good because I can’t hear a darn thing over the snoring anyway. How does he do it? And how is it that he’ll stay up until 4 am when someone is wrong on the internet, but goes right back to sleep next to an exterior wall when someone is shooting a few blocks away? (Okay, I admit it. I understand the first half of that. I mean, someone being wrong on the internet is a powerful motivating force. Also, um, “a few blocks away.”)

We also smelled something on fire this evening. Josh even walked around the neighborhood wondering which house was on fire this time. And of course we’re just around the corner from where the big flood was. I wonder what will be next. Plague seems insufficiently local, as do bears, and we did the fleeing-bankrobber thing around here a few years ago. Falling space junk? Mini-tornado?

Josh and I have been getting a crapload of hangup calls lately, at least some of which are spoofing an ID of 408-999-1234. Sometimes I’ll pick up the phone and it’ll be someone talking fast in Spanish; that gets me wondering if they’re working the same common scam that caught Josh in 2003. More often I pick up and say “Hello?” and I’ll hear background murmuring or whispering in what sounds like Spanish. After a few seconds they hang up. Day after day after day. It’s enough to make me ask Josh if we can change our name to Johansen or something, just in case we’re getting targeted as likely Spanish-speakers.

I’m pretty well fed up with getting up to get the phone, so I’m not going to do it anymore. Most folks email me, not call, but if by some chance you do call me, please leave a message. Odds are good we’re screening calls.

Via Ted.

Pick Your Artist

Aimee Mann

Are you male or female?

Just Like Anyone.

Describe yourself:

I Know There’s a Word.

How do you feel about yourself?

You’re With Stupid Now.

Describe where you currently live:

I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas.

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

Ghost World

Your best friend is:

Beautiful.

Your favorite color is:

Invisible Ink.

You know that:

I Should’ve Known.

What’s the weather like?

I Can’t Get My Head Around It.

If your life was a tv show, what would it be called?

“The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist”

What is life to you?

Little Tornado.

What is the best advice you have to give?

This Is How It Goes.

If you could change your name, what would it be?

Frankenstein

I’m still alive. Just wiped out. I signed up for a pretty stressful couple of months, working some emotionally demanding gigs at Bastyr and the UW.

Now it turns out that I have to make some lifestyle changes this month, too. When we got married, Josh and I made some compromises, of course; when it came to food, I did most of the compromising, I think. My diet used to be pretty much tomato-based, but Josh hates tomatoes; for the past five years, my cheese and sausage consumption has skyrocketed. Well, it’s finally caught up to me, and now I’ve got to clean out the garbage dump I’ve made of my bloodstream, and fast. So I’m returning to my tomato-based diet; Josh and I will just have to fend for ourselves for a while.

It’d be nice if I could exercise, too, but I can’t really move right now. I don’t know what I did to my back last week, but I suspect it has something to do with the ongoing psoas problem from last November. I am wondering if an MRI might be in my future.

Today I can walk very slowly and carefully on level ground, if I don’t try too hard to straighten up. I know! I could use the treadmill! It goes slowly and evenly! But wait, I can’t. Why, you ask? Because it’s folded up with boxes in front of it. Which I can’t lift. And there’s nowhere to put them anyway. Why? Largely because we don’t have attic storage, a year and a half after trying to start that project. What’s the holdup now? We still do not have an electrician. We get these recommendations, we call them, and we never get callbacks. WTF. I’ve gone past “steamed” and right into “gritting my teeth and ready to snap”. Often I think that we should call it all off and just throw away half our stuff. (Does anybody need a small women’s wetsuit? Size sixish, I think.)

So, all my processors are busy right now. How in hell I am going to make the next six weeks work, I do not know.

But there’s good news, too: the chickens are laying! More about that at House of Cranks.

So I’m walking down Roosevelt near 82nd today, and I see a little fenderbender.

There was a woman in a light-colored shirt with a black lab by her side about to cross the street at the corner. I happened to be watching her, because I was admiring how well-behaved the dog was, so I saw her look both ways (apparently she’s well-behaved, too) and as I passed her at the corner I saw her begin to cross.

There was a car down the block that’d easily had ample time to slow to a stop normally, if the driver had been reasonably attentive. But apparently the driver wasn’t paying much attention until the last minute, at which point he or she slammed on the brakes. The car behind that one, whose driver wasn’t smart enough to leave appropriate stopping room, smacked into it just hard enough to knock off its little plastic bumper.

So, the woman with the dog keeps on going. And I’m standing there, wondering if I should go say, “Hi, I’m a witness.” It was a really minor thing, though, and I suspect that the drivers just shrugged and swapped insurance numbers. I look up the block, waiting to find out if anybody comes out of their car yelling. Nobody does. But while I’m waiting, some bald guy in a red Jeep, maybe — something shiny, red, elevated and faintly mid-life-crisis-like, anyway — grins at me conspiratorially and says, “Well, that was rude!”

“Pardon?” Who, me?

“She was really rude!”

I’m lost. I couldn’t even see the genders of those drivers; the light and angle were wrong, and I was looking at the car damage anyway. I walk a few feet back to the corner. “Who?”

“The woman with the dog!”

“What?” Of all the people in this interaction, it’s the pedestrian he’s blaming? The who what now? Is it for walking away?

He nods at the corner curb and says, “She should have stopped!” He is beginning to get that I am not so eager to celebrate his judgmentalism.

Uh. Possibly, and purely for the sake of agreeableness, I’d buy that she was very slightly ill-advised, but that’s only because I’m surely in the top 5% for street-crossing caution. In no way is it reasonable to call her rude. I raise my eyebrows and state a fact: “She had the right-of-way.”

I expect him to tell me that’s no excuse. Instead, he gets huffy and gestures at the street. Clearly I am an idiot, and it is shocking that I am not supporting him in this. “There’s no crosswalk marked!!”

This is when my jaw drops. Yes, you ignorant and deluded entitlement case, that’s what they call an “unmarked crosswalk.” Generally speaking, every intersection contains legal crosswalks, whether or not they’re marked. I could actually feel the hinge of my jaw loosening for a moment before I said, pointing to the corner on which I stood, “Pedestrians have the right of way at every corner. You are wrong. Sorry.” (If only I could have included the link!)

At that point, having heard no yelling, I turned and walked away before I started getting rude. (Or ruder.) Because if you don’t know when pedestrians have the right-of-way, you don’t know how to drive, and in a better world your license would be taken away until you get a clue. Ah, for a better world.

Pansy was not my dog, but she was a famously good dog. I can’t make it to her wake this weekend, so I offer this poem by William Stafford instead. I ran across it the other day and thought of her.

Choosing A Dog

“It’s love,” they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.

Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.

The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for awhile
but then maintenance gets to you.

When I get old I think I’ll keep, not a little
dog, but a serious dog,
for the casual, drop-in criminal –

My kind of dog, unimpressed by
dress or manner, just knowing
what’s really there by the smell.

Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don’t really want you to know –
it’s too grim or ethereal.

And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone,
but they don’t say anything.

Cissa has created a syndicated feed of House of Cranks: houseofcranks. Thank you, Cissa!

Which reminds me — most of you don’t know Cissa. I met her through Dreamingcrow, I’m pretty sure. She’s a jewelry artist who keeps bees. (Check out the scent lockets.) She’s also a person who knows a whole lot of stuff. You know how you’re going along in life and you come up with questions about this or that, and you smile a little as you think to yourself, “I bet X would know,” because you have thought that same thought a thousand times before? Spiff is one of those Xs; Cissa is another.

I’ve dusted off that Twitter account I’ve had kicking around for a while. You can find me there as “sculpin“, unsurprisingly.